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 sexuality 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 over forty years, WGSS at Ohio State has developed into an outstanding academic unit and intellectual hub, with a long history of building the field of WGSS locally, nationally, and internationally. Our faculty is conducting cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research in an important range of fields and we consistently engage communities beyond campus. Currently, the department is comprised of 14 core faculty, and more than 60 affiliated graduate faculty across 21 departments. We average approximately 80 majors, 150 minors, and 24 graduate students.
The department offers an undergraduate major and minor, M.A., Ph.D., and a graduate minor. Our students find a supportive, intellectually challenging community, small class sizes, and close interaction with faculty. Our curriculum and individual courses are designed to engage students as active, critical thinkers who can create new knowledge about the vast array of contemporary problems facing us as global citizens. At a time when cultures are increasingly polarized along ideological lines, WGSS educates students, at all levels, to think in nuanced manners about the production of systems of inequality and injustice. Trained in interdisciplinary methodologies, WGSS students learn how to analyze power in all its rich complexity, locally and globally.
Students and faculty members in WGSS at The Ohio State University have explored issues of gender and sexuality in path-breaking and creative ways:
- Ways of Seeing: We rethink and study gender, women, sexuality, what has contributed to social change, and what might become.
- Visions of Change: We examine how traditional disciplines exclude women, people of color, people with disabilities, queer people, LGBTQIA people 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, and we build theories that account for differences as well as similarities among human beings.