WGSS Mission and Values

Elon’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies (WGSS) program provides an academic home for mentoring, pedagogy, and scholarship dedicated to critical inquiry about women, gender, sexualities, and feminism. Through academic courses, research, internships and events, students learn about gender and sexualities across six areas of emphasis:

  • Critical Inquiry: Using multiple and diverse lenses with which to better understand and question the world around us.
  • Interdisciplinarity: Applying the critical lens of gender and sexualities to the ideas, concepts and events in other disciplines.
  • Identity: Distinguishing between socially and biologically created differences, and exploring how diverse gender embodiment and lived experiences shape our identities and the identities of those around us.
  • Intersectionality: Understanding how gender and sexualities intersect with each other and with other identities such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion, age and ability.
  • Societal Structures: Unpacking the structural and systematic circumstances that contribute to privilege and inequality.
  • Action: Putting critical inquiry into practice through discipline-specific works and/or student-led gender/sexualities-specific advocacy

View our Statement of Activism.

For more information about the program, please contact the program coordinator, Shayna Mehas.

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