The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Fall 2025
The Department offers interdisciplinary courses for students to develop the tools and vocabulary to analyze and respond to current and historical social problems and structures of oppression. We develop scholars and leaders who work to acknowledge, understand, and critically interrogate hierarchies of difference, while imagining and creating more just futures.
LGBT 200 Intro to LGBTQ Studies DSHS, DVUP aka WGSS 298Q Stonewall and Beyond
Now with Online Discussions Sections!
Uncover histories of queer joy, cultural rebellion, social change, and evolutions of identity.
Explore queer & trans politics, identity, and culture through an interdisciplinary study of the historical and social context of personal, cultural and political aspects of sexuality, gender, and identity. Sources from a variety of fields, such as anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, WGSS, and queer studies, focusing on writings by and about LGBTQ people.
WGSS 200 Intro to WGSS: Gender, Power, and Society: DSHS, DVUP
Explore systems of power through an intersectional political science and feminist theory background.
Interrogate the ways that systems of hierarchy and privilege are created, enforced, and intersect through the language of race, class, sexuality, and national belonging. Students develop skills to examine how systems of power manifest in areas such as poverty, division of labor, health disparities, policing, violence.
WGSS 250 Intro to WGSS: Art and Culture DSHU, DVUP
Build media literacy and cultural analysis skills through exploration of arts and activism.
A critical introduction to the ways that art and art activism have served as a conduit to understanding and challenging systems of inequity and practices of normativity. Interrogating the categories of gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, the course will provide students with an examination of how artists have responded to pressing social justice issues of their eras. The course centers on visual art while also engaging music, plays, literature, digital and performance art as arenas of social change.
WGSS 291 Racialized Gender and Rebel Media DSSP
Students can explore the course topics through creative projects like short form video, zine making, podcasting, poster making, and more.
An introduction to the interdisciplinary field of women's studies and an exploration of the ways in which media has been used as a platform for racial justice, feminist activism, and cultural transformation, with a principal focus on the expressions of women of color. Offers an exploration of ways different forms of media shape the stories which circulate about race, femininities, masculinities, ethnicities, sexualities, religiosity, power and difference, and to examine how various media formats been used to disrupt dominant stories, to tell new stories, and to create differing understandings of citizenship.
WGSS319F Fandom aka LGBT398F Special Topics in LGBTQ Studies; Fandom DVUP
Whatever you love - K-Pop, anime, comic books, Dr. Who, Taylor Swift, Game of Thrones, ACOTAR, gaming, D&D - here’s your chance to bring it to class!
As a source of shared feeling, creative community, and collective action, fandom is a significant force in culture and politics. This course will explore the varied and ambiguous intersections of fandom with race, gender, and sexuality, centering on the contemporary US media landscape and how we arrived here. Students' particular fandom interests will shape the course of our collective study as well as providing material for research and creative projects.
