The women's studies program could undergo a complete transformation by next fall, effectively shifting the focus of the department to more general gender studies.
Possible changes include a new name for the department -- Gender, Culture and Society -- and a new curriculum that would allow students to specialize in one of four concentrations -- women's studies, global gender studies, gender and health and sexuality studies.
Women's Studies Director Rita Barnard, College of Arts and Sciences Dean Dennis DeTurck and other administrators considered a total structural overhaul of the department at a meeting Friday, Barnard said.
And for faculty members and student groups such as the Queer Student Alliance -- who have been advocating for the inclusion of sexuality studies in the curriculum -- the proposal signals the beginning of the University's formal recognition of their cause.
"The change will reflect the fact that gender studies have now expanded, and it's not just about men and women anymore, it's about both gender and sexuality," DeTurck said.
DeTurck also said that a proposal for the changes will most likely be introduced at the College's April faculty meeting and that he expects modifications to be made by next fall.
Heather Love -- a Women's Studies and English professor who is one of the leading faculty voices for the changes -- said that formal curricular recognition of gender and sexuality studies is critical to the development of the rest of the College.
"People have only just started to focus in on [sexuality studies], to see it as having sustained importance as something like gender and race," Love said. "Understanding of the way culture works or thinking about history is really incomplete without a specific analysis of sexuality."
QSA co-Chairs Wharton junior Brett Thalmann and College junior Alexis Ruby-Howe said any change would complement Penn's new interdisciplinary focus.
"President [Amy] Gutmann's Penn Compact is perfectly aligned with what we would like, in that gender and sexuality studies is completely interdisciplinary," Thalmann said, referring to Gutmann's three-pronged plan to improve the University.
Love, Thalmann and Howe all said that classes that would fall under sexuality studies are routinely full and that the students in these classes have expressed interest in doing more in the field.
Although student interest in sexuality studies has not yet been officially documented, the QSA has spent the last year compiling data from students and plans to present this research administrators later in the year.
"That's my motivation in doing it, that this is something that is really going to serve the students at Penn and that they're excited about it," Love said.
Thalmann and Ruby-Howe's vision for the department includes "tenured faculty, greater resources, more classes, lectureships, ability for graduate students to do work in this area [and] collaboration with other departments," Thalmann said.
Thalmann and Ruby-Howe also said that they will collaborate with graduate students who are currently studying or are interested in pursuing sexuality studies.
"If you don't have graduate programs, then you don't have Ph.D. students who can then become faculty members," Thalmann said. "But if you don't have faculty spots then no one is going to take the grad programs or Ph.D. programs."
Love -- who successfully led a similar movement at Harvard as a postdoctoral student-- said that the inclusion of sexuality studies in the curriculum should also be accompanied by increased knowledge of what is available.
"Students need to know about classes in this field; there needs to be a place to go and find out about these kind of classes," Love said.
She said she expects the changes to take time.
"I think people are cautious, but I think caution is different from resistance. Universities are slow to change. ... I think there is an institutional crisis when a new field emerges and comes into its own," Love said.
