Stephanie O'Hara, PhD

Basic concepts and perspectives in Women's Studies, placing women's experience at the center of interpretation. With focus on women's history and contemporary issues, the course examines women's lives with emphasis on how gender interacts with race, class, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. The central aim is to foster critical reading and thinking about women's lives: how the interlocking systems of oppression, colonialism, racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism shape women's lives; and how women have worked to resist these oppressions. This course satisfies a social science distribution requirement and the general education diversity requirement.

Contemporary feminist movement that reaches beyond the traditional goal of gender equality to include multiple intersecting categories such as race and class. Intersectional feminism is a theoretical lens for understanding how sexism, racism, and other oppressive frameworks, can overlap and affect people in multiple ways by reinforcing social inequalities and upholding systems of privilege.