Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (Taught)

The information provided on this page was correct at the time of publication (November 2024). For complete and up-to-date information about this course, please visit the relevant University of Oxford course page via www.graduate.ox.ac.uk/ucas.

The MSt in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is a nine-month, interdisciplinary course designed to equip you with the critical and research tools needed for women’s, gender and sexuality studies in the humanities.

The course provides a systematic introduction to feminist theory and highlights women's contribution to culture and history alongside critical analysis and theorisation of the meanings assigned to the category 'woman' in philosophical, literary, socio-cultural and historical thought.

It also provides the practical equipment necessary to engage in original research into topics in the humanities relating to women, gender and sexuality, in a university with excellent facilities for both traditional and computer-age research. Teaching is delivered through close individual supervision, as well as a carefully designed programme of lectures and classes led by specialists from a wide variety of disciplines, promoting collaborative work as well as the development of independent and original scholarship.

You will follow an intensive core course, in the form of seminars combining introductions to feminist theory and to methodologies/methods of research. In addition to this, you will take two options, drawn from a list covering a very wide range of topics.

The options allow deepening of skills acquired in a first degree or the development of new skills under specialist teaching, which can be further practised in the third assessed element of the course, a dissertation on a subject of your choice for which you will receive up to six contact hours from your dissertation supervisor. Please note that not every optional subject may be on offer every year, depending in part on levels of student demand.

Five faculties within the Humanities Division contribute option choices and supervision expertise to the degree: the Faculties of English Language and Literature, History, Classics, Philosophy and Medieval and Modern Languages. The option courses available change from year to year, but the following list is indicative of the types of topics which may be offered:

Feminist Perspectives on the Body
Women’s Intellectual History from 1850 to the present
Postcolonial Perspectives: Race and Gender in Brazil, Mozambique and Portugal
Fiction in English, 1789 to the Present: Gender and Race
20th and 21st Century Theatre
Feminism and/or Queer Theory
Feminism and Silence
Gender and Development
Feminist and Queer Theologies
Early “Feminisms”
Women and Classics
The Philosophy and Feminism of Simone de Beauvoir
Writing Women in the Middle Ages
Gendered Bodies in Visual Art and Culture
Crossing fiction and theory: African women writers and African feminism in conversation
Black Women in the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1600-1850
Philosophy of birth – When the uterus enters the door, reason goes out the window
‘Friendship as a Way of life’: kinship and the nature of queerness
The Sound of Black Feminist Thought
Nahda: Literature, modernity and institution-building in the Arabic 19th Century
Transgender Theory and Writing
Writing Illness in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature.
The programme does not formally involve departments within the Social Sciences Division but draws on the expertise of social scientists.

Whilst you are pursuing the MSt in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies you are also encouraged to go to lectures and seminars organised by individual faculties, which might help you to frame your immediate or future projects.

Further opportunities for exchange are provided by the interdisciplinary communities fostered within individual colleges. The Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities (TORCH) offers a stimulating range of interdisciplinary activities.