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

Presentation, discussion and book signing by Dr. Beth E. Richie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation

Thursday, April 18
5:30-7:30PM
Murray-Green Library, Auditorium Building,10th floor

Dr. Beth E. Richie is the Director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy and Professor of African American Studies and Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Richie is the author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation (NYU Press, 2012), which chronicles the evolution of the contemporary anti-violence movement during the time of mass incarceration in the United States, and numerous articles concerning black feminism and gender violence, race and criminal justice policy, and the social dynamics around issues of sexuality, prison abolition, and grassroots organizations in African American communities.

RSVP to: Nancy Michaels, nmichaels@roosevelt.edu

Sponsored by: The Mansfield Institute for Social Justice and Transformation, The Women's and Gender Studies Program, The Sociology Department, The Black Student Union, and The Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

WGS Writing and Activism awards: deadline April 15, 2013

The Women's and Gender Studies Program is pleased to announce its first annual awards for student writing and activism.

The writing award will recognize outstanding student work on any topic relevant to the field of WGS. Any student enrolled in a WGS course (core or cross-listed) during the 2012-2013 academic year is eligible to submit written work produced in that course. More information on submitting work for the award can be found here.

The activist award will recognize student activism that has made an impact on issues relevant to WGS. Applicants must be an undergraduate WGS minor, a WGS MA student, or a WGS Credential student. Activist work undertaken during the 2012-2013 academic year will be considered.More information on submitting work for the award can be found here.

Specific details on submission procedures are forthcoming. The deadline for submissions is April 15, 2013. Awards will be announced in by the end of the spring semester in 2013.

WGS 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