Disciplines and areas of study
Gender, Sexuality and Diversity Studies
Enquiries: (03) 9479 2287
Gender, Sexuality and Diversity studies at La Trobe University explores how identities in their diverse forms—including markers of sex, gender, class, race, ethnicity, nation and age—both shape and are shaped by social, political and cultural institutions and relations of power. GSD studies brings together issues and debates raised by feminist thought, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, emphasizing strong community connections and public commitments to matters of equity and social justice. Students can expect GSD as an interdisciplinary area of study to include a critique of dominant relations of power, and how such critique relates to practices for social transformation.
Students can pursue graduate study by research and/or coursework, subjects as available. Graduate and postgraduates can draw from an extensive and diverse range of academic staff for research supervision. With high regard from their peers, and a wide variety of reputable publications, these staff members are prominent contributors to their teaching and research fields.
GSD studies is committed to encouraging both theoretical diversity and teaching practices that maximize critical self-reflection on the part of students and staff. The intellectual culture of GSD encourages rigorous scholarship as well as engagement in practical workplace and/or political activities. GSD studies promote and maintain a supportive and intellectually engaging environment through research seminars, and interdisciplinary and thematic reading groups.
Principal areas of specialisation
Principal areas of specialization are feminist history (particularly Australian), gender and work, the study of subjectivity and representation, sexuality and queer theory, feminism and the critique of knowledge, women’s writing and feminist literary criticism, colonial and postcolonial discourses, women and popular culture, gender, media and film, feminist criminology and legal studies, gender and education, feminist socio-legal history, women and religion, queer culture in contemporary Chinese societies, Indigenous women’s health, Hispano-Australian and Latina writers, gender and race in Africa, Australian discourses on whiteness and cultural difference, transgender writing, identity politics, the politics of ‘passing’, explorations of theory and practice, theories of self and other, life writing, ethics, subjectivity and continental philosophy.Coursework programs
- Graduate Diploma in Humanities and Social Sciences
- Graduate Certificate in Humanities and Social Sciences
Research programs
- Master of Arts by Research
- Doctor of Philosophy