The University of New Mexico’s Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program is committed to a just, safe, inclusive, productive and open learning environment. In this spirit, we recognize the strength of, and support the right to pursue, professional and academic goals safely and with dignity, within a racially, culturally, sexually and gender-diverse educational environment, free from threat of violence or hostility. It is to this end that we categorically condemn all threatening, violent and hostile acts which articulate racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, ageist, and classist violence directed at University of New Mexico community members, programs or departments.
What is Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at UNM?
What is Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies?
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) is an interdisciplinary field of knowledge production that centers analyses of women, gender, and sexuality, considered intersectionally with race, Indigeneity, class, age, nation, and ability.
From the National Women Studies Association:
“Women’s studies has its roots in the student, civil rights, and women’s movements of the 1960s and 70s. In its early years the field’s teachers and scholars principally asked, ‘Where are the women?’ Today that question may seem an overly simple one, but at the time few scholars considered gender as a lens of analysis, and women’s voices had little representation on campus or in the curriculum.
Today the field’s interrogation of identity, power, and privilege go far beyond the category ‘woman.’ Drawing on the feminist scholarship of U.S. and Third World women of color, women’s studies has made the conceptual claims and theoretical practices of intersectionality, which examines how categories of identity (e.g., sexuality, race, class, gender, age, ability, etc.) and structures of inequality are mutually constituted and must continually be understood in relationship to one another, and transnationalism, which focuses on cultures, structures and relationships that are formed as a result of the flows of people and resources across geopolitical borders, foundations of the discipline.”
Here at UNM, we are fortunate enough to have one of the oldest programs in the country. After years of organizing across faculty, students, and staff, the Women Studies Program was launched in 1972. As part of the civil rights movements of the time, Women Studies at UNM offered a radical resurgence of feminist scholarship and activisms. In 1999, Women Studies began to offer a BA major alongside the minor that had been offered for many years. While the program had offered graduate courses for many years, the graduate certificate program was officially initiated in 2006. In 2019, we changed our name from Women Studies to Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies to reflect the current state of our intellectual field as well as our growing investments in intersectional queer and transgender studies.
What is Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at UNM? It is a program staffed by award-winning faculty who create dynamic classroom spaces for diverse learning styles. It is a program whose interdisciplinary partnerships allow it to examine how race, Indigeneity, nation, disability, age, and more intersect with gender and sexuality. It is the hub of feminist, queer, and transgender studies at UNM.
