Department of Gender Studies
Minor in Gender Studies
Students on Summer 2020, Fall 2020, or Spring 2021 requirements GNDRMIN
Due to the transdisciplinary nature of the department, the Minor in Gender Studies complements a wide variety of programs and degrees. From the humanities to the sciences, policy to the arts, media to education, the Minor in Gender Studies can enhance a student's degree as it examines how gender and its intersections have an impact on various fields.
Requirements
The minor requires at least 15 credit hours, including the requirements listed below.
- Introductory. Three (3) credit hours:
- GNDR-G 101 Gender, Culture, and Society
- GNDR-G 102 Sexual Politics
- GNDR-G 104 Topics in Gender Studies
- GNDR-G 105 Sex, Gender and the Body
GNDR-G 101 Gender, Culture, and Society
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examination of the international emergence of the field of women’s studies; the achievements and limitations of scholarly work exploring oppression and discrimination based on sex and sex differences; the development of the category “gender” and its uses and abuses; and the relevance of changing understandings of the term “culture” for the study of women, gender, and/or sexuality across diverse historical periods, regions, nations, and societies. Exploration of a series of case studies. Particular attention devoted to the ways in which “gender” as practice, performance, and representation has differed for women and men according to race, class, and other divisions.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourseSpring 2024CASE AHcourse
GNDR-G 102 Sexual Politics
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Investigation of cross-cultural meaning for the term “sexual politics,” from Kate Millet’s classic 1970 text to those offered by historians, social scientists, and other critics analyzing political structures, processes and mobilizations around sex, sex differences and sexual practices and statuses, including the inextricable links between sexual politics and “other/ mainstream” politics.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 104 Topics in Gender Studies
- Credits
- 1–3 credit hours
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Analysis of selected ideas, trends, and problems in the study of gender across academic disciplines. Explores a particular theme or themes and also provides critical introduction to the challenges of analyzing gender within the framework of different disciplines of knowledge.
- Repeatability
- May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourse
GNDR-G 105 Sex, Gender and the Body
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines the diverse and historically varying relationships forged between biological sex, culturally formulated discourses of masculinity and femininity, and the sexed body. With variable title and themes, the course may employ a range of different approaches, depending on the instructor.
- Repeatability
- May be repeated once with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
- Intermediate. Three (3) credit hours:
- GNDR-G 205 Themes in Gender Studies
- GNDR-G 206 Gay Histories, Queer Cultures
- GNDR-G 215 Sex and Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective
- GNDR-G 225 Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture
- GNDR-G 230 Gendered Relations
- GNDR-G 235 Scientific Understandings of Sex and Gender
- GNDR-G 250 Race, Sexuality, and Culture (Intersections)
- GNDR-G 290 History of Feminist Thought and Practice
- GNDR-G 300 Gender Studies: Core Concepts and Key Debates
- GNDR-G 302 Issues in Gender Studies
- GNDR-G 303 Knowledge and Sex
- GNDR-G 304 Constructions of Masculinities
- GNDR-G 310 Representation and the Body
- GNDR-G 320 Sexual Violence: Transcultural Perspectives
- GNDR-G 325 Technologies of Gender
- GNDR-G 330 Looking Like a Feminist: Visual Culture and Critical Theory
- GNDR-G 335 Explaining Sex/Gender Differences
- GNDR-G 340 Gender, Geography, Sex, and Space
- GNDR-G 350 Queer Theory
- GNDR-G 386 British Sexual Histories: From Regency Scandals to Sexual Revolution
- GNDR-G 393 American Sexual Histories: Salem Witch Craze to the Age of Viagra
- GNDR-G 399 Regulating Gender
GNDR-G 205 Themes in Gender Studies
- Credits
- 1–3 credit hours
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Exploration of a theme or series of themes arising from the study of gender, generally from within a particular discipline or subfield. The course will provide some critical reflection upon the challenges of analyzing gender within the framework of different disciplines of knowledge. Focus on specific instances, topics, or case studies, depending on the instructor.
