Recent scholarship has made it clear that full understanding of human behavior, culture, and society cannot be attained without investigating the roles gender and sexuality play in individual experiences.  The Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor is an 18-hour interdisciplinary program designed to offer students such an opportunity.  It provides new ways of approaching conventional disciplines and opens up questions previously unexamined.

Our aim is two-fold: to stimulate and promote new scholarship in the area of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and to encourage traditional departments to broaden fields of study to include attention to gender and sexuality. Attention paid to gender and sexuality has altered our understanding of historical change, social, economic, and political life, and the arts and sciences. In addition, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies highlights the necessity of understanding other important social structures and how they intersect with gender and sexuality: race, economic status, health status, and nationality are examples. It provides key conceptual tools that students can use in educating themselves both in and out of college.

Courses listed below are offered on a regular basis; these, as well as special topics courses, may be taken for credit toward the minor with permission of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Minor Coordinator. Once they decide upon the minor, students should contact the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Minor Coordinator and declare the minor with their major advisor, as soon as possible. For more information about the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Minor, please e-mail: mgworthington@eiu.edu. Additional information about the courses offered in the minor can be found on the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor homepage: https://www.eiu.edu/women.