could anyone tell about getting a minor in this department? I really would like to help women in social work when I’m older and I feel like this would look good on a resume and plus I’m really interested in feminism.
What do you mean “more”? What do you want to know about? Usually a women’s, gender, and sexuality course of study involves using theoretical frameworks from the social sciences and humanities to study issues of gender and sexuality. There’s usually coursework in sociology and anthropology as a foundation, but also possibly literature, film, psychology, history, music, art, political science, religion, philosophy, and the modern foreign languages/cultures.
Usually you’ll take an introductory course and then a course in feminist theory - and in both you’ll read the work of contemporary gender theorists. You might read some Simone de Beauvoir, some Mary Wollstonecraft, some Virginia Woolf, some Judith Butler, some Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan…who and what you read is really going to depend on the theoretical orientation of the department and your faculty, as well as whether they are more of a women/gender studies department or a gender/sexuality studies department (similar, but different leanings). The idea is - it’s a way of critically thinking about the construction of gender and sexualities, about how to ask questions and how to approach the world. There will be a lot of writing.
Depending on your department you may have some other core courses or you may have free range of a variety of electives. This is where the interdisciplinary part comes in. You can probably choose to do a concentration or just take whatever interests you. Some students, for example, may choose to concentrate on women’s literature and so take classes like “Women as Writer” and “Representation of Women in Literature” and “Postcolonial Women’s Writers” (pulling these directly from the website of my alma mater’s women’s studies program). Some students might want a broader theme - like maybe representations of gender and sexuality in the arts (so they take an art class, a film class, a music class, and a couple literature classes). A lot of students are going to want to continue to take social science classes and dig deeper into these theoretical underpinnings, but maybe from one stand point (genders and sexualities of color, or non-Western treatments of gender and sexuality, or how government and social structures constrain gender and sexuality, etc.)
I have taken several gender/sexuality/women’s studies courses (my PhD work, among other things, focused on sexuality and gender) and I have mixed feelings about them, despite identifying as a staunch feminist and being really interested in sociology and psychology. On the one hand, it’s really great to come to a space where you can read and ponder big questions about gender and sexuality, its place in the world, and how society is structured around it and yet constrains it. It’s excellent if you want to do social work with women, because you will understand the “big picture” surrounding these women’s lives - not only the sociology and psychology behind it (that women are more vulnerable to domestic violence and poverty, for example) but also the theoretical philosophies behind our structures of gender and sexuality (why did we come up with two genders, anyway? It hasn’t always been like that, and not every culture only has two! Why did we decide that women are the weaker/less intelligent/less delicate gender in charge of home and family?)
On the other hand…depending on the department, they can be very theory-heavy. And when I say theory, you’re going to be reading a lot of philosophers - and some of them are dense and difficult to get through. And I have…issues with postmodernism, but most gender studies departments are going to take a postmodern stance. The postmodernists seem to believe in making everything as complicated as possible, and everything must be deconstructed and analyzed. (Deconstruction is important, but it sometimes gets tedious.) For example, you will almost certainly read Foucault, and I hate reading Foucault. His work is really important in modern sexuality work but crap, he writes in circles. Judith Butler makes my eyes swim. Even her Wikipedia page says, in the very first paragraph, that she’s known for her “difficult to understand prose.” On the other hand, I really liked reading Althusser, Derrida, and Lacan, and I found their work to be more straightforward.
ANYWAY. The tl;dr version is that I think you should start by taking a class - take the first class required in the minor. See how you like it! It’s a very interesting and sometimes challenging field of study, and I think the rewards are worth it.