- Repeatability
- May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 206 Gay Histories, Queer Cultures
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines the social, cultural, and political history of same-sex relationships and desires in the United States and abroad, emphasizing the historical emergence of certain American sexual subcultures, such as the modern lesbian and gay “movement” or “community.” The course also highlights particular formations such as race, class, and regional difference that interrupt unified, universal narratives of lesbian and gay history.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 215 Sex and Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Investigation of forms in which gender, gender markings, gender meanings, and gender relations are arranged in different cultures of the world. Assessment of debates concerning the global salience of feminist claims about women’s “oppression,” political mobilization around gender, body rituals marking masculinity and femininity, indigenous women, and resistance to gender formations beyond Euro-American borders.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 225 Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examination of popular cultural “makings” of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality through typical representation of gender within fiction, theater, cinema, radio, music, television, journalism, and other secular mass media. Analysis of the developing international telecommunications “superhighway” and struggles to secure increased representation of women and of feminist perspectives within existing culture industries.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourseSpring 2024CASE AHcourse
GNDR-G 230 Gendered Relations
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines the gendered dynamics of social relations. Explores how gender and sexuality are imagined, constructed, and lived within a diverse set of institutions and cultural locations, such as the military, the antebellum slave plantation, the global sex market, the hospital, and the contemporary workplace.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 235 Scientific Understandings of Sex and Gender
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Interrogates the evolution of scientific approaches to, and conceptualizations of, the terminology of sex and gender from the perspective of the behavioral, medical, and social sciences. Topics may include: femininity, masculinity, and androgyny; femaleness, maleness, intersex, and transgender; heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 250 Race, Sexuality, and Culture (Intersections)
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines the construction of sexuality and sexuality studies while analyzing the intersection of race and ethnicity in the production of knowledge and particular social categories that shape racial communities and sexual cultures. May employ a range of different approaches, depending on the instructor.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourseSpring 2024CASE AHcourse
GNDR-G 290 History of Feminist Thought and Practice
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Introduction to historical and contemporary feminists. Critical focus is placed on criteria by which attributes of identifiable feminist discourses and their contexts may be evaluated. Disputes among feminist theorists with regard to the pertinence of differences ordained by sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, and other political and philosophical adherence emerge as central themes for appraisal.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourseSpring 2024CASE AHcourse
GNDR-G 300 Gender Studies: Core Concepts and Key Debates
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- GNDR-G 101
- Description
- Examination of the field of gender studies. Students will explore a series of themes through which gender is discussed, analyzed, and defined. Conceptual frameworks of gender, theories of sexuality, and the cultural and historical construction of the body are emphasized. Examination of gender as a contested category ranging across categories of race, ethnicity, class, and nationality.
GNDR-G 302 Issues in Gender Studies
- Credits
- 1–3 credit hours
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- This topical, variably titled course addresses selected ideas, trends, and problems in the study of gender across academic disciplines. It explores a particular theme or themes and also provides critical reflection upon the challenges of analyzing gender within the framework of different disciplines of knowledge.
- Repeatability
- May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours.
GNDR-G 303 Knowledge and Sex
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Exploration of debates about knowledge as cultural production or representation, implicated in contemporary understandings of gender and sexual difference. Feminist critiques of various disciplines and fields are interrogated, in terms of their justifiability and coherence. Significant differences in interpretations offered by such critics are identified, and their impacts upon areas of knowledge during the twentieth century are assessed.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 304 Constructions of Masculinities
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- An interdisciplinary examination of what constitutes (and has historically constituted) masculinity. Designed to illuminate the contested underpinnings of masculinity.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 310 Representation and the Body
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Analysis of scholarship concerned with how the body is perceived, represented, and symbolically charged. This course examines concepts that include sexed bodies, desiring bodies, corporeality, body politics, and sociological bodily rituals. Thematically, the course investigates exterior/interior, solid/fluid, and sex/gender distinctions critical to discussions of the body.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourseSpring 2024CASE AHcourse
GNDR-G 320 Sexual Violence: Transcultural Perspectives
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Explores historical, transnational, and current aspects of sexual violence in order to highlight important aspects of this global problem and better understand how our interactions in the world as students and citizens. Students will be empowered to become agents of knowledge, care, and responsibility in this process.
GNDR-G 325 Technologies of Gender
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Investigates “gendered” ways that technological transformations reshape social life, physical space, built environments, or medical research. Familiarizes students with how feminist inquiry remaps such fields as computer technology, urban and development studies, geography, medicine, or health sciences.
- Repeatability
- May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 330 Looking Like a Feminist: Visual Culture and Critical Theory
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Advanced study of feminist film theory which examines gender in popular film from a variety of perspectives. Examines how cinema works as a “technology of gender,” how film constructs subject positions and identities, and what these constructions can tell us about how gender structures our culture.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourseSpring 2024CASE AHcourse
GNDR-G 335 Explaining Sex/Gender Differences
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Compares biological, psychological, and social theories regarding the development and maintenance of gender differentiated behavior, gender and sexual identities, and the meaning of sexed bodies. The course scrutinizes the social and cultural forces that magnify, minimize, or subvert the expression of gender differences.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 340 Gender, Geography, Sex, and Space
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines the crucially important role that space and place play in the construction and maintenance of gender norms and sexual practices. Subjects may include the gendered history of the domestic domain, feminist critiques of architecture and urban planning, the modernist art of flaneurie, or the gendered and racial politics of imprisonment in the United States.
