Curriculum

Women's Studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that encourages inquiry into the full range of human experience by raising fundamental questions about gendered relations in human behavior, culture, and society. As the academic branch of the women's movement, Women's Studies challenges assumptions upon which the Western tradition of scholarship has been based and seeks to integrate the diverse experiences and perspectives of women into the curriculum.

Our core curriculum offers students the analytical tools for understanding gender as it is constructed within and through differences of ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nationality. It enables students to interpret the diverse lives, issues, and voices of women in our multicultural and transnational world.

Academic Programs

Women's Studies offers a minor, a certificate, and a major through Interdisciplinary Studies. We also house the new Multicultural Queer Studies minor.

Women’s Studies Minor

The WS Minor consists of a total of 15 units of coursework. There are three required courses, totaling 9 units of coursework, and 6 units of elective coursework. The minor offers students an introduction to the field of Women's Studies, and the elective units enable students to craft an individual course of study to complement their majors.

WS Certificate

The Certificate in Women’s Studies consists of a total of 21 units of coursework. Students completing the Certificate must fulfill all requirements for the minor and then take an additional 6 units of coursework in Women’s Studies. This additional six units must provide students with a depth of study in a sub-field of Women’s Studies. Examples of the 6 units of additional coursework include WS 436: Human Sexuality paired with WS 370: Queer Women’s Lives; WS 311: Feminist Theory paired with ES/WS 480: Chicana Feminism; WS: 350 Women’s Health and Body Politics paired with SOC/WS 319 Ecology of Family Violence.

The Certificate in Women’s Studies may be pursued by students who have already completed a Bachelor’s degree and who want to compliment their prior studies with an exposure to Women’s Studies. It is also pursued by students who do not have the flexibility to double major, yet who want more in-depth knowledge of Women’s Studies than a minor may offer.

Interdisciplinary Studies - Women's Studies major option

The Interdisciplinary major option in Women’s Studies is comprised of 42 units, including 25 units in core courses and 17 units in one of four concentrations. Proficiency in a second language is either recommended or required, depending on the concentration selected. The common core of required courses provides all students with a background in the history of diverse women’s lives and movements within the US(WS 107); the diversity of contemporary women’s issues in the US (WS 106); tools and frameworks to analyze gender at the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and physical ability (ES/WS 108); analysis of the many schools of feminist theory and methods of feminist inquiry (WS 311); an understanding of the diversity of gendered relations cross-culturally, transformations in these relations through colonialism and nationalism, and current transformations due to the globalization of the economy (WS 315); experiences and analysis of women of color in the US (WS 330); service learning in a field of interest to students (WS 410 or 420); and a culminating senior seminar in which students first explore the latest developments in feminism today and then research options for further work and/or study (WS 485).

Students choose among the following four concentrations to pick an area of specialization that best meets their interests: Women & the Environment; Women & Global/International Studies; Women in Social & Community Service; Women’s Expression in Art & Language. Each of these concentrations includes a core of required courses and then a series of electives from departments and programs across campus to broaden students’ exposure to diverse disciplinary perspectives on the topic of study.

The concentration areas for the major were devised by the Women’s Studies curriculum committee in conjunction with students interested in majoring in Women’s Studies. We have found that the most popular concentration is Social and Community Service, with a significant number of students also interested in the other three areas. We feel that each of these areas is well-suited to integrate with and contribute to the strengths of the university. The environmental focus intersects with the Environmental Studies program and the broad student interest in issues of environmental sustainability. The concentration in Women’s Expression in Art and Language articulates well with both the university and community strength in the arts. The concentration in Global/International Studies is part of a growing commitment to international studies on our campus. And finally, the concentration in Social and Community Service draws upon and reflects the student and faculty commitment to issues of social justice and social responsibility.

Some of the courses offered:

Sex, Gender and Globalization
Queer Women's Lives
Feminist Science Fiction
Women's Health and Body Politics
Ecofeminism: Global Women and the Environment
Third World Women's Movements
Third Wave Feminism
Race, Gender, U.S. Law
Revolution, Reform and Response

Feminist Process

Feminist process is a keystone of the Women's Studies Program. Its method is an interactive process of dialogue, consensus, non-authoritarian classroom structure, listening and sharing both information and student-centered concepts. In feminist process learning is (inter-)active both in the classroom and outside it, in experiential learning. Students helped design the Women's Studies Program and have worked hand-in-hand with professors both in and out of the classroom to determine courses of action for both, in an environment where learning is the highest priority. The feminist process is a basic element of Women's Studies imparted as early as the introductory course WS 106, where students practice dialogue in group projects, in class presentations, in extra-classroom interviews later analyzed according to methods studied previously in this class and shared with classmates, in early outreach experiences in on- and off-campus service organizations and artistic exhibits and presentations. This co-operative learning and creative sharing of decision-making profits the professor and the Women's Studies Program, as well as the students.

