2024-2025, 2nd ed. General Catalog
Women’s and Gender Studies, BA
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WGS Mission Statement
The Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Sonoma State University centers the vision of feminism as articulated by bell hooks, as a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and
oppression. [1] Our department enables students to explore the social, political, and cultural dimensions of gender and inequity. Our field empowers students to use an intersectional feminist
analysis to engage in building a more equitable world. It compels us to envision and commit to transformative action.
WGS studies how gender structures everything from our innermost self to transnational circuits of society and economy. Feminist theory and practice involve a critical exploration of power,
difference, and the production of knowledge. Feminist pedagogy is committed to knowledge as co-constructed and collaborative between professors and students with an emphasis on equity
and empathy.
Our department utilizes an intersectional perspective, which means that we understand gender to be co-constituted with race, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, ability, and other forms of social power.
We use an interdisciplinary approach that examines gendered identities, relationships, structures, institutions, and ideologies through social, historical, political, legal, and cultural lenses.
Our department fosters critical awareness and builds community. The WGS Department’s general education courses, lecture series, and major courses produce campus-wide transformative
consciousness. Emphasizing the connections between theory and practice, Women’s and Gender Studies encourages applied learning through internships, service learning, cultural production, and research. This empowers students with the knowledge and fortitude required to exact meaningful individual, interpersonal, workplace and systemic changes toward a more just and equitable world. WGS extends its legacy as a change agent through its faculty, students, scholarship, curriculum, service, and alumni.
[1] bell hooks, Feminism Is For Everybody (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000), 1.
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Program Learning Outcomes
The Women & Gender Studies Department, through its Women & Gender Studies major, minor, and Queer Studies minor has the following program learning outcomes:
1) Intersectionality: Critically examine and articulate how gender intersectionally structures identities, interactions, structures, and systems in relation to race, class,
sexuality, ability, nation, and other forms of power and difference. (SSU Core Value: Diversity and Social Justice)
2) Institutionalization of Gender: Identify how and why gender is embedded in and influences culture and major social institutions and systems such as: family, health care,
law, education, religion, the workplace, the media, settler colonialism, carceral systems, white supremacy, the nation-state, transnational capitalism. (SSU Core Values: Diversity
and Social Justice; Connectivity and Community Engagement)
3) Power and Justice: Demonstrate how people have critiqued, navigated, resisted, and sought to transcend dominant formations of social constructions of gender in different
historical and cultural contexts– from the level of the personal to the transnational. (SSU Core Values: Diversity and Social Justice; Adaptability and Responsiveness)
4) Feminist Thought and Communication: Engage in feminist oral, written, and digital communication skills to speak and act collaboratively across social difference, appreciate
complex phenomena through multiple lenses, and effectively facilitate challenging conversations. Evaluate feminist research, knowledge production, and theory. Design
and conduct community-based research using feminist methodologies. (SSU Core Values: Diversity and Social Justice; Connectivity and Community Engagement)
5) Feminist Praxis: Participate in feminist praxis that joins theory, research, and experience. Through a required internship, students apply themes and categories of
analysis from Women’s and Gender Studies to their lives and the world. (SSU Core Values: Diversity and Social Justice; Connectivity and Community Engagement)
Degree Requirements
See the “Degree Requirements ” in the University Catalog for complete details on general degree requirements.
General Education Requirements (48 units)
See the “General Education ” requirements in the University Catalog for information on General Education requirements. Some major requirements may double count for GE requirements.
Major Core Requirements (29 units)
Pathways
WGS students will choose to specialize in one of the following two pathways: 1) Community/Clinical or, 2) Cultural/Critical
1) Community/Clinical: Students interested in community organizing, social work, health care, education, and/or counseling will consider this pathway. Courses emphasize community and identity development, social transformation and justice movements, institutions and organizations, bodies and health, and service learning.
or
2) Cultural/Critical: Students interested in the arts and art activism, cultural work and activism, education, and/or advanced degrees in humanities, critical social sciences, or law will consider this pathway. Courses emphasize critical theories, pedagogies, ideologies and structures, and cultural production, representation, and activism.
The listed courses are eligible toward each pathway. Students are encouraged to consult with their faculty advisor and the department chair to request approval for unlisted courses to count towards their pathway. Many courses without WGS course designation have home department prerequisites and restrictions. WGS majors seeking to register in such courses must meet these requirements. If WGS majors wish to fulfill their pathway largely with another department’s courses, they are encouraged to double major or minor.
Electives (choose 4 units)
Additional WGS courses or recognized courses in other departments.
Units
Total units in GE: 48
Total Core Units: 29
Total pathway units: 10
Total WGS Elective(s) Units: 4
Total University Electives:
Total units required for graduation: 120
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