This Tuesday, the UMaine Women’s, Gender & Sexuality program (WGS) will host a launch event for their new video campaign, called “This is what a WGS student looks like.” The campaign hopes to spread the word about what WGS is all about by sharing stories of current and former students in the program, as well as addressing what one can do with a degree in WGS studies.

At the launch, there will be an open discussion with the filmmaker and other WGS faculty and students about the program after a screening of the campaign videos, as well as poetry readings by WGS students. The event will be held in the Bangor Room of the Memorial Union from 12:15 to 1:30 p.m.

In addition to calling attention to the program itself, the video campaign hopes to spotlight the relevance of gender awareness in contemporary society.

“The critical lens of gender is becoming more important,” Nicolle Littrell, the WGS Professor who produced the videos, said. “It’s something that’s applicable across disciplines, and across careers. We’re really trying to underscore the relevance of it.”

The video campaign is being described as one step in the WGS program’s overall innovation, which will include social media strategies and rebooting their website. Currently, the program has a Facebook account, Twitter handle and a YouTube channel, all of which are being utilized with more frequency as part of the program’s greater outreach effort.

Littrell said the primary goal of the campaign is to show what a WGS education can offer. She also intends to address some of the common misconceptions about WGS and feminist theory in general.

“Often when people think of feminism, they think of, for example, angry women that hate men,” she said. “And by extension, some people think that way about WGS studies as a discipline, as if it’s just a bunch of women hating on men. That’s really not true,” she said. “We’re obviously looking at gender equality and sexism, but we also consider dynamics of race, class, sex orientation, religion, and beyond. We [really focus on] social categories and the way they intersect.”

Littrell also wants to challenge the idea that one has to be a woman to be a women studies major.

“You don’t have to be a woman to be in women’s studies,” she said. “We have plenty of male students, as well as transgender students… and the idea that you have to work in an overtly ‘woman’s’ career once you graduate with a degree in women’s studies is just a myth.” She said graduates can use what they learn to focus their work on particular issues, whatever they end up doing with their careers.

“WGS affects more than just what you’re going to use it for during your education,” Elizabeth Rovito, a student with a WGS minor, said. “[What you learn is also] going to apply drastically to everything else in your life.”

“WGS has changed the landscape of my education and how I think about my interests and what I want to do. I love learning. WGS has made the space of learning so much bigger,” Sarah Cook, a WGS alumni, said.

At present, the campaign seeks to spread the word around the UMaine community. In the long term, the goal is to spread awareness further, through the state of Maine and the New England region, to throughout the country and beyond.

In the future, depending on the response to the campaign as well as funding from the department, Littrell hopes to produce more videos for the program that go even further, looking at what happens in a WGS classroom, for example.

For more information about the event, contact Elizabeth Franck or Nicolle Littrell on FirstClass.

The WGS program has existed in its current incarnation since Fall of 2014, when it’s name changed from Women’s Studies to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The program offers a major and a minor, as well as a graduate concentration. Major topics addressed in the program include gender and equality; gender oppression, sexism, gender and identity; feminist theory; power and privilege; violence against women and women in work, in the military and in religion, with additional topics being added every semester. This semester there are 18 people with majors in WGS and 25 people with minors in WGS.

In addition to the program’s core classes, WGS offers a variety of specialty classes based on faculty interest and expertise, such as LGBT studies, women in pop culture and masculinity studies.

The WGS program also works closely with the Women’s resource center on campus, which shares a building with the department in Fernald Hall.

At UMaine, the first women’s studies course was offered in spring of 1972, and the Women’s Studies program officially began in the 1990s.