Exploring the UCLA Gender Studies Program: A Comprehensive Overview

Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analyzing gender identity and gendered representation. The UCLA Gender Studies program, located in the Division of Social Sciences in UCLA’s College of Letters and Science, offers students a quality education that emphasizes analytic and writing skills, qualitative research methods, and a historical and transnational understanding of social inequalities. This article provides an overview of the UCLA Gender Studies program, including its curriculum, faculty, research centers, and application process.

What is Gender Studies?

Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the complex interaction of gender, race, class, and sexuality in social relations, institutions, and systems. It originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field now overlaps with queer studies and men's studies. Gender is pertinent to many disciplines, such as literary theory, drama studies, film theory, performance theory, contemporary art history, anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics, and psychology. These disciplines sometimes differ in their approaches to how and why gender is studied.

The UCLA Gender Studies Department

The UCLA Gender Studies Department is home to the College’s largest interdisciplinary faculty and one of the first Ph.D. programs in the field globally. With nineteen core faculty and fourteen joint faculty engaged in feminist research spanning multiple disciplines, the department maintains widespread connections and collaborations across the campus and the UC system. Complementary to their work in Gender Studies, the core faculty administer allied units and centers at UCLA, including the Center for the Study of Women/Barbra Streisand Center, the American Indian Studies Center, the Master of Social Sciences Program, the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, the Center on Race & Digital Justice, DataX, and the Racial Violence Hub.

Curriculum and Courses

The UCLA Gender Studies Department offers multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate degrees that foster critical scholarship from diverse intellectual fields in the humanities and social sciences. The interdisciplinary curriculum offers students perspectives on the complex interaction of gender, race, class, and sexuality in social relations, institutions, and systems worldwide.

The department offers a range of courses, from large lecture courses like the introductory Gender Studies 10 to small, student research-based senior seminars like GS187. Popular undergrad courses focus on sexuality, racial and colonial violence, mass incarceration, and disability rights.

Core Courses

The core courses examine theories and analytical concepts in the context of the historical periods and social movements from which ideas emerge. Students must complete GS 10 prior to enrolling in a core course. The core courses include:

GS 102: Power (4 units): This course considers how feminist social movements have identified and challenged gender-based subordination, and the ways feminist theorists have conceived and critiqued traditional theories of power. Questions to be considered include: How have women’s and other social movements defined and challenged social, political and economic subordination? How have feminist theorists addressed the subject of power? How do empire, colonialism, liberalism, neoliberalism, and globalization produce distinctive forms of gendered violence, gendered mobilities, gendered knowledge, and gendered subjectivities?
GS 103: Knowledge (4 units): This course explores the social production of knowledge about gendered subjects and gender systems. Students will engage key issues in feminist theory and feminist epistemology. How do feminist scholars identify and frame research questions? How is knowledge about marginalized subjects produced? How has feminism challenged dominant understandings of knowledge, rationality, objectivity, and scientific method?
GS 104: Bodies (4 units): This course explores scholarly theories and histories of the body, focusing on topics including sex identities, sexuality, gendered violence, and reproductive politics. Questions to be considered include: How has science, medicine, and culture sought to distinguish “male” from “female” in different historical periods and locations? How have the meanings of the terms “sex” and “gender” varied across time and place? How has the gendered body been represented in different visual cultures? How have embodied identities been produced in different historical and geographic contexts?

Other Courses

The department offers a variety of other courses, including:

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GS 10
GS 125
GS 129
GS 130
GS 131
GS 134
GS 138
GS 142
GS 145
GS 153
GS 171A
GS 185
GS 187
GS 195
GS 197
GS 198A-198B-198C
GS 199

The department also offers a variety of cross-listed courses with other departments, including:

