Gender Studies Program
What is it?
How does the invention of the dishwasher relate to modern warfare and to men's and women's labor relations? How did leather jackets, turtlenecks, and hair in the 1960s signify intensely competing claims for white and black men's masculinities? How do the different forms and techniques of fictional texts - those composed by Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless), Jane Austen (Persuasion), Spike Lee (She's Gotta Have It), David Fincher (Fight Club), Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros), Mike Nichols (Topsy-Turvy) and Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) - shape ironic slants on domesticity and the ever-shifting discourse on love? What do we learn from comparative study of Brazilian and American forms of slavery? Why and what did suffragettes suffer for the vote? What might a sympathetic feminist take on American working-class men look like? To what extent are we the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the language that names us? Are there "male" and "female" brains, "gay" genes, or even "races"? What do we mean by the word "transgendered'? What kinds of dramatically different sexualities exist in different cultures? Are political theories of individualism, public architecture, and national economic development policies subtly (or not so subtly) gendered?
Gender studies has emerged as an interdisciplinary field with a large and impressive body of scholarship and courses that focus on the complex interaction of gender with race, class, sexual orientation, and nationality. In addition to its focus on the history and achievements of women, gender scholarship has also inspired research and curricula that address men's lives, masculinity, and the lives of people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. The overall mission of the Gender Studies Program is to provide a quality undergraduate education in gender scholarship, to promote an integration of this scholarship and research into the university curriculum, to encourage new pedagogies, and to foster the growth of an interdisciplinary community of scholars who are interested in gender as a category of analysis.
Gender studies is best understood as an evolution from the women's studies programs founded in the same era as the women's movements of the 1960s-1980s. Whereas women's studies programs traditionally have focused on revealing and celebrating women's contributions to culture and society, gender studies shifts attention to concentrate more comprehensively on the ways gender structures society and culture. The name "gender studies" is meant to convey that the program intends to offer more than the inclusion of women in the university curriculum; that is, the program seeks to explore both gender difference and gender inequality throughout the entire human experience, for both women and men.
Before changing its name to Gender Studies in 2002, the Women's Studies Program at the University of Utah had existed since the mid-1970s, making it one of the oldest programs in the U.S. From a humble start with a small group of dedicated faculty and students, the program grew considerably over the years. Today in Gender Studies, there are over 100 majors and minors studying for undergraduate degrees, and about 30 affiliated faculty. Of these faculty currently six are joint tenure-track appointments with Gender Studies and another academic department.