Dialogue and shared experience are seen to be ways to interact in a scholarly field whose experts are themselves open to interaction and participation. One of the main lessons students learn is their own value as interpreters and actors in society, once they have gained the necessary tools to judge the value of the complex social, artistic, historical, and scientific messages with which we are bombarded in the technological age. Another essential lesson of this process is that of respect: a simple label for a complex value system in which the "other," whatever or whoever it may be, is listened to with respect, as well as being critically interpreted.

Diversity

Diversity and the Women’s Studies curriculum
Women’s Studies is one of the primary academic programs on our campus that integrates and interrogates issues of diversity throughout our curriculum. Our core courses focus on gendered relations – that is an analysis of gender at the intersection of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nationality. Our program helps students to understand how socially constructed categories of difference impact people’s daily lives. We analyze differences among people as a source of potential strength and creativity at the same time that we analyze the social processes of differentiation and categorization according to race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality as sites for the construction of relations of privilege and oppression.

While the early years of Women’s Studies focused on gender as a sole category of analysis and helped to reproduce the white, middle-class, and heterosexual norm that marked much liberal feminist thought and practice, the last several decades of feminist scholarship have transformed the field. Drawing upon the work of feminists of color, many of whom are from working class backgrounds and identify as lesbian or bisexual, our program offers students tools for understanding complex relations and identities that are formed at the intersection of categories. Our program thus provides students with tools for understanding diversity at multiple levels – of analyzing relations of privilege and oppression within the self, the larger society, and the global community.

Functions of a diverse curriculum
Programs such as Women’s Studies that attempt to address the realities of people whose lives, issues, and voices have been marginalized within the dominant curriculum of the academy serve several important functions. First, such programs interrogate theories and scholarship based upon discriminatory attitudes. Women’s Studies has pushed many disciplines to examine underlying assumptions that were based upon misconceptions that served to support societal inequities. From the scholarship in the history and philosophy of science to Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, English, Education, and beyond, feminist theorists have helped to correct distortions in these fields. Second, these programs enrich the dominant curriculum by injecting a wealth of new perspectives into established fields. Feminist theories are now integrated into a number of disciplines, mainstreaming critical insights and perspectives that were considered radical only several decades before. And third, these programs provide diverse students with curriculum that speaks to (and helps them to analyze critically) their experiences in life. When whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, class privilege, or US citizenship is assumed as a norm in traditional scholarship, those students who deviate from this norm in one or more ways may feel alienated, confused, and lack a means of engaging with the course material. By providing a curriculum that focuses on the diversity of human experience, foregrounding insider voices and perspectives, our program creates a space for engagement by a diverse student body. As HSU seeks to continue to diversify our student body, programs such as Women’s Studies that foreground the diversity of human experience will help these students to find a meaningful home within the curriculum. (The newly approved Multicultural Queer Studies minor, housed within Women’s Studies, is an example of curriculum that helps gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students to validate themselves, engage with curriculum, and analyze their own lives and the world around them. By emphasizing intersections of identity and foregrounding multicultural realities, this minor creates a unique place of engagement for queer students of color and helps all students to analyze the construction of whiteness as a norm. Similarly, students who identify as heterosexual and who take courses that satisfy the minor requirements are asked to analyze the social construction of heterosexuality as well as to learn about the diversity of queer lives, cultural productions, theories, and activism.)

Diversity of Thought
Our program also emphasizes diversity of thought, thereby helping our students to hone the skill of critical thinking. In the feminist theory class (WS 311) students analyze the strengths, weaknesses, omissions and misrepresentations of diverse theoretical strands within feminism. Traversing the terrain of liberal, Marxist/socialist, radical, multicultural, post-colonial, postmodern, and eco-feminist theories, students are required not only to represent accurately authors’ positions and arguments but also to stake out their own relationship to divergent strands of feminist analysis. In the senior seminar (WS 485) students analyze writings by what is now being labeled “third wave” feminism, or the theory and practice of feminists since the mid 1990s. Students examine these writings for the theoretical traditions upon which the work is based, and again analyze omissions and weaknesses as well as inspirations and strengths in this new body of literature and in the new forms of activism. Throughout the core major course Sex, Gender, and Globalization (WS 315) students are urged to search for ironies and contradictions to avoid oversimplified narratives of either progress or retrogression in their analysis of transformations of gendered relations through processes of colonization, nationalist movements, and globalization of the economy. In Third World Women’s Movements (WS 303) students are required to analyze the origin as well as the subsequent multiple and often contradictory meanings of the term “third world.” They are challenged to understand why this term has been deployed, rejected, and in some cases reclaimed. They are called upon to provide alternative terms and to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of these alternatives.

Interdisciplinary Fields

Our Women's Studies Program is the most interdsciplinary program at Humboldt State University.

Other academic departments and programs participating in Women's Studies include the following: