PhD students at UC Berkeley may add a Designated Emphasis (DE) in Women, Gender, and Sexuality (DEWGS) to their major fields. Designed to enhance interdisciplinary graduate studies at Berkeley, the DEWGS provides curricular and research resources and opportunities to students who are already admitted to graduate degree programs on campus.
The designated emphasis program was developed to accommodate some of the many students who conduct graduate-level research in gender and/or sexuality-related topics across numerous fields. Administered by the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, the designated emphasis program provides its students with certification as well as with a context for the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and development of research.
To be admitted to the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality, an applicant must already be accepted into a PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley. For further information regarding admission to graduate programs at UC Berkeley, please see the Graduate Division's Admissions website.
Applicants for the DE will be selected according to their academic qualifications, the appropriateness of their interests to the program's teaching resources, and the enrollment capacity of its graduate seminars. Graduate students should apply in their third semester for admission to the program in their fourth semester. Students must apply before completing their qualifying examinations.
Materials should include four copies of the following:
A one-page statement of purpose which includes: your academic training in the field of Gender/Sexuality Studies, a short description of your dissertation project, and your stated interest in the DE.
One letter of recommendation from your home department faculty indicating readiness to complete the DE requirements (letter can be mailed under separate cover or emailed).
A gender/sexuality relevant writing sample (25 pages or less).
A curriculum vitae.
Deadline for spring admission: October 30 (If October 30 falls on a weekend, please submit materials the following Monday.)
Send all application materials to:
Director
DEWGS
c/o Gender & Women's Studies Department
608 Social Sciences Building
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-1070
One 200-level elective seminar in the Department of Gender & Women's Studies
Students may petition the DEWGS director to use a gender or sexuality-focused graduate course taught outside GWS to fulfill the elective requirement. That request must include a copy of the course syllabus and a cover letter indicating how that course was directly related to your studies in DEWGS (assigned readings, research focus, or paper completed). GWS 200 and GWS 220 can not be substituted by other classes.
Students admitted to the designated emphasis program should enroll in the required introductory seminar (GWS 200) offered the following spring if possible, and must complete that seminar before taking their qualifying exams. Students must fulfill the aforementioned requirements before completion of the degree.
Qualifying Examination
A member of the GWS department or its affiliated faculty must be on the qualifying examination committee; a topic on women, gender, and sexuality must be on the qualifying examination.
Dissertation
A member of the GWS department or its affiliated faculty must be on the dissertation committee.
Degree Conferral
The DE will be acknowledged solely in conjunction with the PhD in an established PhD program and will be signified by the transcript and diploma designation, “PhD in [major] with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality.” The GWS department also provides each DE graduate with a DEWGS medal at the GWS commencement ceremonies.
Teaching Opportunities
GWS provides GSI opportunities for DE Students to assist the instructor of record for:
Calls for applications go out every semester via the DE listserv, and all DE students are encouraged to apply.
Courses
Women, Gender and Sexuality
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course will provide an opportunity for the examination of diverse feminist theories produced in different disciplines and across disciplines. The course will ground contemporary philosophical and theoretical developments in the study of gender to specific histories of class, race, ethnicity, nation, and sexuality. Participants in the class will be urged to draw upon their own disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds and interests to produce multifaceted analyses of how feminist theory has acted to delimit the study of women in some instances as well as how it may be used critically and imaginatively to open the field in complex and dynamic ways. Graduate students research and write a substantial (25-50 page) paper for the course. They will also participate in organizing and leading class discussion on a rotating basis. Theory and Critical Research: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Consent of instructor, 104, or the equivalent
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 2-3 hours of seminar per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Gender and Women's Studies/Graduate
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
A cross-disciplinary examination of specific problems in the study of gender, women, and sexuality. Topics will vary; for example, representations of motherhood, women in the public sphere, work and gender, globalization of gender, and the history of sexuality. Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: 104 or equivalent and consent of instructor
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Gender and Women's Studies/Graduate
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Members of the seminar will present their ongoing dissertation research and mutually explore the interdisciplinary dimensions and implications of their work. Research Seminar: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Open to graduate students advanced to Ph.D. candidacy
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of seminar per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Gender and Women's Studies/Graduate
Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2012, Fall 2011
The aim of this course is to provide graduate students with an understanding of transnational feminist theories so that they may more effectively engage with this area of scholarship, but moreover so that they may critically and creatively contribute to it through their own writing. Transnational Feminist Theories: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Gender and Women's Studies/Graduate
Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Designed to encourage dialogue around themes related to transnational gender and women's studies, this proseminar is organized around colloquia, panels, and conferences sponsored by the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, the Beatrice Bain Research Group, the Center for Race and Gender, the Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, and (as relevant) other campus units. Proseminar in Transnational Gender and Women's Studies: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 1 hour of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Gender and Women's Studies/Graduate
Grading: Offered for satisfactory/unsatisfactory grade only.
Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course focuses on incorporating the analytic power of transnational feminist studies in academic reserch projects and practices. It examines the ways in which interdisciplinary and transnational approaches to gender and wormen replicate, challenge, reconfigure, and transform the emergence of new knowledge frames, analytics, and research practices. Students in this course will explore these and other questions in the context of their own research projects. Transnational Feminist Approaches to Knowledge Production: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Gender and Women's Studies/Graduate
Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2018
Capitalism is often seen as a system that overrides everything in its path. However, a closer look at its development suggests that it emerged and still operates within and in relation to gender and racial domination, reconstituting those meanings and systems in turn. In this seminar, we will investigate that imbrication, exploring the role and constitution of gender and race in ongoing primitive accumulation, in the labor of social reproduction, and in the unfolding of the neoliberal present. Over the course of the semester, we will explore exploitation’s ongoing operations amid a broad terrain of appropriation by other means. Capitalism, Gender and the Present Moment: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of seminar per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Gender and Women's Studies/Graduate
Terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2016, Fall 2013
This course will study debates around the notions of home, location, migrancy, mobility, and dislocation by focusing on issues of gender and sexuality. We will examine the ways in which various cultural flows have fundamentally challenged and changed the nature of global economy by expanding mobility of capital, labor, and systems of representations in a transnational context. We will also look at the impact of new technologies in production, distribution, communication, and circulation of cultural meanings and social identites by linking nationalism, immigration, diaspora, and globalization to the process of subject formation in a postcolonial context. Diaspora, Border, and Transnational Identities: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Gender and Women's Studies/Graduate
Terms offered: Spring 2010, Fall 2008
This is a core class of the new Ph.D in Transnational Gender and Women's Studies. It will expose students to critical thinking about science, technology, and new media. The class explores intersections of gender and women's studies with science, technology, engineering, medicine, and new media around the world; including women in science; transnational feminist science and technology studies; technologies of reproduction, production and destruction; divisions of scientific and technical labor; embodiment and subjectivity; digital divides, digital consumption, embodiment, and circulation; modernist projects of categorization; and the making and breaking of gendered bodies. It mixes secondary sources with primary sources, and among the primary sources, mixes scientific and technical documents with new media and the arts. Transnational Science, Technology, and New Media: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit without restriction.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Gender and Women's Studies/Graduate
Terms offered: Fall 2010
This course is divided into three sections, Theorists and Methods, The Sciences of Life, and Bio-and-Necro-politics, and within each section there are further thematic headings. The course serves both to introduce graduate students to science and technology studies and to introduce new works and directions in the field. The syllabus foregrounds the life and biomedical sciences, and thematizes space and trans-place, time and genealogy, disciplines and inter-disciplines, method and/as theory, identity and governance, ethics and objectivity, knowledge and stratification, security and transparency. Feminist Bio-Politics: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of seminar per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Gender and Women's Studies/Graduate
Terms offered: Fall 2020, Fall 2014, Fall 2010
This seminar aims for both a familiarization and a potential reworking of selected contemporary debates in queer theory: those concerning migration, race, globalization, and movements of theory. How do queer theories, queer theories-as-practice, queer practices travel? Furthermore, do critiques of stability found in queer theory invite presumptions of mobility? We will interrogate the shadow of "mobility" in queer theory by considering queer tourism, gender identity, sub-class labor migration, and the outer zones of citizenship. Queer Translation: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of seminar per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Gender and Women's Studies/Graduate
Terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020
For students engaged in individual research and study. May not be substituted for available graduate lecture courses. Individual Study and Research: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Consent of instructor
Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit without restriction.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 1-9 hours of independent study per week
Summer: 8 weeks - 1.5-17 hours of independent study per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Gender and Women's Studies/Graduate
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