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As a large interdisciplinary Program, with many department-based courses, the committee on the Program for the Study of Women and Gender recognizes that we learn most about all of our courses through conversations, and that we want to avoid any efforts to codify our practice that seem reductive or restrictive.
We have identified these broad shared areas of agreement to describe our practice and our syllabi for ourselves, our students, and for faculty who want to cross-list courses in the Program.
Not every course will use each of these principles for organizing, yet students will, over the course, of the major become familiar with these concepts.
Social construction: the Program for the Study of Women and Gender interrogates and de-stabilizes familiar or naturalized categories; yet in questioning these categories, we also acknowledge that these constructions have real effects in subordinating groups and in marking bodies.
Agency, resistance: a counterpart to examining the social construction of institutions, ideologies, and identities
Intersectionality: the mutual and simultaneous constitution of identities and categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and nation, understood as a historical process.
History: we intend to historicize, localize, and contextualize the experiences we study and the processes of social construction; we agree it’s important to expose students to historical periods and beliefs unlike the current moment; often we use theories from the present to illuminate the past.
Social change: as a product of history and as an effect of agency and resistance.
Representation/ discourse and materiality/ structure are always in tension in shaping experience and explaining it, some courses may give more attention to some factors than to others but both realms are crucial to recognize.
Theory: our students should be able to think theoretically, to read and write about theoretical texts, and to recognize that theory emerges from different sites (different disciplinary locations as well as local knowledges)
Interdisciplinarity: a hallmark of the field whether in the materials we draw upon or the methods we use.
"Feminism” as social movements/collectivities/networks, and as a mode of critique.