Queer Studies

The Queer Studies Program at CSUN began offering classes in the Fall of 2008.

Housed in the College of Humanities, QS is an interdisciplinary minor that questions normative constructions of sexuality and gender.

The Queer Studies minor focuses on histories, contemporary experiences, and community-based knowledges of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people, intersexed people, queers, and others who occupy non-heterosexist and non-normative gender positionalities.

The program explores how heterosexism, heteronormativity and transphobia intersect and collide with national, ethnic, racial, class and other identifications, fostering a community of learners who grapple with issues of diversity, gender, sexuality and social justice.

QS at CSUN provides an academic home for those who wish to study the intellectual, cultural and material conditions that have shaped our current understandings of sexuality and gender variation as well as for those who wish to generate new, resistant theories and practices. The program offers an undergraduate minor, sponsors courses, organizes lecture series, and brings together interested students, faculty, and larger Los Angeles communities.

The Queer Studies Program has the following student learning outcomes. Minors in the program will:

• Explore and value the diversities of cultures, thought, perspectives, and literatures of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexed, and queer people and communities, and explore and value the ways in which ethnicity/race, gender (understood here in terms of the different contrasts between women and men, and between non-normatively gendered and normatively gendered people), and socioeconomic class shape the diversities of cultures, thought, perspectives, and literatures of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexed, and queer people and communities;
• Critically reflect on and analyze multiple dimensions of human identity and experience that are shaped by sexuality and gender (understood here in terms of a contrast not between women and men but between non-normatively gendered people and normatively gendered people);
• Contribute to scholarship and creative production and innovation in the interdisciplinary field of queer studies and closely related fields such as transgender studies; and,
• Act as responsible global citizens committed to principles of freedom, equality, justice and participatory democracy in ways that value fully lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexed, and queer people and communities.