An introduction to Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies
WGSS is less about memorizing answers
and more about learning to notice.
Talking about gender, the sociologist Judith Lorber once wrote, is the equivalent of fish talking about water.
It surrounds us so completely that questioning it can feel absurd. WGSS begins exactly there: at the moment something taken-for-granted starts to look strange. Not to give you a new doctrine, but to hand you a different pair of eyes.
Betty Friedan called it the problem that has no name. Iris Marion Young watched a girl throw a ball and saw a whole social order in the motion. The questions on this page are meant to feel like that: small openings into something much larger.
- 01
Why do we still ask if a baby is a boy or a girl before we ask anything else?
- 02
Whose body counts as a body that needs protecting?
- 03
Who gets to be called a woman -- and who decides?
- 04
What does it cost, every day, to keep all this looking natural?
"Gender is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life."
— Judith Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender
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