Feminist and Gender Studies at Colorado College

Feminist and Gender Studies (FGS) at Colorado College has experienced a history much like other academic units in the field. Beginning in the 1980s, they had an interdisciplinary programmatic structure that relied on the goodwill and unpaid labor of faculty housed in other departments. Over the years, they were able to obtain more institutional support in the form of tenure-track faculty, a budget, and better offices than the basement where they were initially housed. “While our field values the margins as sources of knowledge, we have always simultaneously recognized that there is nothing glamorous about institutional precarity and that we should fight for the resources that we need and deserve,” chair Nadia Guessous remarked. 

As the discipline evolved, they too changed, redefining what it means to invoke terms like “gender” and “feminism,” as well as who can be a professor of Feminist and Gender Studies. Now a department with three tenured faculty, all faculty of color, they are hiring an assistant professor in 2024–25. For the first time in their history, an incoming colleague will be mentored and supported by faculty that have been both trained and tenured in FGS.

This new chapter is also marked by a change in their institutional status. Although the faculty in FGS had long been “agnostic” about the question of becoming a department (as opposed to a program), it was one of the recommendations of their latest external review. Going through this process changed their minds, and they were granted departmental status in May 2023. (The department shares both the recommendations and their responses on their website in a commitment to feminist ethics of transparency.) While the department is proud of this transition, they are mindful of the need to maintain a critical edge about the process of institutionalization. “We come from an intellectual tradition that values the epistemological and liberatory potentialities of the margins and is skeptical towards the promise of recognition,” Guessous says. 

The combination of institutional support and liberatory thinking has allowed the faculty to create a coherent and critical major that reaches a wide range of students. They have reframed the curriculum to be grounded in intersectional and transnational approaches, working hard to integrate core concepts into all courses. While the expertise of individual faculty members remains important, integrating the curriculum in this way works against the territorialization that sometimes troubles departments, as well as the tokenization of marginalized and historically underrepresented faculty members. There are benefits for students as well as faculty. For example, students don’t have to wait to take Introduction to Queer Studies to understand queer studies, which is integrated into all FGS courses. Similarly, they do not need to take Black Feminist Theory or The Politics of Transnational Feminism to learn about these different but intersecting feminist frameworks that have contributed so much to feminist theory and epistemology. The department strives to be coherent and for each faculty member to have their expertise valued across the curriculum rather than shouldered by them alone. 

Students have multiple pathways into the major and minor. They can take one of three different introductory courses (Introduction to Feminist and Gender Studies; Introduction to Queer Studies; or a course offered within the First-Year Program whose content rotates depending on which faculty member is teaching it), which provide enough overlap to give students the knowledge they need for higher-level courses. FGS courses play an important role across campus: they are offered through the College’s general education curriculum, its First-Year Program, and its Bridge Scholars program. In addition, nearly all FGS courses fulfill one of the College’s general education requirements, thus ensuring that a wide range of students, regardless of their major, get to benefit from the insights of feminist thinkers. 

At the same time, the department has worked hard to scaffold and articulate the different levels of their curriculum. In some cases, this has led to new courses to fill in gaps. One recent example is Junior Seminar, a class in which students design their own capstone project (creative, research-based, publicly-engaged, experiential, etc.). The faculty have found that Junior Seminar levels the playing field, providing the skills and experiences that each student will need in order to develop a robust and meaningful capstone project. Guessous further observes that preparing all students in an intentional fashion and in a dedicated course mitigates the extra labor that faculty had previously carried out on a volunteer basis over the summer. As she puts it, “Equity for students maps onto sustainability for faculty.” 

While the numbers of majors and minors in a small department are prone to ups and downs, Guessous is pleased with how their reach has grown, doubling the number of FGS majors while maintaining the same number of minors in the past decade. Lower-level classes are consistently full; many of their classes have waitlists; and the FGS curriculum touches many students because of its contributions to the college-wide curriculum.

While the small size of their department can still feel precarious at times, Guessous says that it has also provided the opportunity for faculty to get to know one another in meaningful ways. They value reading each other’s work, discussing pedagogy, and making major decisions together. Prioritizing relationships is one way that they ground the department in a feminist ethos of care. Faculty work to embody and practice their values: for example, they create dialogic relational spaces by inviting each other to have conversations in front of, and with, students in their classrooms. Practices such as these teach students what it means to do feminist praxis and to delight in learning from each other. “To be a feminist, as Sara Ahmed has taught us, is to be a student for life,” says Guessous. Equally important is finding joy in their work, and celebrating each other and their students whenever possible. 

Despite the many gendered, racist, hetero/cis-normative, colonial, ableist, and elitist stereotypes that continue to inform dominant perceptions of Feminist and Gender Studies as a field (for example that it is not a “rigorous” or “real” discipline), Guessous’s experience as a scholar-teacher is exactly the opposite. “Our students are not looking for easy answers,” she says. “They come to us precisely because they know that we ask hard questions, stay with problems, value intellectual care and precision, and insist on nuance and complexity while cultivating an ethos of continuous self-reflection and responsiveness to the world around us.” In a similar fashion, she sees that FGS at Colorado College will continue to evolve in response to the community it creates and the world it inhabits, never being afraid to let go and to reimagine feminist work when necessary, or to preserve the core principles that have sustained feminist ways of thinking and being at different historical and political conjunctures.