BA in Critical Gender Studies in La Jolla United States | University of California, San Diego

The UC San Diego Critical Gender Studies Program (CGS) is an interdisciplinary initiative that enables students to examine gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationalism as interconnected frameworks for analysis and lived experience. Foundational inquiries in the program's curriculum explore how these categories become institutionalized yet evolve historically, how they collectively influence personal identity, structure societal organization, and play pivotal roles in generating diverse forms of knowledge about human existence.

Building upon recent feminist scholarship, the core curriculum integrates emerging interdisciplinary perspectives, intellectual discussions, evolving methodological approaches, and significant academic transformations that have redefined women's studies. Drawing from critical race feminism, feminist examinations of traditional knowledge systems, and LGBTQ+ scholarship that questions conventional views on sexuality, the curriculum guides students beyond simplistic binary frameworks and mainstream gender narratives. Rather, it examines gender through the nuanced lens of its historical development across cultural, academic, and global contexts.

Students will engage with diverse analytical methods when investigating these complex formations - most upper-division coursework comes from departments including History, Communication, Literature, Ethnic Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy, and Political Science. While these disciplinary approaches vary significantly, they all maintain a critical perspective on gender studies. This analytical position, embodied in the program's title "Critical Gender Studies," resists simplistic explanations when investigating gender dynamics, instead pursuing comprehensive examinations of the complexities and contradictions within power structures that shape and sustain these social relations.