AMES faculty research and teaching adopt multi-disciplinary approaches to exploring themes of gender and sexuality from cross-cultural perspectives, about and beyond the regions of Asia and the Middle East. Faculty are committed to the study of a range of questions raised by the socially, legally, and culturally constructed and lived categories of gender beyond male and female biological anatomy. The program includes various courses that investigate the power dynamics of gender and sexual difference, roles, socialization, inequality and violence, and empowerment, grounded in historical, theoretical, material, and cross-cultural conditions. Faculty explore a range of approaches such as feminist theory and women's studies; transnational and third-world feminisms; construction of femininity and masculinity; gay, lesbian, queer, transgender and transsexual studies; intersectionality of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religion and geopolitics; and the nexus of gender and science.