About

Women sitting in a circle talking on the Tufts campus

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is an interdisciplinary program that focuses on research and teaching in three overlapping fields of inquiry. Scholarship in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies integrates knowledge and methodologies from many disciplines to analyze the various historical and political circumstances, social and economic forces, and cultural representations that shape gendered lives. It emphasizes the fundamental intersection of gender and sexuality with other crucial categories of human identity and experience, including race, ethnicity, and class. It explores the connections between the individual and institutional systems of power in local, national, and transnational contexts. It draws on the insights of feminist theory and practice and develops new modes of critical thought and new models for activism.

The Program offers a number of interdisciplinary courses, including introductory courses and special topics courses open to all undergraduates; in addition, it brings together a wide range of courses taught in different departments and programs, each contributing a unique approach to specific topics and materials within the broad and diverse study of women, gender, and sexuality.

Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies is dedicated to the scholarship and teaching in service of the struggle toward equity, safety, and justice for all people and our planet. We reaffirm our ongoing commitment to stand in solidarity with those targeted by forces of repression. We actively denounce homophobia, misogyny, racism, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and all other forms of hate and bigotry.

Director of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Sarah Luna

Kathryn A. McCarthy, J45, AG46 Assistant Professor in Women's Studies and Director of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Sex work, migration, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, borders, Mexico, United States My research focuses upon how the US/Mexico border is both productive of and made legible by socially meaningful forms of difference through categories such as gender, race, and sexuality. My first book, Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico-US Border, is based on twelve months of ethnographic research conducted from 2008 to 2009 in the Mexican border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas during the height of the drug war. My analysis of two groups of migrants – Mexican sex workers and the white American missionaries who seek to love them – reveals how both groups create value through relations of obligation and love. I am in the early stages of two research projects. The first examines gender and sexuality-based activism in Mexico City. The second is about gender and fitness culture in the United States.