Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies: Self-Designed Major, Concentration 

Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies is a multidisciplinary program that explores the many facets of gender and sexuality.  We encourage our students to examine and challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, explore and honor marginalized experiences and perspectives, and question power at personal, interpersonal, social, structural levels. 

Students in the program pursue critical questions from a range of academic disciplines and learn how activism can promote social change.  We challenge students to consider how complex social identities such as race, social class, age, and ability intersect with gender and sexuality to shape the world in ways that are all at once personal, political, local, and global. Our concentration is an appropriate supplement to any academic major. 

GSWS Statement on The Overturning of Roe v. Wade

June 27, 2022  -  Read the full statement 

Program Highlights

  • 15-20 classes offered per semester and in a range of disciplines 
  • Opportunities to work closely with faculty on groundbreaking research and activist projects  
  • Events on a wide range of topics throughout the year 
  • The capstone experience — an independent project that can take the form of a research paper, an art or performance piece, or an action campaign  
students and a professor in a classroom
Mission

Learn about the guiding intellectual principles and activist practices that inform our work.

Students at a computer
Research

Under the guidance of a faculty member, students conclude the concentration with a capstone experience in their fourth year.

Students in a classroom
Opportunities

From internships to study abroad to the DC and NY Semester programs, opportunities for hands-on learning abound.

Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies News

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Student to Address 700+ Attendees at Worcester Women’s Leadership Conference
If presenting a final project to a classroom of 20 peers is anxiety-inducing for some college students, speaking to a room of more than 700 business professionals about your entrepreneurial passion is a whole new level of pressure. Mary Kate …
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What do Neuroscience and Deaf Studies Have in Common? Just Ask Victoria Mousley ’17
Meet Victoria Mousley. She is senior psychology and deaf studies double major, with a concentration in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies. She wants to be a cognitive neuroscientist. And with an education from 17³Ô¹ÏÍø, she can. It all started …
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17³Ô¹ÏÍø Senior Awarded Prestigious Marshall Scholarship
17³Ô¹ÏÍø student Victoria Mousley ’17, a psychology and deaf studies double major also completing a concentration in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, has been selected as a 2017 Marshall Scholar. The prestigious Marshall Scholarship finances graduate …