Honors
The Honors Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is available to both our Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies majors and to non-majors.
Honors theses may be comprised of either a research paper or a creative project.
Honors students are advised by Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Affiliated Faculty. We recommend preparing for one's Honors Project as early as possible by taking courses in your area of interest and by building relationships with potential faculty advisors.
For more information on the requirements for our Honors program, visit our bulletin entry
Applications to the honors program should be submitted to the Academic Services Administrator at apotemski@stanford.edu. Applications consist of a thesis proposal, current transcript, and application form.
Admission and Requirements for FGSS Majors
Admission
The honors program offers an opportunity to do independent research for a senior thesis. It is open to students with a grade point average (GPA) of 3.5 or better in course work in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, or demonstrated academic competence. Students should begin the application process by consulting with the Program Director or the Associate Director as early as possible in the junior year, preferably by the end of Winter Quarter.
During the application process, students design a project in consultation with their proposed thesis advisers and the Associate Director. A proposal describing the project and the number of units to be taken toward the honors directed project must be submitted to the program office for final approval. All projects must have a primary focus on gender or sexuality.
NOTE: FEMGEN 199A, B, C (Honors Seminar) and FEMGEN 105 (Honors Work) units do NOT count towards the 63 units for the major or the 30 units for the minor.
Requirements
- Students enroll for 2-3 units per quarter in FEMGEN 199A, FEMGEN 199B, and FEMGEN 199C Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Honors Workshop.
- Students in the honors program also enroll for FEMGEN 105 Honors Work with their respective advisers, for an additional 2-3 units each quarter. The combined number of units in 199 and 105 must be 10-15 units over the course of senior year.
- A semifinal draft of the thesis is due early in Spring Quarter of the senior year.
- The final thesis must be submitted by May 15 (or the following Monday should May 15 fall on a weekend). The completed thesis must be submitted with the Thesis Completion Form, which requires the adviser's signature of approval. Creative projects must include a section of critical analysis.
For Majors in Other Departments
Interdisciplinary Honors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for majors in other departments or programs, as distinguished from honors for students pursuing a major in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, is intended to complement study in any major. Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minors who wish to pursue honors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies should apply through the process for non-majors.
Admission
The Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies honors program is open to students majoring in any field with an overall GPA of 3.5 or better or demonstrated academic competence.
Students must complete the following with a grade of 'B+' or better:
- Either FEMGEN 101 Introduction to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies or FEMGEN 103 Feminist and Queer Theories and Methods Across the Disciplines, and and two other FGSS courses that relate to their research topic.
Students should begin the application process by consulting with the Program Director or the Associate Director as early as possible in the junior year, preferably by the end of Winter Quarter. During the application process, students design a project in consultation with their proposed thesis advisers and the Associate Director. A proposal describing the project and the number of units to be taken toward the honors directed project must be submitted to the program office for final approval. All projects must have a primary focus on gender or sexuality.
Requirements
- Students enroll for 2-3 units per quarter in FEMGEN 199A, FEMGEN 199B, and FEMGEN 199C Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Honors Workshop.
- Students in the honors program also enroll for FEMGEN 105 Honors Work with their respective advisers, for an additional 2-3 units each quarter. The combined number of units in 199 and 105 must be 10-15 units over the course of senior year..
- A semifinal draft of the thesis is due early in Spring Quarter of the senior year.
- The final thesis must be submitted by May 15 (or the following Monday should May 15 fall on a weekend). The completed thesis must be submitted with the Thesis Completion Form, which requires the adviser's signature of approval. Creative projects must include a section of critical analysis.
Undergraduate Advising and Research Office
The Undergraduate Advising and Research (UAR) office provides information and guidelines about grant and fellowship support for Honors theses and other undergraduate research projects.
Theses
Research Theses
Because FGSS is an interdisciplinary department, our honors theses vary widely in style and method. Some students perform close readings of texts—historical, fictional, visual, and spacial--and situate those readings in the context of a broader academic conversations. Students in the social sciences may conduct research involving human subjects via surveys, interviews, and field observations; these research projects may be qualitative or quantitative or may take a mixed-methods approach. Still other projects are historical or theoretical in nature. Whatever a student's discipline, FGSS offers mentorship and guidance to complete a thesis that is academically viable in both the world of sexuality and gender studies and in the student's home department.
Through managing their thesis projects, students develop skills in research methodology and analysis in addition to expertise in their research topic. Students work closely with their research advisors and FGSS honors cohort. They also attend weekly FGSS workshops and lectures geared toward refining various aspects of their projects. These weekly check-ins facilitate students' exchange of ideas, adherence to a realistic timeline, and self-awareness of their research methodology.
Creative Theses
The creative honors thesis in FGSS offers students from all disciplines the opportunity to build a creative project around an insight, idea, quandary, or mission associated with feminism, gender, and/or sexuality. This project will build on rigorous academic research in the domain of FGSS addressed by the project. Creative theses may be in any medium and must be accompanied by an academic paper that articulates the implicit argument of the project, the academic literature on which the project builds, and the other creative projects with which it is in conversation. Creative thesis writers will work closely with their advisors and with their peers in FGSS to develop their project's intention, form, and scope. Past creative projects have included short story cycles, novellas, poetry, memoir, graphic storytelling, and film.
