Women’s Studies

Rebecca S. Dixon, Ph.D. (Coordinator)
121 Humanities Building
Telephone: 615-963-5728

Faculty: J. Anderson, S. Browne, R. Dixon, J. Hayes, G. Johnson, and S. Morgan-Curtis

General Statement

The Minor in Women’s Studies is open to any degree-seeking student at Tennessee State University. The Women’s Studies Minor at Tennessee State University seeks to develop, enhance, and strengthen the University’s general education program by providing an organizational structure for the focused study of women as serious academic inquiry. An 18-hour undergraduate minor, the Women’s Studies Program brings together and integrates courses from across many departments of the University that explore issues of gender, sexuality, and inequality through examinations of the lives of women, the work of women, and the social representations of women, in contemporary and historical contexts, around the globe and within the U.S., and across differing races, ethnicities, classes, and social groups. The Women’s Studies Program is expressly multidisciplinary and interdepartmental, and its purpose is to provide a framework for new scholarship about women-multiculturally, multidimensionally, and multinational. Within a University community richly diverse in gender, age, race, nationality, ethnicity, faith, economic structures, and sexual orientation, the Women’s Studies program provides another forum for students to consider the social construction of difference through analyses of literature, the arts, the media, social theory, histories, and cultures. The Women’s Studies Program at TSU promotes integrative thinking, reevaluation, and new ideas about women, as a local contribution toward expanded global understanding and respect for women.

Participating students may major in any area or program leading to a bachelor’s degree at the University while taking the minor (18 semester hours).

The goal of the Women’s Studies minor is to enhance students’ understanding of the complexity of our shared world through the analysis of the construction of gender identities. The students as citizens and educated members/leaders of their communities and the world need to know and appreciate their own gendered human cultural heritage and its development in historical and global contexts. Because of its implicit multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach, the Women’s Studies Program borrows substantively from all fields of study, and Women’s Studies paradigms will concomitantly serve to strengthen both the investigations and goals of students’ major fields of study and their materials, and to deepen the students’ appreciations of their own major fields.