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About the Women's Studies Department The Women's Studies Department at UCI, since its inception in 1975, has been dedicated to the study of women, gender, and sexuality in their complex articulations with systems that differentiate races, ethnicities, socio-economic classes, religions, and nationalities. We assume that there are many kinds of women situated differently in relation to various forms of oppression and multiple systems of privilege. We study these differences and the ways institutions and belief systems produce norms of gender and sexuality. We explore how different kinds of women are produced through powerful social forces, and also how different kinds of men are produced. We recognize that mainstream definitions of “normal” men and women are the outcomes of an elaborate and evolving system usually involving ideological conflicts and uneven systems. We look at how masculinity and femininity are not natural, pre-given facts lodged in a clear-cut binary system of biological difference, but are products of cultural processes, processes that are often but not always antagonistic. As we examine these issues, we forge new forms of knowledge out of critiques of previously accepted beliefs and intellectual paradigms in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Our curriculum combines theory with practice in its links to the professional and political realities of contemporary life.
Our teaching and research activities reflect a commitment to feminist transnational analysis and to the development of interdisciplinary methods. The framework we have been developing under the name of Feminist Transnational Studies allows for the study of transnational phenomena conducted through interdisciplinary feminist methods. It allows us to focus on the networks of inequalities and connections arising from new forms of globalization and from older histories of colonialism and racism. It illuminates the conditions under which knowledge of different regions of the world is produced and circulates, particularly concerning how this knowledge pertains to gender and sexuality. By emphasizing a critical interdisciplinary perspective, we call into question the boundaries of disciplinary knowledges and formulate new questions, frameworks, and methods for understanding how specific objects of analysis and specific modes of subjectivity come into being through contingent links between knowledge and power.
The initial meetings to form the Program began in 1975, through the efforts of a small but determined group of faculty, students, and staff. Gradually, classes on women and gender started to appear in the course catalogue in the latter half of the 1970s under the Program’s name. It took over a decade finally to acquire the University’s approval to offer a freestanding major in 1992. Two years later, we received approval to offer a Graduate Emphasis in Feminist Studies. In the past few years, the Women’s Studies faculty has grown into a ten-member faculty with 52 affiliated faculty in units throughout the school of Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts and Social Ecology. The research and teaching interests of the core faculty include gender and the study of science, information, and technology; gender and the environment; gender and transnational cultural studies; gender and nationalism; gender and religion; and gender and popular culture. After much time and effort, we officially became a Department on June 30, 2007.
We currently offer an undergraduate major in Women’s Studies, undergraduate minors in both Women’s Studies and Queer Studies, and a Graduate Emphasis in Feminist Studies. Many of our classes also satisfy campus breadth/general education requirements, and all are valuable as elective courses. Our courses require students to be intellectually engaged in the world around them.
We also host and co-sponsor many events each year geared toward furthering scholarship in the field and making links to the larger communities of which we are a part. Through these events and our multiple affiliations with programs and organizations at and beyond UCI, we build networks and encourage important conversations that might not otherwise occur. We invite you to attend our events if you are in the area. We will be podcasting some of our events, so please check our News and Events section if you’d like to listen in.
Perspectives
What is being said about the Department:
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“UCI has put together an impressive ensemble of faculty and classes to produce a unique and highly promising, interdisciplinary course of study at the graduate as well as undergraduate level in Women’s Studies. The quality, rigor, and potential of the program are beyond question.”
-Review of the Program in Women’s Studies, April 2004 |
