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Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies (GSWS)

This guide was created for students studying and/or researching topics around gender and gender identity, human sexauality, and women's studies.

What is GSWS?

Gender, sexuality and women's studies is an interdisciplinary ("involving two or more academic, scientific, or artistic disciplines" (Merriam-Webster)) area of study that emphasizes the social processes, structures, and institutions that shape how gender and sexuality is perceived and enacted upon. The way a person's gender, sex, or sexuality is perceived by society can have major impacts on their access to healthcare, education, housing, and more. 

Useful definitions

Gender performativity

"Judith Butler is a post-structuralist philosopher and queer theorist. She is most famous for her notion of gender performativity, but her work ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, mourning and war" (Big Think, 2011).

Intersectionality

"Kimberlé Crenshaw, a 2017 NAIS People of Color Conference speaker, civil rights advocate, and professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, talks about intersectional theory, the study of how overlapping or intersecting social identities—and particularly minority identities—relate to systems and structures of discrimination" (National Association of Independent Schools. 2018)

Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation

In this video, Dr. Lorri Sulpizio explains the difference between gender identity and sexual orientation (2023).

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