The UC San Diego Critical Gender Studies Program (CGS) is an interdisciplinary academic program offering students the opportunity to study gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationalism as intersecting categories of analysis and experience. Some basic questions that anchor the program's core curriculum include asking how these categories become institutionalized yet change over time, how they work together to shape individual identity, contribute to the organization of social life, and become essential to the production of many different kinds of knowledge about that life.
The program's core curriculum builds upon feminist scholarship of the last decade, incorporating the new interdisciplinary agendas, intellectual debates, changing methodological practices, and major scholarly shifts that have reshaped the field of women's studies. Informed by the insights of critical race feminism, feminist critiques of conventional domains of knowledge, and gay and lesbian inquiries challenging traditional understandings and assumptions about sexuality, this core curriculum is designed to move students beyond simple binary descriptions and contemporary, popularized accounts of gender. Instead, gender is analyzed in the full complexity of its construction over time and in a variety of cultural, scholarly, and global arenas.
Students can expect to encounter a rich spectrum of approaches in studying these complex constructionsthe majority of a student's advanced work in the program consists of upper-division courses from the Departments of History, Communication, Literature, Ethnic Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy, and Political Science. However, despite their important differences, what these approaches share is a critical stance with respect to the subject of gender. This stance, reflected in the program's name Critical Gender Studies, refuses easy answers when exploring the social relations of gender and reaches, instead, for detailed accounts of the intricacies and paradoxes of power through which these relations are and have been made and maintained.
