Gender Studies Program

Gender Studies majors learn why study of gender is central to fierce advocacy for justice. Gender is a fundamental organizing principle of human lives throughout the world. Gender Studies examines the way ideas about gender norms and expectations shape our lives, why they are taken to be 'natural,' how they think in binary terms ('men' and 'women'), and why these traditions have been oppressive and related to other forms of injustice. Gender Studies is an intersectional, transnational, decolonial, and anti-racist field of study committed to disrupting such systemic oppressions. John Jay College is a minority-serving public institution of higher education at the City University of New York--a perfect place to study the complexities of gender from intersectional perspectives. 

Our courses question the gender binary, normalization of straightness, and the social, historical, political, cultural, economic, and legal forces that have long inhibited the attainment of justice and equality for transgender women and men, people who non-binary and gender expansive, cisgender women, and LGBQ+ people. We study how experience of gender varies as it intersects with sexuality, race, ethnicity, and citizenship status, and how it has been studied from different feminist and queer perspectives, including Black feminism, Chicana feminism, transnational feminism, Asian American feminism, trans studies, jotería studies, etc.

Studying Gender Studies will help you develop your own critical, imaginative, and active approaches to problem solving, research, data collection, and clear expression, including writing.

If you have questions about the Gender Studies Program, the major or the minor, or if you need advisement, please contact Gender Studies Director Olivera Jokić at ojokic@jjay.cuny.edu.