The members of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program believe that solidarity and collective action are the best responses to attacks on the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education and elsewhere. These attacks do not concern mere concepts — they are attacks on the people who embody the many overlapping identities of race, gender, and sexual orientation.
We recognize that we must stand together to protect the most vulnerable among us and to protect and support each other.
We affirm the rights to safety and equal access to education for all.
We affirm the rights of academic freedom, and the rights of publication and creative output of all faculty and students.
We believe in the First Amendment protections for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and freedom to protest. Free speech must be the foundation for civic engagement and a truly meaningful, successful educational environment.
We commit to working in solidarity with People of Color, Indigenous Nations, everyone in LGBTQIA+ communities, women, workers, immigrants, and all those striving for justice and self-determination.
We commit to working for a safe, inclusive, and equitable campus environment for all faculty, staff, students, and community members.
Trans rights are human rights.
Women's rights are human rights.
Gay rights are human rights.
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.
