The Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program (GSWS) at William & Mary was founded in 1991, making it one of the university's first interdisciplinary programs. Undergraduate students may pursue major or minor tracks of study in GSWS, and students of all academic backgrounds are encouraged to consider taking one of the several courses the program offers each semester. Courses in GSWS span the humanities and social sciences and emphasize the importance of discussion and collaboration; faculty investment in producing and engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship ensures that students in GSWS become agile thinkers capable of moving beyond and reimagining conventional boundaries.

The undergraduate student-scholars presenting their work at (Inter)Disciplining Culture are all currently enrolled in GSWS 205, the program's "Introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies" course. In order to provide students with the necessary foundational knowledge to pursue sustained study in GSWS, the course is developed to foster robust engagement with questions such as: How do diverse understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality shape and inform how we see, think, and act in the world? How do the meanings attributed to these sites of identification come to influence what we can know about ourselves and to determine who we can understand ourselves to be? How can we develop a more comprehensive understanding of the inseparability of social signs such as race, class, ability, and empire, among others, from our understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality?

These questions and others like them provide a reflection of the course's principal curricular investments, which endeavor to introduce students to several of the conceptual frameworks and methodological orientations useful for addressing some of the pivotal questions animating scholarship in gender, sexuality, and women's studies. Nuanced engagement with these frameworks through textually grounded discussion enables students to more rigorously interrogate and analyze the consequences of sexual difference within and across the multiple social worlds we inhabit, with particular attention paid to the sites of intersection between anti-racist, anti-classist, and anti-sexist political struggles. The scholarly archive with which students work throughout the semester facilitates the cultivation of these critical skills in textual analysis, formal academic writing, and dynamic reasoning by encouraging students to consider the numerous points of analytical juncture between course content and contemporary configurations of the social, cultural, and political.

Each section of 205 is taught by a different member of the GSWS faculty, which results in the creation of a shared intellectual space between the sections that nevertheless reflects the particular pedagogical approach and research interests of the teaching faculty. Topics and themes covered in 205 have included: consideration of the notion of social construction, with particular regard to its consequences for studies of gender and sexuality; theories of oppression as well as its structures, politics, and relationship to the exercise of power; engagement with the necessary complexities and challenges of forms of anti-racist and anti-classist politics and epistemologies, framed by these accounts’ capacity to complicate and enrich core questions in the fields of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies; women of color feminisms and Black feminist theory and critique, including the framework of intersectionality and feminist of color methodology; histories of feminist activism in the United States; sexual rights and reproductive justice; queerness, heteronormativity, and trans politics and epistemologies, as well as examination of emerging paradigms of queer theoretical critique; feminist disability studies; Indigenous feminisms and epistemologies; and feminist methodologies for the critical assessment of popular culture and cultural objects.