Women’s and Gender Studies Minor

Director: Dr. Krisanne Bursik, kbursik@suffolk.edu

The Women’s and Gender Studies Program provides students the opportunity to examine how gender structures our ideas, social institutions, and cultural practices.  As an interdisciplinary program, it combines the analytic tools from different disciplines, incorporating both practical and theoretical approaches to understanding the role of gender in our lives.

The Women’s and Gender Studies Program may be best understood as an evolution from the Women’s Studies Program that offered its first courses at Suffolk in the late 1970s.  In the spring of 2003, the Women’s Studies faculty unanimously supported a proposal to change the name of the Women’s Studies Minor to the Women’s and Gender Studies Minor, highlighting the program’s more comprehensive attention to men, women, and various aspects of gender. 

A minor in Women’s and Gender Studies creates a structure for students to examine how gender structures their personal lives, families, careers, and social environments.  Through a variety of course offerings from a number of departments, students develop skills in analysis, critical thinking, theoretical understanding, and practical application.  In these courses, students discuss ideas about gender, images of femininity and masculinity, and the cultural construction of sexuality.  Students examine the relationship between biological differences and social inequality and compare gender systems from global and historical perspectives.  Through internships, field work, and directed studies, students work to develop practical strategies for transforming coercive and unequal gender systems to enhance our common humanity.