Sexuality Studies Minor

Current Catalog Year
2024-2025
Degree
Bachelor of Arts
Total Credits
20
Locations
Mankato

The Sexuality Studies minor is an interdisciplinary course of study designed to complement any major. The objective of the curriculum is to develop a critical framework for understanding social justice by examining how sexual practices, expressions, identities, and representations are shaped by social, anthropological, historical, psychological, legal, sociological, and political contexts. Under the coordination of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, the minor focuses on issues of social ethics and sexuality, including the impact of cultural inequality on sexual well-being and sexual health.

To declare the minor students contact Angie Navejas: angie.navejas@mnsu.edu

Program Requirements

Core

An introduction to the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities and identities, including challenges to homophobia and heterosexism. We will explore social and historical constructions of LGBT identities as they vary across ethnic, class, and gender lines.Fall, Spring

Prerequisites: none

Goal Areas: GE-05, GE-07

Diverse Cultures: Gold

Explores how popular culture shapes and mirrors our understandings of gender and sexuality and their intersections with race and class. Critically examines representations of gender and race in popular culture forms such as film, television, music, books, and the internet.

Prerequisites: none

Goal Areas: GE-02, GE-06

Diverse Cultures: Purple

This course explores the interconnections between sex, gender, and sexuality, with special attention to how institutions and communities shape experience and identity.

Prerequisites: none

An introduction to the psychological aspects of sexual health including sexual stigma and taboos, debunking myths and identifying misinformation, understanding capacities to consent, and overcoming barriers to sexual wellness.

Prerequisites: none

Explores the social construction of sex and sexuality. Key topics include the social, cultural, and historical construction of sexual identities, sexual bodies, sexual politics, sexual socialization, and sexual technologies, in the context of the sexual activities, beliefs, and morals of people.

Prerequisites: none

Goal Areas: GE-05, GE-07

Diverse Cultures: Purple

Elective

Choose 3 - 4 Credit(s).

Sex and our relationship with it. This course examines the topics of sex, sexuality, and gender by exploring the diverse range of sexual cultures of the world in the past and the present. Attention is given to the role of language, biology, culture, and the archeological record of societies's fascination with sex.

Prerequisites: none

Goal Areas: GE-05, GE-07

Diverse Cultures: Purple

Language is powerful. What we say, how we say it, where we say it, and to whom we say it matters. This course explores the connection between power, language, performance, and identity. The relationships between language, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class are explored by investigating historical and present day sources of language practices and events.

Prerequisites: none

Diverse Cultures: Purple

This course describes and analyzes sex/gender systems, interpersonal power, language and communication, the role of gender in social institutions such as the family, work, and politics, and the role of social movements in creating change in gender relations.

Prerequisites: none