All Guides: Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Guide: Getting Started

Getting Started

This guide is intended to help students get started with research regarding Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, with an eye towards electronic resources.

Best Bets

Key resources for beginning research in this field:

America: History and Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window Scholarly journals, books, and dissertations covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada from before European contact to the present.
HeinOnline This link opens in a new window Women and the Law (Peggy) is a database containing a unique collection of materials bringing together more than 3,200 books, biographies, and periodicals dedicated to women’s roles in society and the law over the past 200 years. Also included are more than 70 titles from Emory University Law School’s Feminism and Legal Theory Project which provide a platform to view the effect of law and culture on the female gender. Follow the path from HeinOnline -> Women and the Law
PubMed This link opens in a new window Contains publication in the area of health and medicine research. Includes MedLine which records are indexed with NLM's controlled vocabulary, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®). Links to full-text online holdings are listed where the citations match Macalester Library e-journal resources.
Family & Society Studies Worldwide This link opens in a new window Indexes journals, books, conference papers, government documents and research reports in the area of family studies.
Historical Abstracts with Full Text This link opens in a new window Index covering world history (excluding the United States and Canada). It includes hundreds of history journals and books, plus useful features such as the ability to search by time period.
MLA International Bibliography (Ebsco) This link opens in a new window The primary database for literary and film scholarship.
Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window Provides access to the latest research in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences.
Women's Studies International This link opens in a new window Covers the core disciplines in Women's Studies to the latest scholarship in feminist research including the areas of sociology, history, political science, international relations, arts and humanities, business, and education.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
Access to journals in the humanities and social sciences, covering literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, and economics.

New E-Books in WGSS

Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader

Handbook of the New Sexuality Studies

Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity

Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene

The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon

Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies

Firebrand Feminism: The Radical Lives of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Dana Densmore

Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power

Re/orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects

Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University

Post-Borderlandia: Chicana Literature and Gender Variant Critique

Gender Terrains in African Cinema

The Right to Be Out: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in America's Public Schools

Featured Journals

Visual Culture and Gender
"The purpose of the journal is to encourage and promote an understanding of how visual culture constructs gender in context with representations of race, age, sexuality, social units, and social class."
Feminism & Psychology
The peer-reviewed journal's principal aim is to foster feminist theory and practice in—and beyond—psychology. We are interested in pieces that provide insights into gendered realities along multiple intersecting dimensions of difference, privilege, and inequality.
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly offers a high-profile venue for innovative research and scholarship that contest the objectification, pathologization, and exoticization of transgender lives. It publishes interdisciplinary work that explores the diversity of gender, sex, sexuality, embodiment, and identity in ways that have not been adequately addressed by feminist and queer scholarship.

Archival Resources

Bay Area Reporter Archives
"The Bay Area Reporter is the oldest continuously published lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer weekly newspaper in the United States and is the highest circulation publication serving the LGBTQ communities of the San Francisco Bay Area." The GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco is digitizing issues starting in at the inception of publication in 1971 through mid-2005, thanks to a grant from the Bob Ross Foundation. 2005 issues to present is available on the Bay Area Reporter's website at www.ebar.com.
Digital Transgender Archive
The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world. The collection focuses on materials created prior to 2000.
Women Writers Project
The Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding. Our goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader. We support research on women's writing, text encoding, and the role of electronic texts in teaching and scholarship.
Kinsey Institute
The Kinsey Institute is one of the best known research organizations for sexuality studies in the world. While most content is not digitized, there are a number of finding aids and browsing the collections can help with determining appropriate terminology for research elsewhere.

Sex & Sexuality This link opens in a new window
This resource explores changing attitudes towards human sexuality, gender and sexual behaviors, in America and beyond, throughout the Twentieth Century.

Women: Transnational Networks
Women: Transnational Networks focuses on issues at the intersection of gender and class from the late-eighteenth century to the era of suffrage in the early-twentieth century, all through a transnational perspective. The collection contains deep information on European and North American movements, but also expands its scope to include collections from other regions.

Women and Social Movements This link opens in a new window
A resource for scholars of U.S. Women's history. The collection currently includes 123 document projects and archives with 5,100 documents and more than 170,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by 2,700 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools.

The Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection Archives
"The Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies houses over 3,000 linear feet of material about the GLBT experience. It includes published material, organizational records, personal manuscripts, informational files, films, music, textiles, posters, and other items. The collection is international in scope and has materials in approximately 58 languages." -Web site

Streaming film on Kanopy

Finding Library Resources Near You

Taking classes remotely this year? Here is a tutorial on how to find resources at a library near you!

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Local Resources and Organizations

A handful of links to local resources and organizations here in the Twin Cities to help kick-start your research process.

Quatrefoil Library
A special, independent not-for-profit library focused on collecting materials related to LGTBQ interests and concerns. Their mission is to collect, maintain, document and circulate gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer materials and information in a safe and accessible space.
Eastside Freedom Library
The ESFL’s mission is to inspire solidarity, advocate for justice and work toward equity for all. The library houses non-circulating research collections that appeal to interested general learners as well as scholars, with innovative databases and finding aids that make using the collections fun and vital.
The Advocates for Human Rights
The mission of The Advocates for Human Rights is to implement international human rights standards to promote civil society and reinforce the rule of law.
Planned Parenthood
Planned Parenthood is one of the nation’s leading providers of high-quality, affordable health care, and the nation’s largest provider of sex education.
Office on the Economic Status of Women
The Office on the Economic Status of Women (OESW) advises the legislature and provides information and statistics on women in Minnesota. The office gathers information on population characteristics, educational attainment and enrollments, marital and parental status, household characteristics, labor force status and employment characteristics, and basic information on women's legal and economic rights.
Women’s Initiative for Self Empowerment, Inc.
The mission of WISE is to empower immigrant women and girls to succeed. WISE envisions a future where immigrant women and girls will be honored for their wisdom, celebrated for their leadership, and empowered to create change in their lives and their communities.
MN Transgender Health Coalition
The Minnesota Transgender Health Coalition is committed to improving health care access and the quality of health care received by trans and gender nonconforming people through education, resources, and advocacy.
Tubman
Safety. Hope. Healing. Those three words are at the heart of Tubman’s mission. For more than 40 years, we’ve worked to advance opportunities for change so that every person can experience safety, hope, and healing.

Saint Paul Public Library

St. Paul Public Library has more than 42,000 ebooks and 300 audiobooks that you can check out online, including an extensive fiction collection.

As a Macalester College student, you can use the college's address to sign up for an E-card to allow you to use online resources from the St. Paul Public Library at https://sppl.org/ecard. Once you've registered, you can borrow and download ebooks and audiobooks to view on an e-reader, computer, or mobile device.

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Guide

Research & Instruction Librarian

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