The Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program 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.

The Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program was established at Yale in 1979 as the Women’s Studies program. Since its founding, the program has grown and evolved, changing its name twice—in 1998, to the Women’s & Gender Studies Program, and in 2004, to the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program—to recognize the importance of the study of both gender and sexuality in the academy. A thorough history of the program, written in 2001 by Kirsten Lodal, is available here as a PDF: “Engendering an Intellectual Space: The Development of Women’s Studies at Yale University, 1969-2001.”

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