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Gender and Sexuality Studies Major and Minor

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Academic Departments

The Gender and Sexuality Studies Major and Minor at Davidson

The gender and sexuality studies (GSS) program trains you to examine gender relations and the construction of gender and sexual difference from a globally-informed perspective and to consider how gender and sexuality intersect with the social categories of race, class, ethnicity, disability, and age to produce our complex social identities.

While integrating theoretical concepts and empirical knowledge, gender and sexuality studies majors and minors learn to practice critical thinking about issues of gender and sexual identity and to develop strong research, communication, and writing skills.

The gender and sexuality studies minor provides you with a solid grounding in the interconnected, interdisciplinary fields of gender, sexuality, and queer studies, and engages these fields from a variety of perspectives – religious, economic, political, social, biological, psychological, historical, anthropological, artistic, and literary.

Note to 2024 graduates: given the reduced course load during 2020-21, the chair and core faculty of GSS will review student petitions to complete the GSS major with one less course. Email Department Chair Vivien Dietz at vidietz@davidson.edu for more information. 

Student Spotlight Luis Cordero ’22

Luis Cordero ’22, who graduated with a Neuroscience major and Gender & Sexuality Studies minor, was awarded the prestigious Watson Fellowship to research Foregrounding Dignity and Kindness in Care Facilities. His Watson Fellowship will allow him to shadow providers and researchers in under-resourced and wealthy countries, in countries that rely on private care, and ones with public health systems.

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Honors

We encourage any gender and sexuality studies major interested in pursuing any idea or question through a sustained, year-long study to pursue the year-long capstone process, which may culminate in honors. 

GSS Year-Long Capstone and Honors Process

Courses You Might Take

AFR 330
Gender & Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

The purpose of this course is to continue a discussion on the debates, structures, and agents that inform international development in Africa but through the varied perspectives and experiences of African women. Their perspectives offer critical interventions into development discourses and practices traditionally viewed through masculine and Western lenses.

GSS 350
Sex Radicals!

When we think about queer and feminist politics, we typically think of the processes by which women and LGBT people have effected change through legislation, court cases, and supporting candidates friendly to their causes. But much U.S. queer and feminist thought and activism has taken root outside the bounds of liberal electoral politics. This course centers on the fringes.

HIS 228
Modern Bodies: Gender, Sex, & Race in France

One of the greatest “discoveries” of modern historical thought has been that even the human body has aspects which are historically contingent. Perceptions and attitudes toward bodies are necessarily raced, sexed, and gendered, and reflect shifting historical definitions of these categories. This course examines the way historians of modern France have tackled this topic.

Related Academic Programs

Interested in Studying Gender and Sexuality Studies at Davidson?