Welcome to Women’s and Gender Studies
Women’s and Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary program that explores gender and sexual diversity, masculinities and queer studies, practices of representation and cultural production, popular culture, and critical transnational feminisms.
Drawing on innovative conceptual frameworks and interdisciplinary methodologies, our undergraduate curriculum addresses intersections of embodiment, identity, community and knowledge politics in arenas that span the intimate and the international. Engaging the everyday worlds that we inherit and inhabit, the program provides critical tools that help students re-imagine more inclusive processes for creative, social and political change.
News and Events
Consent Fest, May 28th, Saskatoon
Rainbow Explorations and The New Feminist Research Lecture Series Present:
By Jasmine Rault
Friday, April 1 2011
Room 18 - Goodwill Theatre
Edwards School of Business
4:30-6pm
Reception to follow at Louis' Pub.
Jasmine Rault is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at McMaster University. She is currently working on her second book, provisionally entitled, /Transnational Mediations of Feminist and Queer Affect: The Arts of Activism in the Americas. /Her first book, /Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In/ is published with Ashgate Press and will be available by June 2011.
Abstract: This talk will explore the role of positive affect in contemporary feminist and queer scholarship, cultural production and
political activism in the hemispheric Americas. Recent scholarship in feminist and queer theory, based largely in and on the United States, has invested primarily in negative affect, casting positive affect as delusional or hegemonic. Looking beyond the historical, cultural and epistemic context of the U.S. allows us to recognize that illicitly utopic feelings like thrill and euphoria are important affective media of communication for feminist queer political and cultural work throughout the Americas.
The New Feminist Research Lecture Series is hosted by the Women's& Gender Studies Program and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture& Creativity. This series aims to raise the profile of feminist research at the University of Saskatchewan and to showcase the work of dynamic early-career (pre-tenure) scholars in WGST and its related fields. This series also seeks to foster connections within the various feminist communities at the University of Saskatchewan, and to support the development of feminist research in Canada.
This lecture has been generously sponsored by the Role Models Speakers Fund.
For more information, please contact T.L. Cowan, Assistant Professor Women's & Gender Studies and English: tl.cowan@usask.ca
The Obituary: A reading by Gail Scott
Wednesday Jan 26th 2011
New Feminist Research Lecture Series
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Lecture 7pm, Wine & Cheese Reception to follow
Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
Room 191, Murray Building
University of Saskatchewan
Dr. Ilya Parkins
University of British Columbia, Okanagan
"Timing Femininity in Christian Dior’s Self-Fashioning"
Drawing on contemporary feminist theory, modernist cultural criticism,
and theories of nostalgia, Ilya Parkins reads Christian Dior’s
autobiographical writing and other self-representations as this fashion
legend’s relational forging of a self through others. Parkins argues
that Dior’s self-narration occurs through the feminine: both living
women and an iconic, figural femininity. For Dior the nostalgic subject,
women become the bearer of the wished-for past, but they do so in a
domain, fashion, that is perpetuated through its relationship to the
present and the future. The temporal burden that Dior’s
self-representation places on women foregrounds the foundational
question of modern fashion in the twentieth century, one that haunts
Dior’s work and his self-conception: the conflict between art and
industry. Women, thoroughly present and visible in Dior’s
self-representation, thus paradoxically establish its central narrative
as the masculine subject’s anguished relationship with industrial modernity.
Ilya Parkins is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of
Women's& Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia,
Okanagan. She is the co-editor (with Elizabeth M. Sheehan) of _Cultures
of Femininity in Modern Fashion_, forthcoming from University Press of
New England in 2011, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on
feminist social and cultural theory, fashion and dress, and theories of
modernity.
The New Feminist Research Lecture Series is hosted by the Women's&
Gender Studies Program and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture&
Creativity. This series aims to raise the profile of feminist research
at the University of Saskatchewan and to showcase the work of dynamic
early-career (pre-tenure) scholars in WGST and its related fields. This
series also seeks to foster connections within the various feminist
communities at the University of Saskatchewan, and to support the
development of feminist research in Canada.
This Lecture has been generously supported by the President's Advisory
Committee on the Status of Women& the USSU Women's Centre.
For more information, please contact T.L. Cowan, Assistant Professor
Women's& Gender Studies and English: tl.cowan@usask.ca
New Course
WGST 409.3 Understanding Western Patriarchy.
On Campus News, April 23, 2010
WGST moves to Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity.
“All growth requires risk,” said Marie Lovrod, a faculty member in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, but the upcoming move of the department’s program into the College of Arts and Science’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity (ICCC) appears to be a risk with more up side than down.
