Welcome!

About the Department

    The basics

    A dynamic interdisciplinary program, Gender and Sexuality Studies at USC offers its majors, minors and graduate certificate students a heady intellectual environment, a sense of community, and unparalleled personalized attention. Our curriculum explores the myriad ways gender and sexuality impact politics, intimate life, culture, the workplace, athletics, technology, health, science, and in the very production of knowledge itself. Our courses emphasize that gender is not a freestanding category, but rather one that takes shape through its intersection with other relations of power, including sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and religion.

    GSS internship

    GSS encourages and fosters “real world” experience beyond the classroom through our internship program, open only to majors. Through our community internship programs, students gain course credit for valuable gender-related work experience at a range of organizations, including women’s health clinics, the world’s largest international LGBT archive, Hollywood studios and other sectors in the creative industry, as well as in non-profit and social justice organizations.

    Our faculty

    Drawn from across the university, our faculty consists of leaders in their fields of specialization, including popular and public culture, LGBTQ studies, sports and gender, reproductive rights, class and social movements, politics and government, and new medical technologies.

    Location

    Located in the heart of Los Angeles, our university and department occupy a predominantly Black and brown neighborhood. Our department remains committed to both maintaining and forging deep connections and collaborations with our surrounding community, through mutual care and mutual aid.

    Why GSS

    By necessity, gender and sexuality studies departments, so hard-won as our own and others have been across the world, were built not only to provide an institutional home for research centering women, people of color and sexual minorities, but also to build worlds: to provide spaces that would give our students and communities respite and refuge from gendered, racialized and sexualized oppression. This is something our department has provided for our students and surrounding community at USC.

    Our alumni

    We are tremendously proud of our alumni who continue the work of building worlds in a range of fields including communications and media, the arts and education, business and non-profit organizations, politics, social justice and government, as well as in the law, health, and athletics. And we welcome any and all to our community as we work together to imagine a more just and equitable world.

    Undergraduate

    Gender and Sexuality Studies is an interdisciplinary program offering a major and a minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies and additional minors in LGBTQ Studies and Gender and Social Justice.

    Graduate

    For more than twenty years, graduate students from across the disciplines at USC have enriched their studies and broadened their expertise by training in Gender and Sexuality Studies. A survey of our certificate alumnae/i shows that a Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Certificate can help you find a job in or out of academe.

    Affiliates & Resources

    The Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies is closely affiliated with the Center for Feminist Research and the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture, both of which offer programming and opportunities for students and faculty at USC working in the areas of gender and sexuality.

    GSS also offers the Tedesco Scholarship for undergraduate and graduate students in our programs and multiple fellowship opportunities open to students across the University.

    Featured Faculty

    Our Core Faculty comes from over 10 different departments and schools across the University. Get to know our faculty today!

    Oneka LaBennett

    Oneka LaBennett is Director of USC’s Black Studies Center, and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Studies. LaBennett is the author of several books, including Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond (NYU Press 2024), which was shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. LaBennett’s OpEds and public commentary on figures such as Vice President Kamala Harris, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj have appeared in platforms such as Ms. Magazine, Newsweek, The Guardian, Politico, and NBCNews.com. At USC, LaBennett also serves as Faculty Chair of the Africana Research Cluster. Previously, she was Associate Professor of Africana Studies and a Faculty Fellow with the Atkinson Center for Sustainability at Cornell University. She also conducted oral history research on art and culture in the Bronx with a focus on Bronx women’s contributions to hip hop music in her capacity as Director of American Studies and Research Director of the Bronx African American History Project at Fordham University.

    Diana Blaine

    Diana Blaine teaches in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies where she also serves as Director of Undergradute Studies. Her research and publications examine representations of death in media, including analysis of corpses in advertising, literature, news, films and television. Besides thanatology, Blaine studies other representations of gender and the body, including abortion, yoga, and celebrity. For better or worse, she sees everything through the lens of mortality. Blaine has published a multitude of book chapters and had her work published in Mississippi Quarterly and The Conversation, amongst others. Previously, Dr. Blaine was a Fellow at the NEH Institute, Columbia University. She received her PhD in English from UCLA.