Afro-Am/Gender M109
Afro-Am/Gender M172
Anthro/Gender M151
Anthro/Gender M154P
Anthro/Gender M154Q
Anthro/Gender M155
Anthro/Gender M155Q
Art His 110J
Asia Am/Gender M164
Chicano M110/Gender M132A
Chicano M154/Gender M132B
Chicano/Gender M133
Chicano M135/Gender M135C
Chicano/Gender M144
Chicano M147/Gender M147C
Chicano M158/Gender M157
Classic 169
Comm St/Gender M149
Com Lit/Gender CM170 CM170
Dis Std/Gender M121
Educ147
Educ/Gender M148
Educ/Gender CM178
Educ/Gender CM178L
Engl M101A/Gender M105A
Engl M101B/Gender M105B
Engl M101C/Gender M105C
Engl M101D/Gender M105D
Engl/Gender M107A
Engl/Gender M107B
Engl/Gender M126
Engl/Gender M191D
Engl/Gender M191E
Ethnomu/Gender M109
Film TV/Gender M111
Geog/Gender M146
Grntlgy/Gender M104C
Hist/Gender M133A-M133B
Hist/Gender M133C
Hist M147C/Gender M147B
Hist/Gender M147D
Hist M151D/Gender M157
Hist/Gender M173B
Hist/Gender M180B
Hist M187A/Gender M186A
Hnrs/Gender M106
Lbr&WS/Gender M114
Lbr&WS/Gender M149
German M107/Gender M108
German M105/Gender M119
Russian M127/Gender M127
French/Gender M140
Italian/GenderM 158
Scandinavian CM144A/Gender M186
LGBTS M101A/Gender M105A
LGBTS M101B/Gender M105B
LGBTS M101C/Gender M105C
LGBTS M101D/Gender M105D
LGBTS/Gender M107B
LGBTS/Gender M114
LGBTS/Gender M115
LGBTS/Gender M116
LGBTS/Gender M118
LGBTS/Gender M126
LGBTS/Gender M133
LGBTS/Gender M147A
LGBTS/Gender M167
LGBTS/Gender M191D
LGBTS/Gender M191E
Mus Hst/Gender M136
Philos M187/Gender M110C
Pol Sci M107/Gender M117
Psych/Gender M137E
Psych/Gender M147A
Psych/Gender M165
Pysch/Gender M172
Soc Wlf/Gender M104C
Sociol/Gender M162
Sociol/Gender M163
Sociol/Gender M164
Sociol/Gender M166
Sociol/Gender M174
Urbn Pl/Gender M175
WL Arts CM140/Gender CM143

Degree Programs

The Gender Studies department offers both undergraduate and graduate degree programs.

Undergraduate Programs

The Gender Studies major is open to all UCLA undergraduates. Students must take all courses for a letter grade and maintain an overall grade-point average of 2.0 or better. Students meet with the Gender Studies undergraduate counselor to review the requirements, complete the registration and petition forms, and plan their course of study. Students are required to have completed all three core courses prior to enrolling in the research seminar.

The Gender Studies minor is open to all undergraduates in the College of Letters and Science; students in other Schools may petition. All courses must be taken for a letter grade. A grade of “C” or better is required for all preparation courses and core courses; courses for which a grade of “C-” or lower is earned will not count. Students meet with the Gender Studies undergraduate counselor to review the requirements, to complete the registration and petition forms, and to plan their course of study.

Graduate Programs

The UCLA Gender Studies Ph.D. Program is designed for students preparing to work in the intellectually rigorous atmosphere of post-secondary teaching and research. All individuals with a BA degree or equivalent are eligible for admission to the Gender Studies Graduate Program. Admission to the Ph.D. Program is based upon intellectual ability, past performance and, most importantly, the fit between the Gender Studies graduate program and the candidate’s personal and professional goals.

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To apply for the Concentration, you must be a graduate student enrolled in another UCLA department, program or professional school.

Application Process

For Fall 2025 admission, the deadline for application to the Ph.D. Program is December 12, 2024. Applications should be submitted through the UCLA Graduate Division. All applications to the Ph.D. Program are reviewed by the Gender Studies Department admissions committee. The committee considers the following factors: letters of recommendation from the applicant’s former or current professors and/or supervisors or colleagues; undergraduate/MA grade point average. Please identify any UCLA faculty members you are interested in working with in your Gender Studies supplementary essay.

Research Centers

The Gender Studies Department houses several research centers, including:

The Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2): C2i2 is a critical internet studies community committed to reimagining technology, championing social justice, and strengthening human rights through research, culture, and public policy.
The Racial Violence Hub: The Racial Violence Hub creates a virtual community of feminist critical race scholars, artists, activists, and organizations working on issues of racial violence and the state. The Hub’s goal is to foster research, develop critical pedagogies and share resources for anti-violence practices around state violence against Indigenous and racialized peoples. Race and Deaths in Custody contains case studies of Indigenous, Black and racialized peoples who have died in state custody in countries of the global North. The Hub analyzes these deaths in custody to reveal their racial underpinnings, hoping that in building this archive, they become better able to develop a critical race and feminist analysis to sustain political anti-violence projects.

