Feminist Research Methodologies

The Center initiates and supports collaborative projects dedicated to engaged, critical feminist scholarship from diverse perspectives. With an emphasis on emerging fields in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in all disciplines, the Center also provides a forum in which faculty and graduate students in the Five Colleges, visiting scholars at all ranks from around the world, and partner organizations can present their work. Annual thematic foci provide a framework for partnerships, short-term and long-term residencies and symposia.

Mission: The Campus Life Women's Center supports and celebrates women’s leadership; provides empowering spaces for women; takes action to address gender inequity on campus; provides programming and resources on local, national and global gender issues; honors Vassar College’s unique history; and promotes understanding among people of different genders, cultures, beliefs, ethnic backgrounds, abilities and sexual orientations.

The QRC seeks to improve the campus climate for queer and trans students and advocate for the respect and safety of all members of the campus community in collaboration with other campus organizations and departments, the QRC works to meet the needs of students to promote personal and leadership and development.

SWAGS is a cross-disciplinary exploration of sexuality and gender and their intersections with race, class and nation. It is also an inquiry into the material, cultural and political lives of women. We examine feminist and queer thought in a variety of global and historical contexts. Faculty specialize in literature, history, anthropology, classics, medicine, film, politics, and rhetoric.

Gender and sexuality are increasingly crucial lenses through which to view the world. While heavily incorporated into women's studies, gender, being neither stable nor absolute, also lends itself to the study of queer identity. Issues such as straight masculinity, queer femininities, and gay male identity are becoming increasingly important to the study of gender, as is the transgender movement.

The goal of the Program for the Study of Women and Gender is to understand how gender operates as a powerful social system that organizes how we perceive ourselves, others and the culture around us. The program enables students to see how the meanings of gender change across cultures and over time and how the meanings of gender are always connected to the meanings of race, class, and sexuality. Historically based in the study of women’s experiences worldwide, the field has expanded to include attention to masculinities, queer and transgender subjects, as well as to disability.

We are committed to interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis in which the study of women and gender is multi-faceted, diverse, and embedded in a network of power relations including race, class, sexuality, and nation.