Academics

Staff at the Gender Equity Resource Center can support students to connect with advisors in the appropriate college for advising. 

Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures

The Center for the Study of Sexual Culture was founded in 2001 to support research and critical conversations concerning sexuality, sexual culture, and their mutually determining relationship to institutions, social practices and norms, and modes of representation. We understand sexuality to essentially inform diverse fields of social life, such as the state, the economy, civil society, family forms, social identity, and the cultural modes of representation. We draw from a broad field of scholarship in which sexuality is found to participate in discussions as far-reaching as: reproductive control and rights, heredity, marriage, nationalism, welfare systems, property, adoption, animal ethnographies, colonial imaginaries and administrations, performance, language norms, gendered ways and styles, disability politics and culture, visual cultures, materialities, and more.

Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality (DEWGS)

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. Administered by the Department of Gender & Women's Studies and its affiliated faculty, the DEWGS provides its students with certification as well as with a context for the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and development of research.

LGBT Studies Minor

UC Berkeley offers a LGBT Minor that is administered by the Gender and Women’s Studies Department.  The LGBT minor includes 4 required courses and 2 electives. Issues related to transgender populations and transgender theory are integral to all of the required courses but the extent to which these issues appear differs from instructor to instructor. However, as part of the syllabus review process, the GWS Vice Chair of Pedagogy reviews and approves all the course syllabi in an attempt to ensure that material on transgender theory and/or populations, and other relevant material, is adequately addressed in all of the required classes for the LGBT Minor. Many of these courses have more generic titles, for example Cultural Representations of Sexualities: Queer Literary Culture, or Alternative Sexual Identities and Communities in Contemporary American Society but individual instructors can and often do, select a specific focus, and in the past that has at times included a specifically Transgender focus.  For example the Queer Literary Culture class has been taught on several occasions with a focus on Butch/Femme/Trans Narratives.  On occasion, mostly dependent on Instructor availability and funding, the GWS department has offered specific courses more specifically aligned with Transgender Studies, but these course offerings are not always available.  One summer for example we offered Beyond Male and Female: Intersex, Transgender and Transsexual Bodies and Identities.

Other courses not specific to the LGBT Minor, but offered through the GWS department very often include significant curricular material on transgender theory and/or transgender populations. More general critiques of the gender binary, which often include significant discussion of transgender issues, are integrated into several required GWS classes and are considered core learning objectives for the department as a whole.

LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 (Archives of Human Sexuality and Identity)

With material drawn from hundreds of institutions and organizations, including both major international activist organizations and local, grassroots groups, the documents in the Archives of Human Sexuality and Identity: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 present important aspects of LGBTQ life in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. The archive illuminates the experiences not just of the LGBTQ community as a whole, but of individuals of different races, ethnicities, ages, religions, political orientations, and geographical locations that constitute this community. Historical records of political and social organizations founded by LGBTQ individuals are featured, as well as publications by and for lesbians and gays, and extensive coverage of governmental responses to the AIDS crisis. The archive also contains personal correspondence and interviews with numerous LGBTQ individuals, among others. The archive includes gay and lesbian newspapers from more than 35 countries, reports, policy statements, and other documents related to gay rights and health, including the worldwide impact of AIDS, materials tracing LGBTQ activism in Britain from 1950 through 1980, and more.