Gender & Queer Studies

About the Program

As the home to one of the nation's first Women's Studies programs, the University of Puget Sound has a long tradition of exploring issues pertaining to sexuality, identity, and gender. The current Gender and Queer Studies program has the following learning objectives:

1. To understand, apply and critique key concepts and theoretical positions in feminist, gender and queer studies;
2. To use and interrogate gender and sexuality as categories of analysis
   • at various levels, such as individual, interactional, institutional, and global
   • and in specific historical, cultural, and disciplinary contexts;
3. To reconsider and denaturalize identities and experiences as embedded in and produced by interlocking systems of power and inequalities;
4. To integrate feminist, gender and queer analysis into educational and activist practices:
   • in students' research, writing and classroom interactions
   • and in public scholarship, activism, and everyday life.