Rationale for Changing the Name of the Program from "Women's Studies" to "Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies"

September 5, 2007

Provost Richard Lariviere
Strong Hall
Campus

Dear Provost Lariviere:

We write to request that our Program's name be changed from the Women's Studies Program to the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. We have come to this decision over a long period of reflection and debate, recognizing that our program began from a very special event. In this letter we will detail our reasons for requesting this change.

The Women's Studies Program at the University of Kansas began after the revolutionary movement of the February Sisters, who conducted a sit-in protest in February, 2972 in part to demand the initiation of our Program. What began as a few courses on women in the Departments of English and Sociology, overseen by a volunteer director, has grown into a unit with eight joint appointed faculty (4.0 fte), including a joint appointed Director, a major, minor, and graduate certificate. We are now in the process of hiring our first 100% faculty appointment and constructing a PhD program.

More to the point of this letter, however, our courses and the research of the faculty has also evolved. In addition to courses that focus on women in far flung fields across the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, from African and African American Studies to History to Theatre and Film, many of our classes focus on gender and sexuality studies. We offer our students courses in masculinity studies, human sexuality, and gender across cultures.

Gender Studies is a distinct field of research working with the tools of many disciplines including the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional fields, with its own scholarly community, theory, and literature, including journals and other standard hallmarks of the academic profession.

Gender Studies addresses such issues as femininity and masculinity; gender and the body; gender and culture; gender and knowledge; current and historical inquiries into the relationships between the sexes; gender and aesthetics; gender as an organizing factor on social, political and familial institutions and policy; gender role development and institutionalization; feminist theory; sexual orientation; sexual identity politics and history, queer theory, and lesbian cultural criticism and other interdisciplinary inquiries related to sex, gender, sexuality, reproduction, and feminist theory. It examines ideas of femininity and masculinity across cultures and historical periods and how these concepts are represented within cultures (e.g., literature, popular culture, the arts science, and medicine).

Likewise, sexuality studies is becoming a sub-field in its own right. One o our current faculty members (Charlene Muehlenhard, Psychology and Women's Studies) is an expert in the field of sexuality. Furthermore, we are beginning a Human Sexuality minor in our Program.

In addition to this compelling intellectual rationale for our name change, however, are two more practical concerns. First, many other institutions have changed their names from Women's Studies to other names such as Women and Gender Studies (University of Colorado), Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies (Yale University), Gender Studies (Indiana University), and Feminist Studies (Stanford University). While this growing diversity presents a difficulty for the field, we feel that it is time to change from Women's Studies to the name that best describes the combination of fields and interests of our faculty.

Second, we hope that by changing our name and thereby revealing our intentions and focus better, we will attract more male students to our major.

Yours,

Ann Cudd, Director

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program