Explore the diversity of human sexuality and examine how historical and contemporary attitudes have shaped our understanding of sexual orientation and difference.

An interdisciplinary exploration of gender and sexuality as central formations in human interactions, social institutions, creative endeavors, and scientific inquiry. The Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) program provides tools to unlearn systems power and address critical 21st-century sociopolitical and economic issues.

The Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program offers a baccalaureate degree and minor.

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is an approach that places women at the center of inquiry. The primary mission of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is to analyze gender. Students acquire both a local and global perspective on gender. Attentiveness to diversity, privilege, and power, and women's unique creative contributions to human experience are central aspects of this training. More than simply a body of knowledge, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies encourage students to apply their learning to transform their lives and their communities. Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies offer a vital perspective everywhere gender impacts our world.

The Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies analyzes local and global entanglements of knowledge, power, pleasure, and resistance. Drawing on histories of antiracist, decolonial, feminist, queer, and trans work, courses examine shifting dynamics of privilege, exclusion, and marginalization. The program also cultivates action, practice, and reciprocal engagement with the many communities of which we are part. To study gender and sexuality in these ways is to refute simple assertions about identity in favor of richly detailed accounts of the specific conditions through which particular social positions are maintained and transgressed. Students may choose to either major or minor in gender and sexuality studies.

MISSION Creating and sustaining a community of scholar-activists who: understand systems of gender and sexuality; generate and apply intersectional feminist and queer perspectives; challenge structural inequalities; and work for social justice. WGS DEPARTMENT OVERVIEW The study of women has been part of the GVSU curriculum since 1973 when courses were taught in the College of Arts and Sciences and in William James College. The minor in Women's Studies was approved in 1986 and the first Women's Studies minor graduated in 1988. In 1997, the program was significantly expanded to include the study of gender. Women and Gender Studies became a major in 2006. In fall of 2013, a new minor in LGBTQ Studies was launched. With the study of sexuality added to curriculum, the program name was changed to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGS) in 2015. The WGS Department is housed in the Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies.

Engage in feminist scholarship in a supportive program offering small classes and one-on-one work with faculty. In women, gender, sexuality studies (WGSS), we are committed to an interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis in which the study of women and gender is multifaceted, diverse, and embedded in a network of power relations that includes race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity.

Sexuality and gender, including the transgender experience, have a long history tied to masculinity, heteronormativity, discrimination, power, privilege, and inequality. It is the social constructs of sexuality and gender that influence and impact social, political, economic, and cultural systems, and ultimately define your sense of belonging and dictate your freedom in society.