The women's studies program will begin the 1998-99 academic year, its 20th anniversary year, with a new name and a newly refined focus.
The program will be renamed "women's and gender studies," and its undergraduate major will be reorganized into three tracks: women's studies; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies; and gender studies. The new tracks are designed to recognize the distinct areas of scholarship now being pursued by students and faculty, as well as a growing number of pertinent courses offered by other departments and programs, according to Margaret Homans, chair of the program.
"What began in the 1970s as the study principally of women's historical, social, and cultural experiences -- a field that was needed to supplement the almost total absence of women from serious scholarly inquiry -- has now broadened significantly," says Homans. "The field now centers on the study of gender and sexuality as primary modes of social differentiation that are both historically constructed and active in producing patterns of power, including the patterns of exclusion that originally created the need for women's studies programs."
Under its new name, the women's and gender studies program will retain its traditional strengths in scholarship on women through the women's studies track, while creating new opportunities to study the ways gender and sexuality organize human societies and cultures, notes Homans. The track in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies will be devoted to analyzing the experiences of people of nonconforming sexualities and genders and exploring new critical perspectives on sexuality as a complex cultural, social, biological and historical phenomenon. The gender studies track will focus on how masculinity and femininity as social categories structure patterns of power. All three tracks will continue to emphasize the interplay of gender and sexuality with race, class and ethnicity, says Homans.
The expansion of the program is made possible by the creation on campus of the Stephen T. Baker Lesbian and Gay Studies visiting faculty post, which will be held in 1998-99 by Professor Alexandra Chasin of Boston College.
In September, the program will also welcome to campus Marianne LaFrance, professor of women's and gender studies and of psychology. A distinguished social psychologist who investigates experimentally how gender is produced in social interactions, she will be the first professor to hold a tenured position in the program at Yale. LaFrance has taught at Boston College for 24 years.
|