ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is both a discipline and an interdisciplinary program. Over the past 30 years, feminist scholarship has developed analytic and methodological tools by which to study and explore women's lives and constructions of gender from disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. The Program offers a Bachelor of Arts, an undergraduate minor and a Graduate Certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies.

The discipline examines women and gender as multifaceted and diverse, embedded in a matrix of power relations including race, class, sexuality and nationality. Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies uses and transforms the analytical tools of different disciplines in the social sciences, arts and humanities and natural and physical sciences such as anthropology, art, biology, business, communication, education, history, legal studies, literature, nursing, philosophy, political economy, psychology, sociology and more. There are now more than one thousand undergraduate and graduate programs nationwide. Current scholarship at the University includes: Latin-American and Caribbean feminisms; feminist philosophy; sexuality; queer studies, women’s health issues; international human rights; social construction of identities; global women’s activism; gender and development; feminist pedagogy; critical race feminisms; postcolonial and transnational studies; globalization; feminist science studies; and third world feminisms.