Women's and Gender Studies

Launched in 1996, Roosevelt University's Women's and Gender Studies (WGS) Program offers a master's degree, a graduate credential, and an undergraduate minor. The program emphasizes an interdisciplinary framework in which students explore and synthesize multiple perspectives on historical and contemporary issues concerning women, gender, and sexuality. This interdisciplinary approach stresses intersectional analysis of gender and sexuality in relation to race, ethnicity, class, culture, nationality, ability, and other factors that shape experiences, identities, cultural productions, and ways of knowing.  

Contact: Ellen O'Brien
Associate Professor, Women's and Gender Studies and English
Director, Women's and Gender Studies Program
(312) 341-3723 or eobrien@roosevelt.edu

Women's and Gender Studies Faculty Essay: Fashion Forward?

By Marjorie Jolies

Feminism and fashion are not often considered allies. If feminism is thought to be serious, high-minded and ideological, fashion is considered its very opposite: trivial, superficial and subject to the whims of personal taste. Where feminism concerns itself with ethics, fashion revels in aesthetics. If feminism teaches us to see the deeper forces shaping human experience, fashion directs our eyes outward, to the surface of things.

Indeed, fashion has long been a favorite target of feminism, which has, over the years, taken aim at trends unfriendly to women’s freedom. Feminism has fought against clothing that limits women’s physical — and thus social — mobility, and styles that demand women wage war on their bodies to achieve an idealized silhouette.

But this is not the only way feminism’s relation to fashion plays out. Fashion has been a valuable accessory to feminism as often as its enemy, for as much as fashion may police the body or encourage conformity, fashion is also a powerful vehicle for defiant self-expression and lodging a collective complaint against the status-quo.  Read more