By recognizing the complexity of the social world, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies advocates for social change and provides insight into how this can be accomplished. WGSS is interdisciplinary – involving multiple academic disciplines – as feminist scholars include biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, chemists, engineers, economists and researchers from just about any identifiable department at a university. Disciplinary diversity among scholars in this field facilitates communication across the disciplinary boundaries within the academy to more fully understand the social world.

they see systems of oppression working in concert rather than separately. For instance, the way sexism is experienced depends not only on a person’s gender but also on how the person experiences racism, classism, ageism, and other forms of marginalization within particular historical and cultural contexts.

In subsequent decades, contributions of women of color, immigrant women, women from the global south, poor and working class women, and lesbian and queer women became integral to Women’s Studies. More recently, analyses of gender diversity, sexualities, disabilities, masculinities, religion, science, incarceration, indigeneity, and settler colonialism have become centered in the field. As a result of this opening of the field to incorporate a wider range of experiences and objects of analysis, many Women’s Studies departments have renamed themselves “Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” departments.

important critiques of transnational, post-colonial, queer, trans and feminists of color, most contemporary WGSS scholars strive to see the world through the lens of intersectionality.

Feminist scholars recognize the inextricable connection between the notions of gender and sexuality in U.S. society, not only for women but for people of all genders,