This course provides an introduction to women’s studies, the interdisciplinary nature of this area of study, and the major issues involved in considering gender in intellectual inquiry. An exploration of disciplinary erspectives (especially those of sociology, anthropology, history and literature) on the study of women, as well as interdisciplinary perspectives. Cross-cultural analytic frameworks will be employed.

The critical perspective of women’s studies, out of which this examination of the development of feminist thought/theory emerges, establishes the social construction of gender as a focal point of analysis in a complex matrix with class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality as fundamental categories of social and cultural analysis. In an examination of the development of feminist thought, the course will consider the historical, social, intellectual and political contexts within which feminist theories developed, including the relationship between feminist theory and contemporary women’s movements in the U.S. and around the globe.