Students interested in completing a creative honors thesis with FGSS should meet with potential advisors and with FGSS honors faculty to discuss possible structures of their thesis and to develop a plan that would meet FGSS requirements while staying true to the guiding intentions of the project. The proposal submitted to the honors program should be understood as a "pitch" that will necessarily evolve over the course of the honors year. Students will benefit from mentors in FGSS and a tight-knit group of peers who will help to keep the project on track and will challenge the author to grow as a scholar and artist. FGSS encourages creativity and welcomes the opportunity to work with students on projects that exceed the traditional purview of honors theses.
2020-2021 FGSS Honors Thesis Projects
Julia Adams
My creative honors thesis imagines a future in which the gendered power dynamics that define our current society have been equalized and complicated. The novel bridges both dystopian and utopian visions in an effort to explore the violence, uncertainty, and attempted modes of control that might emerge from such a future.
Eunice Jung
Eunice is a senior double majoring in Anthropology and International Relations and minoring in Education. Her thesis leverages pleasure and desire as a framework for better understanding girls' agentic decision making when dropping out of school to enter the garment industry in the third world. The thesis creates a space to explore how girls experiment with the terms by which they are categorized as (un)desirable through their own definitions of identity, love, success, and labor, engaging in a self-determined life-- even while becoming an intimate source of global exploitation in the garment industry.
Christina Misaki Nikitin
My thesis is a critical ethnography that examines the role of musics and musicking for Black queer-identifying musicians in Cape Town, South Africa as critical sites of resistance against systems of oppression. Based on the fieldwork I conducted in Cape Town from June to August 2019, this work features the voices, subjectivities, and stories of various musicians of color through extensive interview excerpts, ethnomusicological analyses of their musics, and my own self-reflexive participant-observation.
Claire Dauge-Roth
Claire Dauge-Roth (she/her) is a writer and transmedia artist interested in memory, healing from trauma, and the liminal spaces of reality and presentness. In this collection of stories, she experiments with narrative form and interrogates how to read the inner architecture of characters as a source of survival knowledge woven throughout the body.
| Authors | Publication Year | Title | Publisher |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ashe Huang | 2020 | Asian, Female, Future: Yellow Embodiment in the Posthuman Age | |
| Lucy Arnold | 2020 | Early History of Marriage, Labor, and Sex Migration Dynamics in the U.S. | |
| Tabor Hoatson | 2020 | Politicizing Substance Addiction in Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Communities | |
| Mehr Kumar | 2020 | The Complaining Party: a collection of poetry and prose | |
| Jasmine Kerber | 2020 | “The Thing With the Ribbons”: A Media Analysis Exploring Perceptions of Rhythmic Gymnastics in the United States | |
| Colette Brannan | 2019 | Drag Performance: Exploring Identity and Queering Queer Spaces | |
| Lucas Benjamin Lawrence | 2019 | fragment[ed] | |
| Catherine Xie | 2019 | Reimagining Sexual Violence Through Theater: Narrative, Memory, and History in Venus and How I Learned to Drive | |
| Alison Logia | 2019 | Supporting Diversity, Sabotaging Intersectionality: The Limits of Employee Resource Groups for Queer and Trans Women of Color in Tech | |
| Julia Freels | 2019 | The Fringes: A Novel | |
| Charlie Dubach-Reinhold | 2019 | Transverse Casting: Thinking Gender through Layers | |
| Jasmine Mueller-Hsia | 2018 | Sexuality Education as the Practice of Freedom: Creating Student-Derived Curricula for Youth Experiencing Systemic Oppression | |
| Allison Rose Martin | 2018 | The Distance Between Texans and Abortion | |
| Leela Srinivasan | 2018 | The Shame to Cure: A Counter-Epic of Gender, Language, and the Mind | |
| Michela Rodriguez | 2018 | Waiting Room: A Feminist Play | |
| Sydney Osifeso | 2017 | "Loving Ourselves Enough to Live": Black Women, Femmes, and Emotional Justice in the Era of Black Lives Matter | |
| Mallory Simone Frasier | 2017 | Cindy, or the Study of Monsters: A Creative Exploration of Adolescent Girls' Relationship with Fiction | |
| Robert Wilkins | 2017 | Colorful: Using Fiction to Examine American "Trauma Culture" Through an Intersectional Lens | |
| Talia Charme-Zane | 2017 | Freaky Forests, Gay Princes, and Guilty Children: A Queer Reading of Sondheim's Into the Woods | |
| Julia Martins | 2017 | Instant: A Young Adult Novel | |
| Tess Bloch-Horowitz | 2017 | Not Just Child’s Play: Psychological and Legal Constructions of Female Victims of Child Sexual Abuse, 1870-1970 | |
| Emily Pang | 2017 | Raising Resilience: Exploring Mothers' Postpartum Perspectives on Childbirth, Birth Trauma, and Growth | |
| Claire Thompson | 2016 | Cornucopia | |
| Brianne Huntsman | 2016 | Everyone is Welcome!: Analyzing the Relationship Betwen Gender and Makerspaces | |
| Katherine Quiles | 2016 | Exploring the Complicated Relationship Between Identity, Experiences, and Behavior in an Online Context |
