This plan is only available to students commencing from 2009 onwards

The Women's and Gender Studies Minor offers students the opportunity to achieve a gender balance in their studies. It aims to produce graduates who possess a specialized knowledge of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship today, comprising the study of issues surrounding women, gender and sexualities.

The Minor in Women’s and Gender Studies seeks to inculcate in students:

• a knowledge of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of women, social constructions of gender (femininity and masculinity), and sexualities

• an understanding of modern to contemporary feminist schools of thought, with an emphasis both on women’s rights, issues and activism and developments in feminist theory, scholarly methodology and ethics

• a recognition of change and heterogeneity—in feminisms, amongst women, and in gender constructs; inter-culturally, and in the past and present

• an awareness of how ‘race’, class and other markers of identity intersect with gender, signifying that gender cannot be studied or critiqued in isolation from other discriminatory categories of difference

A student who wishes to gain a Minor in Women's and Gender Studies must complete 36 units of credit including 6 uoc at Level 1, at least 12 uoc at Level 2 and at least 12 uoc at Level 3.

Level 2 courses give students the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of different topics and analytical approaches included in interdisciplinary feminist scholarship.

These include: the history of feminist thought and movements; women, gender and feminism in different cultural traditions; women’s (or gender and) literature; gender and human rights; sexualities; gender, identity/subjectivity and difference; gender and the Arts.

Level 3 courses take a more specialized approach to topics and critiques introduced at the lower levels: for example, women/gender and human rights, gender’s intersections with other markers of ‘difference’, and theorizing the body.

To complete the Minor and prepare students for honours research, some courses focus on the application of feminist critiques in individual disciplines (History, Sociology, English/Literary Theory, Philosophy); while others address scholarly writing, methodology and ethics in the interdisciplinary field of Women’s and Gender Studies.