This course takes as its jumping-off point Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: a Biography. This novel’s long afterlife in adaption for the stage and the screen indicates that the enduring thematic heart of the text is its fantastical encounter with gender. Woolf’s novel is, notably, humorously, and impossibly mis-genred as a biography. The question for this class, then, is as follows: how do genre and form inform, circumscribe, explode, and/or ramify what can be thought and said about gender? What constitutes reality, fidelity, or truthfulness in fiction, film, memoir, or theory?

One of the four learning objectives for GQS students is to to integrate feminist, gender and queer analysis into educational and activist practices, both in (a) students’ research, writing and classroom interactions and in (b) public scholarship, activism, and everyday life. This internship fulfills (b) of this learning objective. Students will identify an internship with a community or government agency dealing with issues relevant to gender, feminism, or sexuality, such as the Rainbow Center of Tacoma.

Research under the close supervision of a faculty member on a topic agreed upon. Application and proposal to be submitted to the program director with support from the faculty research advisor. Recommended for majors prior to the senior research semester.

Research under the close supervision of a faculty member on a topic agreed upon. Application and proposal to be submitted to the program director with support from the faculty research advisor. Recommended for majors prior to the senior research semester.

In this course students examine the differences between traditional scholarship and a feminist approach to knowing. Participants engage in an independent research project of their choosing, sharing process and findings with other members throughout the semester. Completion of the class includes participation in the Lewis & Clark Undergraduate Gender Studies Conference in March of each year.

This course surveys the history/ies and development of feminist, gender and/or queer theories, with an emphasis on theories produced in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The course familiarizes students with key feminist, gender and queer theoretical debates and concepts, requires them to read, think, speak, and write critically about these theories; and encourages them to employ these feminist and queer theories and concepts in critical analyses of contemporary institutions and practices, as well as in their own lives.

This course is organized around a set of interlocking questions: Who tells the story of scientific knowledge? Through what lens? Who does the work of producing scientific knowledge? To what end?

What does it mean to study sexuality? Does one’s sexual identity change over time? The course first covers some critical readings from feminist, queer, and scientific perspectives in relation to sexuality. Then, armed with these tools, students address key topics in the field around science and sexology, histories of sexuality, reproductive politics, queer theory and pedagogy, health, hook-up culture, body modification, sexual harassment and #MeToo, and global issues in sexuality.

Gender Studies Publication is an activity credit for participation in a campus publication of literary and artistic materials related to questions of gender and sexuality.

This course explores "queer" as an open question rather than a stable set of identities, asking: what kinds of bodies, desires, histories, and politics does queer describe? Students consider the complexity of queer identities and investigate the social and historical processes of identity construction. The class asks, with insights from queer theory: What governs the formation of legible social identities? What dynamics of erasure and illegibility accompany these formations?