College of Letters and Science

1120 Rolfe Hall
Box 951504
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1504

Gender Studies
310-206-8101
Department e-mail

Elizabeth A. Marchant, PhD, Chair

The Department of Gender Studies offers interdisciplinary academic programs that are both nationally and transnationally oriented.

Students develop critical reasoning and analytical skills, a deep appreciation for complexities of power and asymmetries in gender relations across time, class, and cultures, and conceptual tools for social change.

The Gender Studies curriculum challenges the pervasive theory/practice divide within the academy. In both undergraduate and graduate courses, students are taught a broad range of methodological and analytical skills. Core undergraduate courses contextualize foundational theories and key analytic concepts within the study of different historical periods and social movements. In designating these courses power, knowledge, and bodies, the department identifies three primary areas in which feminist and queer inquiry has been concentrated over time, enabling students to trace grounding concepts, key controversies, and the emergence of new theoretical paradigms.

The department has long enjoyed recognition for its strengths in areas including women’s history, feminist science studies, and gender and the law. Over the past decade, it has become a leading program for interdisciplinary intersectional feminist scholarship on gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality; and has built a strong reputation in transnational feminist studies, studies of settler colonialism, neoliberalism, racial violence, cultural politics, migration, social movements, affect, visual culture, and disability, as well as feminist policy studies, critical prison studies, women of color feminism, queer of color critique, and queer theory.