Dec 07, 2024  
USC Catalogue 2024-2025 
    
USC Catalogue 2024-2025

Gender and Sexuality Studies (BA)


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The Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies offers students the opportunity to examine the forces behind the cultural and historical production of gender, including their relationship to other factors including race, class, ability, nationalism and colonialism. The department aims for its students to develop competencies in critical thinking; research skills; community-engaged creativity and collaboration; feminist knowledge production; intersectionality; queer and transgender theory; justice, equality, and power; transnationalism; and decoloniality. The Gender and Sexuality Studies curriculum analyzes how gender and sexuality operate in politics, popular culture, the professional sphere, intimate life, health, technology, science, sports and the very production of knowledge itself. With this rigorous understanding of the shifting terrain of contemporary power relations, graduates will be able to identify, resist and transform oppressive systems in their personal and professional lives. The interdisciplinary major in Gender and Sexuality Studies will prepare students to enter graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences and in professional schools including law, business, education, and health care. In addition, the curriculum equips students for careers in industry, including the media, arts, communication, governmental and non-governmental organizations and public service.

The major in Gender and Sexuality Studies requires completion of 40 undergraduate units (usually ten 4-unit courses).

Upper Division


Thirty-two units of upper-division SWMS courses are required. Of these, students are required to complete SWMS 308 , SWMS 311 , SWMS 392  and SWMS 410 .

Honors Program Requirements


The Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies offers a two-semester honors program, in which qualified students spend their first semester in an honors track in an upper-division seminar, SWMS 410 Senior Seminar in Gender and Sexuality Studies . During the second semester, all honors students are required to take SWMS 492 Gender and Sexuality Studies: Honors Thesis , in which each completes a  thesis project on a topic of his or her choosing under faculty direction. Contact the departmental honors director for further information. To graduate with honors, department majors must have a minimum GPA of 3.5 in their major course work.

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