About the Undergraduate Program

About the Major and Minor in Gender & Sexuality Studies

Students at UCI may declare a major or a minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

To declare the major, please contact the Humanities Undergraduate Dean’s Office.
To sign up for the minor, contact us or join the Gender & Sexuality Studies minor mailing list.

Most of our classes for the Gender & Sexuality Studies major are kept to a small size and emphasize student participation, so that students may benefit from close engagement with the material and valuable interaction with professors and classmates.

Declaring a major in Gender & Sexuality Studies gives students an opportunity to become part of an intellectual cohort and to sustain their learning through Department events geared toward fostering a learning community.

More about UCI’s Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies

Note: The Gender & Sexuality Studies undergraduate curriculum has a coherent focus on interdisciplinary approaches to transnational cultural theory.

About the Minor in Queer Studies

The Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies offers a minor in Queer Studies, providing students with an opportunity to study sexuality as a complex historical and cultural formation, rather than merely a feature of intimacy or an outcome of universal and unchanging biological forces. UCI’s minor was established in 2005, and is one of a growing number of similar degrees being offered at universities and colleges internationally. Queer Studies scholarship addresses a number of central questions: What constitutes the history of sexuality? How is gender related to sexuality? How are cultural norms of sexuality linked to assumptions about the proper desires and capacities of bodies? How is sexuality linked to processes of racialization? By what means and to what ends is sexuality policed?

Queer Studies is a relatively new field, emerging in the 1990s. It draws upon concepts and methods from anthropology, history, geography, psychology, sociology, literature, philosophy, political theory, biology, art, and art history, religious studies, science and technology studies, performance studies, and visual studies. Queer Studies focuses on the study of how norms are produced and come to be taken for granted, and, conversely how they are destabilized either through their own internal contradictions or through the interventions of activists seeking social justice. Thus the field shares intellectual affinities with the interdisciplinary fields of gender studies, sexuality studies, ethnic studies, critical legal studies, critical race studies, and cultural studies. Interdisciplinary insights from international studies, religious studies, science and technology studies, medical humanities, and visual studies also enrich this field of study.

A list of courses that may be approved via petition