Queer Studies Minor

Offered at: San Luis Obispo Campus

The Queer Studies (QS) minor promotes intersectional and interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry, education, and activism that emphasizes how constructions, experiences, and expressions of sexuality change over time and are lived in relation to interlocking systems of gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class status, disability, national origin, religion, size, and age (among other factors). Areas of exploration include the invention of homo- and heterosexuality and abnormality; the dynamics of heterosexism and heteronormativity; and intimacy, kinship networks, and embodiment, considered via active student learning and by exploring the vital contributions made to history, knowledge, and contemporary life by communities marginalized on the basis of sexuality in the United States and around the world. 

Students completing the QS minor will acquire intellectual and practical skills necessary to contribute to scholarship, activism, creative production, policymaking, and innovation in Queer Studies, and to creating a more inclusive, just, and equitable world for all.

Program Learning Objectives

1. Students will identify and explain foundational and contemporary research and theoretical literature in the interdisciplinary field of Queer Studies.
2. Students will define and summarize the ways that foundational and contemporary research and theoretical literature in the interdisciplinary field of Queer Studies draws upon and utilizes perspectives from the humanities, sciences, arts, and professions to expand existing and create new knowledge.
3. Students will review and analyze the historical and contemporary dynamics and impacts of cisheterosexism, cisheteronormativity, homophobia, transphobia, and hegemonic white approaches to queer studies, with particular attention to the ways that norms and ideologies constitute and reproduce intersecting inequities within local, regional, national, and transnational contexts.
4. Students will examine and evaluate, via intersectional frameworks, the ways that constructions, experiences, and expressions of sexuality shape and are shaped by social, political, ethical, institutional, economic, legal, cultural, scientific, and technological factors in the past and present.
5. Students will reflect upon and critique their own beliefs, attitudes, and potential biases related to sexuality as well as personal, policy, and community efforts for social change.
6. Students will employ and synthesize key concepts in Queer Studies to contribute to scholarship, activism, creative production, policy, the professions, and/or innovation.
7. Students will apply intellectual and practical skills to engage with issues of social justice and contribute to efforts to forge a more inclusive, just, and equitable world for all.

Minor Requirements and Curriculum

• At least half of the units must be from upper-division courses (3000-4000 level).
• At least half of the units must be taken at Cal Poly (in residence).
• No more than one-third of the units will be taken with credit-no credit grading (CR/NC), not counting courses with mandatory CR/NC. Departments may further limit CR/NC grading if desired.
• A minimum 2.0 GPA is required in all units counted for completion of the minor. 

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Required Courses not taken to satisfy minor requirements listed above may be used to satisfy Core or Approved Elective requirement(s).

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Repeatable up to 6 units. Credit may be earned more than once when course is taken with different subtitles or topics.

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Core Courses not taken to satisfy minor requirements listed above may be used to satisfy Approved Elective requirement. Half of Core Course units must be upper-division.

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Additional prerequisites may be needed to complete this requirement.

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Minor advisor approval required. Approval contingent on course subtitle. Contact the department for list of approved subtitles.