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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Statement of Support for Black Lives from WGSS Faculty
We demand justice for George Floyd, and for all Black lives. We stand in solidarity with the policy demands of the Black Lives Matter movement that call for ending: the death penalty; mass surveillance of communities of color; the privatization of police; the cumulative costs of criminal records; and violence against Black people of all genders.
Leaders of Academic Units at Yale Release Joint Statement on Anti-Asian Racism
We come together to condemn anti-Asian racism, recognizing that this week's murders in Georgia, along with persistent violence and intimidation directed at Asians and Asian Americans elsewhere, reflect legal, economic, and social exclusions, and U.S. militarism in Asia, which are older than our contemporary moment. We call for social justice, and not the reliance on policing and carceral remedies.
We stand in solidarity with our colleagues in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration to condemn the anti-Asian, particularly anti-Chinese, hate crimes and harrassment that have increased in communities across the United States as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic.
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.