Courses in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies are offered every spring and fall semester at Penn State Altoona. The eighteen-credit Women’s Studies minor, which is available at Penn State Altoona, enriches study in many majors, including human development, political science, criminal justice, communications, theatre, English, engineering, and the natural sciences. The minor provides students with a competitive edge in their professional lives.
It is also possible to design a Women’s Studies/Gender Studies or Diversity Studies major at Penn State Altoona through the Multidisciplinary Studies program. Contact Dr. Leigh Ann Haefner at [email protected] for information about Multidisciplinary Studies. Research with productive faculty can be done at our college.
Graduates with degrees in Women’s Studies attend top-tier professional, law, and graduate schools. They have careers in professional fields as diverse as legal advocacy, counseling, public relations, journalism, management, non-profit administration, teaching, medicine, politics, and government.
Contact Dr. Brooke Findley at [email protected] if you are minoring in Women’s Studies to ensure courses are going into the right places on your Academic Requirements Report in LionPATH.
Spring 2025 Courses
WMNST 100: Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies
Dr. Freyca Calderon Berumen
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:35–2:50 p.m.
This course offers an introduction to some of the basic concepts and theoretical perspectives in Women's and Gender Studies, focused on shared experiences, issues of gender roles and stereotyping, questions related to sex/gender systems, and examining what constitutes the interdisciplinary academic field that explores critical questions about the meaning of gender in society.
Drawing on disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural studies, the purpose of this course is to engage students with key issues, roles, questions, arguments, and disputes in Women's and Gender Studies scholarship, both historical and contemporary. Women's and Gender scholarship critically analyzes themes of gendered performance and how are they influenced and shaped by culture, education, media, and other social institutions, such as gender inequities, sexuality, families, work, media images, queer issues, masculinity, reproductive rights, and history; specially through systems of oppression. (GS, US, IL)
WMNST/HIST 117: Women in US History
Dr. Lindsay Keiter
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 1:25–2:15 p.m.
What has it meant to be a woman, and how has that changed over the past four centuries? This class explores how gender shaped individual and group experiences from the 17th century through today. Students will apply historical analysis to consider women not as a monolith, but as people with complex identities shaped by race, ethnicity, class, and religion. At the end of this course, students will be able to provide historical context for current debates around and challenges facing women of various backgrounds today. (GH; US; IL)
WMNST/HIST 166: History of Sexuality
Dr. Lindsay Keiter
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 12:20–1:10 p.m.
Why do we care so much about who has sex with whom and how? How did we arrive at our current “obvious” understanding of sexual behavior and identity? HIST/WMNST 166 explores how ideas and practices of sexuality have changed over the last 400 years and how ideas about sexuality are also ideas about power and social order. We’ll explore questions like: Have there always been homosexuals – or heterosexuals? How has the relationship between gender identity and sexuality changed over time? How do race and class come into play? How have “normal” and “deviant” sexuality been defined over time – and why has it changed? Is sex work empowering or exploitative? What forces led to the #MeToo movement? You’ll leave this course with a better grasp of why Americans continue to debate about what constitutes “good,” “bad,” and “normal” sexual behavior. Prerequisite: one introductory course in either history or women’s studies. (US; GH)
WMNST/ENGL 225N: Sexuality and Modern Visual Culture
Dr. Laura Rotunno and Dr. Douglas Page
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from 9:05–9:55 a.m.
Sex Sells ... So What, Exactly, Are We Buying? Our world bombards us with images, and we contribute to that barrage each time we post a picture. This class will engage you in vital discussions about those images as well as those that came before us and continue to shape what we see and create today. At its core, this class will be driven by our discussion of visual presentations that use “sex” to “sell” us a story; that story might be about what family is or should be, about what political activism looks like, about how a society thinks about love, beauty, hate, even its future hopes or its present fears. To spur those discussions, we’ll offer you readings by and about artists and their subjects—both fictional and real—and a rich, diverse historical background in visual representations that reflect how Western society, from the mid-19th-century to today, has viewed itself through the lens of sexuality, which always intersects with race, gender, gender identity, and class. For example, the terms “feminist” and “homosexual” were invented by the Victorians and reflect profound shifts in conceptions of identity. Another 19th-century invention was the idea of the literary and artistic “avant-garde” as a minority contingent with politically and/or aesthetically advanced views. These ideas of minority culture were deeply enmeshed with one another and still have effects on our world today. Discussions of these ideas then, hopefully, can help us all navigate the flood of images that today’s media presents as well as the self-images we cast into the world. This course can be used as a prerequisite for a 1-credit study abroad (to LONDON!) opportunity that will occur—circumstances allowing—in late May 2025. Questions? Contact Dr. Rotunno at [email protected] or Dr. Page at [email protected]. (GA; GH; Interdomain)
Additional Courses
Additional courses that count toward the WMNST minor at Penn State Altoona. Email [email protected] to request that the course be correctly counted toward the minor in LionPATH.
HDFS 434/SOC 435: Perspectives on Aging
Dr. Kelly Munly
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4:35–5:50 p.m.
This course will examine demographic, social, historic, and cultural factors affecting older adults and their quality of life in the United States. Exploration of these topics will be couched in theoretical perspectives, including intersectionality, feminist gerontology, life course, and care theories. Students will apply course material to everyday life and professional scenarios through reading assignments, a community practicum, writing exercises, and group work designed to enhance their expertise about perspectives on aging. We will look at the history and continuity of old age security across intersections of identity and life experience, simultaneously examining, for example, age, gender and race relations. We will look at older adults’ relationships with technology, experiences in and out of the workforce, and as members of the sandwich generation, caring for their parents, children, and grandchildren simultaneously. We will look at what it means for some older adults to identify as LGBTQIA+ in old age, as well as the strengths of caregivers across genders and identities. After taking this course, you will be able to embrace old age content and/or human services work with a greatly enhanced critical perspective on numerous issues of importance to our nation’s older adults.
