What will I learn?
RIT’s women’s, gender, and sexuality studies major critically explores how gender and sexuality interact with science, technology, and the arts to shape aspects of our personal, social, and professional lives and career paths. Gender studies is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that intersects gender and sexuality with race, class, ethnicity, localities, disabilities, and age. By analyzing the functioning of gender and sexual norms, stereotypes, and representations as they appear within and across cultures in literature, history, the law, public health and health care institutions, educational systems, the arts, sciences, technologies, and other areas, we come to understand the impact of gendered attitudes and behaviors on the ongoing oppression, discrimination, and exclusion of women and other sexed and gendered groups in various contexts of today’s society, locally and globally. Learning to recognize and understand structures of power relations and sources of oppression and injustice leads to acknowledging the need for social change and transformation at various levels of existence, from social interactions to relations with the Earth and the environment, to modes of scientific knowledge and technical production and applications.Gender studies fosters a critical approach to identifying problems, expanding intellectual inquiry, imagining creative solutions, and building an open, diverse, inclusive, and collaborative environment that leads to innovation, progress, and positive change for a better, more responsible, and more sustainable world.
