UC Santa Cruz - Feminist Studies

Feminist Studies Dept.
UC Santa Cruz
Humanities 1, Room 315
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Phone: 831.459.4324
Email: fmst@ucsc.edu

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Spring '08 Faculty Office Hours

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Welcome to Feminist Studies at UCSC!

Feminist studies is an interdisciplinary field of analysis that investigates how relations of gender are embedded in social, political, and cultural formations. The undergraduate program in Feminist Studies provides students with a unique interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. The department emphasizes theories and practices derived from multiracial and multicultural contexts.

With over 180 students declared as majors, UCSC is home to one of the oldest and largest departments focused on gender and sexuality studies in the U.S. Since its founding
as Women's Studies in 1974, it has contributed to the development of internationally recognized feminist scholarship. The major in Feminist Studies offers opportunities to pursue careers in fields such as law, social services, public policy, health care, and higher education. Feminist Studies also encourages community service through faculty-sponsored internships and a mutually supportive and collaborative teaching and learning environment.

Introduction to Feminisms
Taping Project

Click photo for 6-minute video of
Professor Bettina Aptheker's
definition of feminism

Prof. Aptheker's recently-published memoir...

Intimate Politics:
How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech,
and Became a Feminist Rebel

is on sale now at most major retail outlets and many independent booksellers.

At eight years old, Bettina Aptheker watched her family's politics play out in countless living rooms across the country when her father, historian and U.S. Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, testified on television in front of the House on Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. Born into one of the most influential U.S. Communist families whose friends included W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bettina lived her parents' politics witnessing first-hand during one of the most dramatic upheavals in American history. She also lived with a terrible secret: childhood sexual abuse and a frightening and lonely life lived inside a home wrought with family tensions.

A gripping and beautifully rendered memoir, Intimate Politics is at its core the story of one woman's struggle to still the demons of her personal world while becoming a controversial public figure herself. This is the story of childhood sexual abuse, abortion, sexual violence, activism, and the triumph over one's past. It's about FBI harassment and persecution, Jewish heritage, and lesbian identity. It is, finally, about the courage to speak one's truth despite the consequences, and to break the sacred silence of family secrets.

Intimate Politics:
A Roundtable

A distinguished panel of nationally known scholar-activists participated in a roundtable panel at UCSC in February to discuss feminist studies professor Bettina Aptheker's new memoir Intimate Politics, focusing on issues of social justice, race, and gender. Pictured outside UCSC's new Humanities Lecture Hall, from left to right: Bettina Aptheker, Ericka Huggins, Angela Davis, Blanche Wiesen Cook, and Johnnetta B. Cole. Click here for more information about the panelists and to hear a podcast of the event. [in order to launch the podcast, you will need iTunes, available here for download].