The Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University
Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) is an interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that places gender and its intersection with sexuality at the center of inquiry. It raises many questions about gender and sexuality as socially and culturally constructed phenomena that affect our personal lives, artistic expression, social relationships, and the ways we think about ourselves and the world.
Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies considers the ways gender and other social categories such as class, race, ethnicity, nationality, dis/ability, and age shape our experiences. Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies is one of the fastest growing fields of inquiry to emerge in higher education in the past forty years.
For more than thirty years, students and faculty members in WGSS at Ohio State have explored issues of gender and sexuality in path-breaking and creative ways:
- Ways of Seeing: We rethink and study what women have been, what women have contributed to social change, and what women might become.
- Visions of Change: We examine how traditional disciplines exclude women and other marginalized groups, and we provide students with new modes of thinking about gender and sexuality and interpreting the world.
- Fresh Perspectives: We explore the diversity of gender and sexuality experiences, and we build theories that account for differences as well as similarities among human beings.
In WGSS, our students find a supportive, intellectually challenging community; small class sizes; and close interaction with faculty within a large research university setting that offers extensive resources and opportunities.
Points of Pride
- Prestige: One of the largest undergraduate women’s/gender/sexuality/feminist studies programs in the country, with approximately 100 majors and 130 minors.
- Cutting Edge Graduate Program: MA and PhD students engaged in interdisciplinary feminist studies of global, national, and local topics.
- Community Outreach: Peer Power, an undergraduate outreach program for local public schools, takes gender and diversity issues into the community.
- National Visibility: Reading Women's Lives, a customized textbook used by over 100 colleges nationwide.
- Award Winning: Faculty research that contributes to gender and sexuality scholarship and envisions social change.