Transnational Feminist Analysis

A transnational feminist analysis attends to global circuits of power and investigates imperialism, colonialism, racial capitalism, and histories of genocide and slavery. The term transnational feminist draws attention to the Global South, often overlooked in liberal feminist approaches, and includes a consideration of newer forms of globalization.

Queer and Trans Studies

Queer and Trans Studies is an interdisciplinary field, emergent since the late 1980s. The focus in the field is on the history and diversity of genders and sexualities with specific attention on the LGBTQ population.

Critical Race Feminism

Critical race feminism, like critical race theory more broadly, interrogates race, gender, class, and sexuality through a lens of racial justice. The department is home to the Racial Violence Hub. The Racial Violence Hub creates a virtual community of feminist critical race scholars, artists, activists, and organizations working on issues of racial violence and the state.

Feminist Theory and Psychoanalysis

A number of theorists have influenced the field of gender studies significantly, specifically in terms of psychoanalytic theory. Among these are Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Bracha L. Ettinger. Gender studied under the lens of each of these theorists looks somewhat different. In a Freudian system, women are "mutilated and must learn to accept their lack of a penis" (in Freud's terms a "deformity"). Lacan, however, organizes femininity and masculinity according to different unconscious structures. Both male and female subjects participate in the "phallic" organization, and the feminine side of sexuation is "supplementary" and not opposite or complementary. Lacan uses the concept of sexuation (sexual situation), which posits the development of gender-roles and role-play in childhood, to counter the idea that gender identity is innate or biologically determined. Kristeva contends that patriarchal cultures, like individuals, have to exclude the maternal and the feminine so that they can come into being. Bracha L. Ettinger transformed subjectivity in contemporary psychoanalysis since the early 1990s with the Matrixial feminine-maternal and prematernal Eros of borderlinking (bordureliance), borderspacing (bordurespacement) and co-emergence. The matrixial feminine difference defines a particular gaze and it is a source for trans-subjectivity and transjectivity in both males and females.

Feminist theorists such as Juliet Mitchell, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, Jane Gallop, Bracha L. Ettinger, Shoshana Felman, Griselda Pollock, Luce Irigaray and Jane Flax have developed Feminist psychoanalysis and argued that psychoanalytic theory is vital to the feminist project and must, like other theoretical traditions, be criticized by women as well as transformed to free it from vestiges of sexism (i.e., being censored). Critics such as Elizabeth Grosz accuse Jacques Lacan of maintaining a sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. Others, such as Judith Butler, Bracha L. Ettinger and Jane Gallop have used Lacanian work, though in a critical way, to develop gender studies.

Psychoanalytically oriented French feminism focused on visual and literary theory all along.

Post-Modernism and Gender Studies

The emergence of post-modernism theories affected gender studies, causing a movement in identity theories away from the concept of fixed or essentialist gender identity, to post-modern fluid or multiple identities. The impact of post-structuralism, and its literary theory aspect post-modernism, on gender studies was most prominent in its challenge of grand narratives.

In addition to the expansion to include sexuality studies, under the influence of post-modernism gender studies has also turned its lens toward masculinity studies, due to the work of sociologists and theorists such as R. W. Connell, Michael Kimmel, and E. Anthony Rotundo. These changes and expansions have led to some contentions within the field, such as the one between second wave feminists and queer theorists. The line drawn between these two camps lies in the problem as feminists see it of queer theorists arguing that everything is fragmented and there are not only no grand narratives but also no trends or categories. Feminists argue that this erases the categories of gender altogether but does nothing to antagonize the power dynamics reified by gender.

History of Gender Studies

The history of gender studies looks at the different perspectives of gender. This discipline examines the ways in which historical, cultural, and social events shape the role of gender in different societies.

After the universal suffrage revolution of the twentieth century, the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s promoted a revision from the feminists to "actively interrogate" the usual and accepted versions of history as it was known at the time. It was the goal of many feminist scholars to question original assumptions regarding women's and men's attributes, to actually measure them, and to report observed differences between women and men.

