Gender and Women’s Studies is a dynamic and rapidly expanding interdisciplinary area of study. An alternative to the traditional curriculum, Gender and Women’s Studies provides students with the opportunity to examine history, social structures, the sciences, language, literature, and culture from critical and illuminating perspectives.

At Dalhousie, students can currently enter the following programmes in Gender and Women’s Studies: a Concentration, a Major, a Double Major, or a Combined Honours programme. These programmes include classes in the disciplines of English, French, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology and Social Anthropology, and Theatre, and in interdisciplinary and professional fields, including International Development, Law, Nursing, and Social Work.

Students in the Dalhousie Gender and Women’s Studies programmes develop a critical understanding of gender as a category of analysis in scholarly enquiry, social dynamics, cultural expression, and belief systems. They also investigate the ways in which gender intersects with other variables such as race, class, and cultural difference. They study women’s contributions to civilization in many fields of knowledge, and examine the social and ideological forces that have made these contributions “invisible” in the past. Through exposure to a large and growing body of research in a number of disciplines and fields, Gender and Women’s Studies Majors gain a grounding in the methodologies and concepts shaping the organization and dissemination of knowledge.

Our classes also provide students with opportunities of uniting theory with social and cultural practice, addressing contemporary issues that individuals and institutions are grappling within today’s changing world order. They provide a context in which women can find strength and insight through exchanging experiences and ideas with other women, and a context in which women and men together can further human understanding through exploring and respecting differences.

Do men take Gender and Women’s Studies classes? Yes. Gender has operated as a fundamental category in the organization of knowledge, social systems, forms of representation and modes of production and consumption. The critical examination of gender is therefore relevant to men as well as women, in part because it involves the study of constructions of masculinity.