Women’s and Gender Studies
Academic Department Introduction
We explore gender and its intersections with other relations of power, such as race, social class, sexuality, nationality, age, dis/ability, and ethnicity. These forces shape the individual and collective lives of people across diverse cultures and times, and provide contexts for analyzing the worlds in which we live.
Our curriculum and faculty research reflect the vibrant contours of global feminisms today. We cover a variety of theoretical and empirical scholarship such as feminist theory; queer and trans studies; anticarceral/abolition feminisms; Indigenous and transnational feminisms; media studies; science and technology studies; critical animal studies; critical health studies; environmental and reproductive justice and their intersections; and feminist activism within disciplinary and interdisciplinary frameworks.
Learning goals
- Interrogate how sex, gender, sexuality, race, dis/ability, and nation have been historically constructed, unsettled, and contested as social identities and systems of power.
- Examine the potent material and political implications of social identities.
- Apply an intersectional lens of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality to recognize the interlocking systems of privilege, oppression, and opportunity.
- Deploy gender as a category of intersectional analysis in written and oral communication.
- Cultivate a transnational awareness about shifting frames in global geopolitics.
- Demonstrate knowledge of the history of activism and the complexities of social change.
Programs of Study
Women’s and gender studies major and minor
Students explore how structural changes and historical moments intersect with individual lives. Each major chooses one of the following concentrations, taking at least four courses in that area:
1. Representations, media, and race
2. Feminist science, health, and reproductive justice
3. Labor, families, and the state
4. Transnational feminism(s), global context
Course highlights
Global Feminisms
SOC256
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Gender and Race in Westerns: Rainbow Cowboys (and Girls)
WGST274
Westerns, a complex category that includes not only films but also novels, photographs, paintings, and many forms of popular culture, have articulated crucial mythologies of American culture from the nineteenth century to the present. From Theodore Roosevelt to the Lone Ranger, myths of the Trans-Mississippi West have asserted iconic definitions of American masculinity and rugged individualism. Yet as a flexible, ever-changing genre, Westerns have challenged, revised, and subverted American concepts of gender and sexuality. Westerns have also struggled to explain a dynamic and conflictive "borderlands" among Native Americans, Anglos, Latinos, Blacks, and Asians. This team-taught, interdisciplinary course will investigate Westerns in multiple forms, studying their representations of the diverse spaces and places of the American West and its rich, complicated, and debated history. (AMST 274 and WGST 274 are cross-listed courses.) -
Seminar: Techno-Orientalism. Geisha Robots, Cyberpunk Warriors, and Asian Futures
WGST307
This course examines Techno-Orientalism as a global science fiction genre in literature, film, and social media to understand the broad historical and social formations of Otherness, Aliens, Citizenship, and Immigration. We also study racial assumptions in popular culture, discourses of the human and human rights, science and technology industries, and anti-Asian violence during the global pandemic. Finally, we also interrogate the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and geopolitical divisions and interactions in Asian/American Studies and Postcolonial Studies from the past to the present.
Places and spaces
We have an accessible and welcoming lounge for department-sponsored events and informal student gatherings.
Research highlights
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Professor Banu Subramaniam’s new book, Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (University of Washington Press, 2024), examines how the plant sciences and botany have been profoundly shaped by empire, and how those histories live on in our study of plant worlds today.
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Professor Rosanna Hertz conducted research on single mothers’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and co-authored an article about her findings in the 2021 issue of Journal of Family Issues. Her latest co-authored book is Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin (Oxford University Press, 2019).
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In Professor Elena Creef’s book Shadow Traces: Seeing Japanese/American and Ainu Women in Photographic Archives (University of Illinois Press, 2022), she examines little-known visual archives of four historical groups of Asian women. She also follows the augmented reality work of Japanese artist Masaki Fujihata and his digital simulation of the WWII Japanese American evacuation, BeHere/1942.
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Professor Jennifer Musto’s 2022 article “The Afterlife of Decriminalisation” explores the harms of reforms billed as trauma-informed alternatives to punishment. As co-facilitator of the Anti-Carceral Co+Laboratory (ACC) with Laura Grattan, professor of political science, she organized “Dreaming Abolition, Co-Creating Abolitionist Knowledge in Greater Boston,” a convening to explore how scholar-activists and organizers can reimagine freedom, justice, safety, and education beyond prisons.
Opportunities
We work closely with students to identify opportunities that will deepen their experience within our department.
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WGST Leadership Council
Majors and minors selected to join the WGST Leadership Council engage in student outreach and offer strategic advice and leadership in shaping departmental programming.
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WGST tutor program
As tutors providing peer support to students enrolled in WGST courses, WGST majors and minors have a vital opportunity to translate their understanding of gender and sexuality studies and apply their critical thinking, writing, and editorial skills.
Beyond Wellesley
Beyond Wellesley
Our graduates are thought leaders, policy innovators, entrepreneurs, writers, artists, and healers. Many devote their careers to confronting the most pressing issues of our time. They work in a range of fields, including health care, education, law, and the nonprofit sector. Employers of recent WGST graduates include United We Dream, Google, Accenture, the National Academy for State Health Policy, and Planned Parenthood.
Recent Employers
106 Central Street
Wellesley, MA 02481