Welcome
The Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale offers a variety of courses and an undergraduate major (BA). The Program establishes gender and sexuality as fundamental categories of social and cultural analysis. Drawing on history, literature, cultural studies, social science, and science, it offers interdisciplinary perspectives from which to study the diversity of human experience. Gender—the social meaning of the distinction between the sexes—and sexuality—sexual identities, discourses, and institutions—are studied as they intersect with class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and transnational movements.
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WGSS mourns the passing of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy
It is with the deepest sadness that we mourn the passing of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy.
Miss Major was a lifelong activist and organizer, a Black trans revolutionary whose organizing, courage, kindness, love, and fierce dedication to social justice bettered the lives of Black and trans communities, sex workers, people living with HIV/AIDS, people formerly and currently incarcerated, and people who have endured violence by police and state actors. Over many generations, Miss Major’s advocacy and caretaking was boundless, from driving a mobile needle exchange van in San Francisco in the 1980s to founding the House of gg in 2019, a retreat center to “promote healing justice, resilience, and community organizing for transgender women and men of color.”
An organizer since the Stonewall Riots, Miss Major persistently and powerfully criticized the whitewashing of queer and trans history and activism. Refusing a White House invitation to commemorate Stonewall, Miss Major explained,
If you pay attention, most monuments are for one person, or one thing that some person did in their life. I wouldn’t be here if not for my community, my friends, my comrades … Regardless of whether they deserve a statue or not, those people didn’t get to do anything great without a damn crowd of people they worked with to get there.
Miss Major might not want us to lionize her, then. And yet, her community-building is undeniable. So many survived and thrived because of Miss Major’s generosity, vision, and tireless labor.
We were privileged to award Miss Major the Yale LGBTS Brudner Prize in 2024.
Our love goes out to Miss Major’s partner, her children, and all the people she made family.
Combined Ph.D. Program
Beginning in 2021, we welcomed our first cohort of students pursuing dual doctoral degrees in WGSS and American Studies, Anthropology, African American Studies, English and Sociology.
Our faculty work on questions of gender and sexuality from a wide range of theoretical and methodological locations, concentrating our attention on transnational politics and security regimes, public law and sexual violence, reproduction and reproductive technologies, incarceration, social movements and protest, race and racism, neoliberalism, and Islam.
