What’s your passion?
Gender and Sexuality Studies is an interdisciplinary program offering a major, minor, and graduate certificate at USC. Our courses cover gender, sex, and sexuality across cultures, regions, historical periods, and academic subjects. Our Core Faculty comes from 10 different departments and our courses from 20 different departments and programs across the University.
As a GSS major or minor, you design your own course of instruction based on your interests – humanities, social sciences, arts, or all three.
For example:
- Interested in international relations? Sign up for Gender and Global issues (IR 316).
- Art or media? Take Queer Cinema, Literature and the Visual Arts (COLT 415) or Gender, Media and Communication (COMM 395).
- Politics? Sex, Power, and Politics (POSC 381)
- Masculinity? Men and Masculinity (SWMS 385)
- Heath or biology? Health, Gender and Ethnicity (SWMS 336) or The Science of Sex Differences: A Gender and Sexuality Studies Approach (SWMS 325)
Gender and Sexuality Studies brings top-notch scholars together with students in small upper-level courses and seminars. Majors and minors work closely with their professors and have multiple opportunities for individual or team research. You can pursue an honors major and write a senior thesis in GSS.
Our major
The Gender and Sexuality Studies major is designed for students drawn to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality. In exploring how gender and sexuality have operated across time and cultures, students will engage with the approaches and methodologies of established disciplines: sociology, literature, history, political theory, religion; as well as interdisciplinary fields like queer studies and ethnic studies. Our curriculum analyzes how gender and sexuality operate in politics, popular culture, the workplace, health, science, sports, intimate life and the very production of knowledge itself. Our classes emphasize that gender and sexuality are not stand-alone categories but rather take shape through their intersection with outer relations of power, including race and ethnicity, religion, class and nationality. Majoring in Gender and Sexuality Studies prepares students for graduate school in the social sciences and the humanities as well as in law, business and education. In addition, the major and each of our several minors prepare students for work in governmental and non-governmental organizations, communications and the media, arts and public service.
Our minors
Minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies
The Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies offers a minor for students specializing in other disciplines who would like a substantive introduction to the way gender shapes individuals and institutions, as well as to the research methods and topics specific to the field.
Minor in Gender and Social Justice
The minor in Gender and Social Justice is tailored for students interested in careers in the area of social policy. The minor is unique in its focus on the ways in which large-scale social and economic processes such as neoliberalism, globalization and economic precarity are connected and gendered.
Minor in LGBTQ Studies
The interdisciplinary minor in LGBTQ Studies establishes sexuality as a critical category of analysis for humanists and social scientists. The minor enables students to explore the shifting social organization and cultural meanings of same-sex sexuality and gender identification.
Our courses
Gender and Sexuality Studies offers seven lower-division courses and nineteen upper-division courses, including an internship course, a directed research opportunity, an honors thesis option, and a variety of special topics courses that change from semester to semester.
Our major and minors are interdisciplinary. This means that many courses that count for credit towards our major and minors are cross-listed with other departments. Currently, GSS students have over twenty-five cross-listed courses from across the University available to choose from, depending on their program of study.