Initially, these programs were essentially feminist, designed to recognize contributions made by women as well as by men. Soon, men began to look at masculinity the same way that women were looking at femininity, and developed an area of study called "men's studies". It was not until the late 1980s and 1990s that scholars recognized a need for study in the field of sexuality.

Men's Studies

Men's studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to topics concerning men, gender, and politics. It often includes feminist theory, men's history and social history, men's fiction, men's health, feminist psychoanalysis and the feminist and gender studies-influenced practice of most of the humanities and social sciences. Within studies on men, it is important to distinguish the specific approach often defined as Critical Studies on Men. This approach was largely developed in the anglophone countries from the early 1980s - especially in the United Kingdom - centred then around the work of Jeff Hearn, David Morgan and colleagues. The influence of the approach has spread globally since then.

Gender Issues in Eastern Asia and the Pacific Region

Certain issues associated with gender in Eastern Asia and the Pacific Region are more complex and depend on location and context. For example, in China, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia, a heavy importance of what defines a woman comes from the workforce. Places such as India and Polynesia have widely identified third-gender categories. For example, the hijra/kinnar/kinner people of India are often regarded as being a third-gender. Hijra is often considered an offensive term, so the terms kinnar & kinner are often used for these individuals. In places such as India and Pakistan, these individuals face higher rates of HIV infection, depression, and homelessness. Polynesian languages are also consistent with the idea of a third-gender or non-binary gender. The Samoan term fa'afafine, meaning "in the manner of a woman", is used to refer to a third-gender/non-binary role in society.

One issue that remains consistent throughout all provinces in different stages of development is women having a weak voice when it comes to decision-making. East Asia Pacific's approach to help mainstream these issues of gender relies on a three-pillar method. Pillar one is partnering with middle-income countries and emerging middle-income countries to sustain and share gains in growth and prosperity. Pillar two supports the developmental underpinnings for peace, renewed growth and poverty reduction in the poorest and most fragile areas. The final pillar provides a stage for knowledge management, exchange and dissemination on gender responsive development within the region to begin. These programs have already been established, and successful in, Vietnam, Thailand, China, as well as the Philippines, and efforts are starting to be made in Laos, Papua New Guinea, and Timor-Leste as well.

Gender Performativity

Philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler's work Gender Trouble discussed gender performativity. In Butler's terms the performance of gender, sex, and sexuality is about power in society. They locate the construction of the "gendered, sexed, desiring subject" in "regulative discourses". A part of Butler's argument concerns the role of sex in the construction of "natural" or coherent gender and sexuality. In their account, gender and heterosexuality are constructed as natural because the opposition of the male and female sexes is perceived as natural in the social imaginary.

"Men's and Women's Beliefs About Gender and Sexuality" is an article written by authors Emily Kane and Mimi Schippers, which explicitly focuses on the social construct of social opposition between men and women. Parallel to Butler's argument, this article also argues that gender is constructed as "natural" within our society when in reality it contains arbitrary aspects.

Criticisms of Gender Studies

Historian and theorist Bryan Palmer argues that gender studies' current reliance on post-structuralism - with its reification of discourse and avoidance of the structures of oppression and struggles of resistance - obscures the origins, meanings, and consequences of historical events and processes, and he seeks to counter current trends in gender studies with an argument for the necessity to analyze lived experiences and the structures of subordination and power.

Psychologist Debra W. Soh postulates that gender studies is composed of dubious scholarship, that it is an unscientific ideology, and that it causes needless disruption in the lives of children.

Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti has criticized gender studies as "the take-over of the feminist agenda by studies on masculinity, which results in transferring funding from feminist faculty positions to other kinds of positions. There have been cases… of positions advertised as 'gender studies' being given away to the 'bright boys'. Some of the competitive take-over has to do with gay studies.

Gender Studies Around the World

In Russia, gender studies is currently tolerated; however, state-supported practices follow the traditional gender perspectives of those in power. Gender studies programs were banned in Hungary in October 2018. The Central People's Government supports studies of gender and social development of gender in history and practices that lead to gender equality. The United States currently allows academic institutions to offer courses in gender and sexuality studies, women's studies, feminist studies, queer studies and LGBT studies.

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