Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Furman provides an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry that examines the historically contingent roles gender and sexuality play in structuring the social and cultural experiences of all people.
In addition to exploring the specific and varied roles women play in our own and other cultures, this interdisciplinary minor is concerned to understand how the sex-gender system shapes knowledge across the curriculum.
While courses in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies have disciplinary homes in different departments of study, they are unified by their focus on the ways sex and gender shape the knowledge we acquire within those disciplines and across others. They bring recent knowledge about sex and gender acquired in fields such as sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and history into dialectical relation with a variety of other disciplines such as biology and the empirical sciences, psychology and the social sciences, as well as the traditional humanities.
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies truly embodies the idea of the “liberal arts;” it is interdisciplinary and unifying, teaches analytical skills, assumes a problem solving stance, and promotes socially useful ends by bringing a new perspective to existing questions.