Aug 16, 2025  
2025-2026 Undergraduate Catalog 
    
2025-2026 Undergraduate Catalog

Women’s and Gender Studies Major


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BA Degree

The WGS major requires 36 credits that are completed as described below. 

 

Core Major Learning Outcomes

  • Explain the historical, social, and political contexts of women’s movements and feminist thought
  • Explain feminist theories and apply them in critiquing and transforming one’s world

Focus Area Learning Outcomes

Intersectional Gender Studies: Identify and evaluate the social construction of gender and the ways gender intersects with other forms of identity such as sexuality, race, class, ability and age in creating and maintaining structures of inequality.

Politics, Justice and Policy: Explain the gendering of our socioeconomic and political worlds and the individual and collective components of social change.

Cross-Cultural and Transnational Inquiry: Identify, compare, and evaluate culturally and historically specific ideas of gender, sex, and sexuality; and identify and examine ideas of gender, sex and sexuality that cross cultural and national borders.

Politics of Cultural Representation: Apply a feminist perspective to the study of literature, history, and/or the arts, with the aim of examing critically the multiple, situated kinds of knowledge that emergae from cultural artifacts and narratives.

Requirements


Core Courses: 12 credits


Students must successfully complete four core courses: WGS 101, WGS 190, WGS 203, and the capstone course: WGS 499. 

Focus Area Requirements - 12 credits


Students must complete at least one course in each of the four focus areas:

Politics, Justice, and Policy


Choose one:

Specialization Requirement - 6 credits


Students must successfully complete at least two additional courses (a total of six credits) in one of the four focus areas: Intersectional Gender Studies; Politics, Justice, and Policy; Cross-Cultural and Transnational Inquiry; Politics of Cultural Representation.

Elective - 3 credits


Students must successfully complete one elective course in any of the four areas of concentration, or in feminist theory, or an internship (WGS 399).

Total credits: 33


Note: Seven of the eleven required courses must be upper-level courses (300/400-level).

University Studies Requirements


In addition to the requirements in the major, students will be required to complete the University Studies requirements. For more information: http://www.umassd.edu/generaleducation/universitystudies/universitystudiescurriculum/.

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