OGDEN, Utah — Weber State University will be the first school in Utah to offer a program this fall dedicated to studying LGBTQ issues, according to a report in the Standard-Examiner.
“In some ways, I can’t help but wonder what took Utah so long, but I’m excited to see that Weber State is at the forefront of that,” said Theresa Kay, a Weber State psychology professor who wrote the proposal for the program along with Women & Gender Studies Program Director Melina Alexander and political science professor Richard Price.
Classes on queer studies are not new in Utah, but they are often within a gender studies or human sexuality program. That was previously the case at Weber State, but students will now be able to earn a queer studies minor.
READ: Utah Pride Week events being planned for June
This new program, called Queer Studies (QS), is described as allowing students to study "interdisciplinary, scholarly perspectives on the formation of sexuality and gender identity. Instead of conceptualizing these topics as unchangeable and only biologically driven, QS (will examine) their critical intersections with other relations of power such as race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion, and age."
