What will I learn?
Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Western Washington University pursues praxis and critical inquiry through feminist and queer scholarship by teaching and activism that makes sense of how gender impacts our world and shapes social, political, and cultural formations. We are dedicated to teaching undergraduate majors and minors to use critical thinking to bridge feminist theories and social justice practice. Our program foregrounds interdisciplinary analyses of feminism, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and queer studies in transnational and multicultural contexts. To achieve these goals, we foster multiple modes of intellectual inquiry and creative pedagogies to promote transformative thinking, collaboration, and activism that ends oppression and demands liberation and justice. The program prepares students to pursue graduate school, law, social service, counseling, public policy, health care, teaching, social activism, and the arts.The WGSS major provides students with the skills to critically and actively engage with the world around them. Our plan of study equips students in various ways: to understand, apply, analyze, and critique key concepts and theoretical positions in feminist, gender, sexuality, queer, race and ethnic studies to assess and denaturalize identities and experiences as embedded in and produced by interlocking and intersectional systems of power and inequalities to integrate libratory analysis into a variety of scholarly, social, political, creative, and activist practices.