- Fall 2024CASE DUScourseSummer 2024CASE DUScourseSpring 2024CASE DUScourse
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 350 Queer Theory
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines queer theory, particularly in relation to other intellectual/political movements (post-structuralism, critical race studies, feminism, gay and lesbian studies) which it both borrowed from and challenged. Focus on the ways in which queer theory articulates a radical transformation of the sex/gender system in opposition to normalizing and essentializing impulses.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourseSpring 2024CASE AHcourse
GNDR-G 386 British Sexual Histories: From Regency Scandals to Sexual Revolution
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines transformations of sexuality and erotic lives within modern British history, focusing upon popular culture, demographic trends, sensational crimes and scandals (the Queen Caroline Affair, the Profumo Affair), and controversies over the regulation of sexual behaviors and identities. Concludes with analysis of the slate of 1960s "liberal" legislation on divorce, censorship, abortion, and homosexuality.
- Repeatability
- Credit given for only one of GNDR-G 386 or HIST-B 386.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 393 American Sexual Histories: Salem Witch Craze to the Age of Viagra
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines interactions between sexualities, culture, and science in America from the late seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Sexual patterns of indigenes, European settlers, and early immigrants underwent significant changes in the later nineteenth century. Specific episodes and trends fueled early twentieth century controversies over erotic practices and identities. These debates gave way to new areas of interest and concern, however, as a result of sex researchers' findings on interwar and postwar Americans' sexual histories, publicized in the Kinsey Reports and successor studies.
- Repeatability
- Credit given for only one of GNDR-G 393 or HIST-A 393.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 399 Regulating Gender
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Explores the regulation of gender relations through the institutions of state, church, and/ or civil society, including: public policies; laws and their enforcement; religions; ethical and moral norms; and other social conventions and cultural norms. Strong focus on cross-cultural and transnational comparisons. May be thematically concentrated around case studies.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
- Advanced.
- 300–499 Level. Six (6) credit hours:
- Any GNDR-G 300–399
- Any GNDR-G 400–499
- 400–499 Level. Three (3) additional credit hours:
- Any GNDR-G 400–499 except GNDR-X 474
- 300–499 Level. Six (6) credit hours:
- International/Non-Western Emphasis. One (1) course:
- GNDR-G 102 Sexual Politics
- GNDR-G 215 Sex and Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective
- GNDR-G 320 Sexual Violence: Transcultural Perspectives
- GNDR-G 410 International Feminist Debates
GNDR-G 102 Sexual Politics
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Investigation of cross-cultural meaning for the term “sexual politics,” from Kate Millet’s classic 1970 text to those offered by historians, social scientists, and other critics analyzing political structures, processes and mobilizations around sex, sex differences and sexual practices and statuses, including the inextricable links between sexual politics and “other/ mainstream” politics.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 215 Sex and Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Investigation of forms in which gender, gender markings, gender meanings, and gender relations are arranged in different cultures of the world. Assessment of debates concerning the global salience of feminist claims about women’s “oppression,” political mobilization around gender, body rituals marking masculinity and femininity, indigenous women, and resistance to gender formations beyond Euro-American borders.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourseSpring 2024CASE SHcourse
GNDR-G 320 Sexual Violence: Transcultural Perspectives
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Explores historical, transnational, and current aspects of sexual violence in order to highlight important aspects of this global problem and better understand how our interactions in the world as students and citizens. Students will be empowered to become agents of knowledge, care, and responsibility in this process.
GNDR-G 410 International Feminist Debates
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Investigation of debates among feminists as to whether aspirations towards global feminism are possible and desirable. The course compares concerns about the global situation of women, as articulated by international bodies such as the United Nations, with concerns articulated by feminists in different parts of the world.
- Fall 2024CASE GCCcourseSummer 2024CASE GCCcourseSpring 2024CASE GCCcourse
- Minor GPA, Hours, and Minimum Grade Requirements.
- Minor GPA. A GPA of at least 2.000 for all courses taken in the minor—including those where a grade lower than C- is earned—is required.
- Minor Minimum Grade. Except for the GPA requirement, a grade of C- or higher is required for a course to count toward a requirement in the minor.
- Minor Upper Division Credit Hours. At least 9 credit hours in the minor must be completed at the 300–499 level.
- Minor Residency. At least 9 credit hours in the minor must be completed in courses taken through the Indiana University Bloomington campus or an IU-administered or IU co-sponsored Overseas Study program.
Minor Area Courses
Unless otherwise noted below, the following courses are considered in the academic program and will count toward academic program requirements as appropriate:
- Any course at the 100–499 level with the
GNDR-G
subject area prefix—as well as any other subject areas that are deemed functionally equivalent - Any course contained on the course lists for the academic program requirements at the time the course is taken—as well as any other courses that are deemed functionally equivalent—except for those listed only under Addenda Requirements
- Any course directed to a non-Addenda requirement through an approved exception
This program of study cannot be combined with the following:
- Bachelor of Arts in Gender Studies (GNDRBA)
Exceptions to and substitutions for minor requirements may be made with the approval of the unit's Director of Undergraduate Studies, subject to final approval by the College of Arts and Sciences.