Women & Gender Studies Institute | University of Toronto

The Women & Gender Studies Institute (WGSI) at the University of Toronto is dedicated to exploring the entangled work of gender, race and sexuality in identities, relations, practices, theories and institutions. WGSI has developed a distinct strength in transnational feminist studies, which joins questions concerning nation-states, citizenship, colonialisms, diasporas and global capitalism with concerns about how to understand the gendered, queered and raced politics of subjectivity, activism and knowledge making. In our classrooms and our research, we put feminism into critical question as much as we develop feminist questions. Our dual emphasis on interdisciplinarity and transnational feminist studies aims to respond to the diverse feminisms that meet in the diasporic space of Toronto and embodied in our students, as well as to be accountable to the complexities of politics in an interconnected world. These commitments are manifest in our close relationship with critical and postcolonial area studies, with particular strengths in research that traces the relationships and disconnects between Africa, the Caribbean, East Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, Canada and the United States.