Gender studies isn’t only about women anymore. In the last decade, academic institutions across the country have been implementing a new topic within their interdisciplinary departments: gender and sexuality studies.
As a new addition to post-secondary curriculums, the response from students has been more than positive. “When we’d get feedback from the core course, they’ve said it’s amazing and that we need to have more options,” says Lloyd Whitesell, chair of thesexuality diversity studies minor at McGill University. “So there’s great excitement and great demand.”
Dr. Mary K. Bryson, professor and director at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia (UBC), attributes the popularity of their graduate program as being partly generational. “People who are in the under-30 crowd already have been participating in a world within which there’s much more complex understanding about what we mean by gender and sexuality and that everyone has a sexuality. It’s not only about being gay or gender studies isn’t only about being female.”
Before the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice was introduced in 2012, UBC solely had a Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies that included undergraduate, master’s, and PhD options. “What you can see there is the progression of the field of gender studies, sexuality studies, critical race studies,” says Dr. Bryson. “So this is a transformation where a lot of women’s studies are now women’s and gender studies or women’s and sexuality studies.”
At McGill, like the Institute at UBC, the minor in sexuality diversity studies is interdisciplinary with the purpose to introduce different perspectives such as political issues, human rights issues, historical perspectives, theory, and media representation.
“I think when I teach my course, one of the really important principles I think of is to challenge normative thinking,” says Whitesell. “I teach music and queer identity, and I have different units where we’ll do queer music history and [learn] how historians have gone about looking for stories and how they ignored or forgot queer history.”
With sexuality as just one part of the program, Whitesell explains the importance of gender diversity. “The title is sexual diversity studies, but it’s a priority to have gender diversity in there as well to have trans issues covered as much as possible. Some students are very sophisticated in terms of knowing about trans identity related to performers or health research.”
Today, the term gender has taken on a new meaning, adds Dr. Bryson. “We’re seeing changes to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms where transgender is now part of gender in the same way gender is showing up differently in the courses and programs that we offer.”
As an interdisciplinary program, graduating students are finding community-based careers. “Our students have one foot firmly planted in a community-based context of one kind or another, like refugee rights and human rights,” says Dr. Bryson. “I would say that we’re probably about 50/50 in terms of people continuing to be located in the university and people who take up leadership positions in community-based and socially oriented programming.”
Photo: MHJ, Wavebreakmedia Ltd/Thinkstock