The program in Women's and Gender Studies inquires, in a concrete way, about women's real lives, their political, social, economic, and cultural positions and, in a theoretical vein, about methods of interpreting and explaining the differences in gendered lives. Concerned with the social meanings of gender everywhere, past and present, women's and gender studies offers new scholarship, interdisciplinary and within the disciplines -- which in the past two decades has challenged our empirical and theoretical understanding of the sexes and contributed new insights about women and gender -- from the perspective of the humanities, the social sciences, and the biological sciences.
Women's and Gender Studies challenges not only conventional theories about human nature and behavior rooted in a male-only experience, but those based solely on heterosexual, white, middle class experience. Hence Women's and Gender Studies is transformative of student's lives; it assumes that students are producers of knowledge and able to contest the power relations within their own lives.
The intellectual objective of Women's and Gender Studies is twofold: 1) to establish, through the analytical lens of feminist theory, systematic and accurate information about women and gender in present and past cultures all over the globe; and 2) to transform dominant disciplines or fields of study through the integration of new data, methods and theories produced by feminist scholarship. This entails the recognition and incorporation of the diversity of women's lives and experiences reflected in interconnected and complex identities of race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and sexual orientation.
