Gender Studies Program

Gender Studies Program

 The mission of the Gender Studies Program is inspired by John Jay College’s core mission, “Educating for Justice.” 

 

Artistic representation of black feminist abolitionist scholar Angela Davis

Gender Studies majors and minors learn how to advance knowledge about the social construction of gender as it intersects with sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and other aspects of self. Learn how power, privilege, and identity shape your everyday experiences. Learn how the idea of gender itself structures inequality relationally and socially, locally and transnationally. Learn how feminists have changed the world and continue to do so! Learning feminist and LGBTQ+ theories, methodologies, and ways-of-knowing provides you the tools needed to identify systemic oppression and, importantly, the socio-historical methods of disrupting systemic oppression, including demands for representation and inclusion.
 
Intersectional feminist thought, like Indigenous feminisms, Black womanism, Black feminisms, Chicana & Latinx feminisms, are emphasized. The program offers two academic programs of study:
 
 
Becuase we are a Program and not a Department, faculty from across JJC teach feminist critical thought around the gendering of everyday life, developing students into "fierce advocates for justice," our JJC motto. We do so in service of a vision of emancipatory educational liberation and justice, in support of JJC’s status as a federally recognized Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI).
 
Gender Studies provides students with an understanding of the social, historical, political, cultural, and socio-legal forces that have long inhibited the attainment of justice and equality for cisgender women, transgender women and men, non-binary people, and LGBQ+ people. Our courses question the gender binary and the normalization of straightness via intersectional examinations of how identity and inequality mutually reinforce each other. 
 
The Gender Studies Program mission is to be imaginative and aspirational in service of teaching and scholarship that are intersectional, feminist, transnational, decolonial, and anti-racist. 
 
Please contact Gender Studies Director Olivera Jokić with questions or for advisement: ojokic@jjay.cuny.edu.

 

Full-time faculty are welcome to explore the Gender Studies Program Bylaws to learn how to serve as Director or member of the GSP Committee. Any faculty member interested in teaching GEN 101: Introduction to Gender Studies or any other  GEN, please contact the Director. We welcome faculty from across discliplines! 

 

SPECIAL TOPIC COURSES IN GENDER STUDIES (GEN 380)
Fall 2023: 
Prof. Mark McBeth, English Department
 
Reading and Writing Queer Worlds
 Have you ever considered how your abilities to read, write, listen, speak, research, and critique the world have shaped you and the world in which you live? In this course, Reading and Writing Queer Worlds, we will examine how public forces that “sponsor” literacy—such as parents, teachers, religious leaders, and legislators—have affected the literacies of the LGBTQ+ community, and how queer readers and writers have responded to their training in heteronormative/homophobic situations.  

Many marginalized people’s reading and writing have been systemically restricted by institutionally imposed (and often unspoken) regulations: Jim Crow laws, English-only statutes, bathroom legislation, immigration policies, and educational gag orders have all over-determined how people read, write, think, research, and critically identify and express themselves. Yet there is another subversive side of that literate narrative and discourse. Colonial subjects have used literacy aptitudes to resist occupation. African-Americans have used it to countervail racist oppression. Queers have used it to confront and upend homophobia and heteronormativity. Students have used it to challenge inequitable educational positions and policies.  Literacy can be weaponized, but it can also be disarmed. 
 
This hybrid course challenges you to locate your own position as a literate person and investigate what has shaped your literacy acquisition, your critical comprehensions, and your expressive approach to the world. Your personal narrative becomes a point of departure for more in-depth research about literacy, learning, and language that we use in thinking about gender and sexuality.

GEN380 Class

 

Award for Student Work on Gender and Sexuality
Gender Studies Program invites undergraduates in all majors to send us their submissions for our first Award for Student Work on Gender and Sexuality!

Work in any major, discipline, or genre done for a course in academic year 2022-23 is eligible. Selected winner(s) will receive a small stipend as part of the Award.
Send your submissions to GSPAward@jjay.cuny.edu by May 5, 2023.
 

Award for Student Work on Gender and Sexuality Poster