What is Women's Studies?

Women’s Studies is where you get the chance to indulge in some serious thinking about the meanings of gender and sexuality in contemporary culture and its historic precedents.

At the University of Western Australia, Women’s Studies is taught through an engagement with contemporary cultural forms, like city precincts, cyberspace and shopping malls, and also more traditional texts like books, cinema and advertising. It engages with ideas about who gets to do what in ‘public’ spaces, the architecture of living arrangements, technologies of the home and the internet, the limits of language and the plasticity of the body, and postmodern relations between work and play. It is concerned with masculinity and feminism, straight and queer thinking, and the relations between knowledge production and consumption. It particularly focusses on the intersecting meanings of gender, race and class. While it ranges over disciplines and nations, times and cultures, Women's Studies at UWA is conscious of its location in postcolonial Australia and twentyfirst century metropolitan Perth.

Women’s studies adds a valuable perspective to any field of study or work portfolio, providing skills in

• the critical analysis of power relations,
• theories and practise in cooperative teamwork and collaborative research, and
• a compelling experience of everyday practices offering material for ongoing independent learning.

Undergraduate units
Postgraduate study
Staff