The Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at The College of St. Scholastica offers a minor designed to cultivate critical thinking about women, sexuality, and gender as it engages with topics of immediate social and political concern. These issues include objectification of women in media and advertising, wars on women's bodies and reproductive health, trafficking of women and girls, systemic sexism within institutions, homophobia, transphobia, and racism in white middle-class feminist movements.
To introduce students to the history and complexity of these political, intellectual, and cultural issues, the program stresses the critical importance of feminist theory, intersectionality, and global engagement with women's and LGBT movements and lived experiences in the United States and around the world. In this sense, the program turns on a debate that remains central to Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies - the relationship between academics and activism, between theory and practice.
Students graduating from St. Scholastica with a minor in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies have pursued careers in healthcare, midwifery, advocacy, publishing, and have completed graduate study in the humanities, social work, and management.
The program offers both research and internship opportunities. Practicums have been completed at Safe Haven, PAVSA, the YWCA, and the Duluth Building for Women.
Contact Information
wgs@css.edu
Learning Outcomes
Through the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor, students will:
- Analyze written, visual, and/or musical forms of expression based on theoretical and historical understandings offered by feminist scholars.
- Connect the feminist principle of intersectionality of gender and other social categories, such as social class, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identification, with people’s differing individual and institutional experiences.
- Apply key concepts and methods from the WGS minor and student’s discipline to the understanding of issues related to women, gender, and/or sexuality.
Requirements
Students must achieve the following program requirements for all courses listed under Program Requirements and Program Required Courses for the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor.
Program Requirements
Minor Credits: 20
Program Required Courses
The Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor requires 20 credits.
Course List
| Code |
Title |
Credits |
| WGS 1010 | Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | 4 |
| WGS 4555 | Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Fieldwork/Scholarship Capstone | 4 |
| 12 |
| Art and Protest | |
| The Media, Race and Gender | |
| Women Writers on Writing | |
| Dance, Gender and Culture | |
| Cultural Anthropology | |
| Issues in United States History | |
| Islam and the Modern World | |
| Reading Ida B. Wells | |
| Psychology of Human Sexuality | |
| Philosophies of Feminism | |
| Psychology of Gender | |
| General Sociology | |
| Sociology of Health | |
| Understanding Systems of Privilege and Oppression | |
| Women and Religion | |
| Feminism & Globalization: Women, Religion and the Body | |
| Total Credits | 20 |
