Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies program

Undergrad major Undergrad minor

Understand how social transformation is possible

Do you want to know how to understand problems of social, economic, racial, and gender inequality? Do you want to be part of the solution?

The Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies program is devoted to empowering students to think critically and intersectionally about race, gender, and sexuality, and to challenge inequitable structures. Alongside our students and communities, we advance critical conversations and movement toward social justice through teaching, research, service, and community engagement, including our pre-college Self Sufficiency Program. RGSS students understand themselves, their place in the world, and how social transformation is possible.

What is Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies?

RGSS is an interdisciplinary program that helps students understand the enormous diversity of the U.S. and a globalizing world, and the structures of inequality on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and social class that shape this world. Students uncover hidden histories that include experiences of discrimination and marginalization, as well as of resilience, resistance, and coalition building. In RGSS, we work with students to develop research and communication skills to help students creatively use the knowledge and practices of our discipline, preparing them for careers, advanced degrees, and engaged citizenship.

I loved that we had opportunities to choose where to invest our time and energy in the program; I had so many opportunities to tailor assignments to my interests, to write papers about topics that were especially compelling to me.

Carrie Bero

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Types of careers

RGSS prepares students for any career. Research shows that programs like ours develop future leaders who know how to advocate for others, and for themselves, in any workplace. RGSS students in any workplace know how to look critically at policies and practices, and ask: how could we do this better by being more inclusive? See testimonials from graduates on our homepage to learn how our grads are using their degrees.

What distinguishes UWL's Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program?

Interdisciplinary major and minor

This program is applicable to diverse fields and is open to students in any major across campus.

Hmong and Hmong American Studies Certificate

The Hmong and Hmong-American Studies Certificate offers an excellent opportunity for students to learn about this rich culture and history. Through a set of carefully-structured courses, students use a critical lens to explore topics related to Hmong studies.

Award-winning department for Inclusive Excellence

The RGSS Department plays a critical role in UWL's commitment to Inclusive Excellence, promoting racial and gender justice through our academic programs as well as through advocacy for students, faculty, and staff with marginalized identities. We make significant contributions to UWL's efforts in Inclusive Excellence, to attract and retain diverse students, faculty and staff and promote a dynamic learning environment vital for academic excellence and global citizenship.

Self-Sufficiency Program

This semester-long program concentrates on critical reading, writing, and thinking to prepare low-income people, often single parents, for successful college work. Classes meet one night per week and child care is provided. SSP also provides internship opportunities for women’s studies students.

Internship opportunities for students

The department encourages an facilitates student internships, including:

A long-standing “in-house” internship in the Self Sufficiency Program, designed to improve access to higher education for single-parents and other adults
In-house internships in the RGSS library, programming, or social media/marketing
Community internships, including, New Horizons, Bluff Country Family Resources, American Association of University Women, Greater La Crosse Area Diversity Council, Planned Parenthood, and the YWCA.

Additional learning and connecting experiences outside the classroom

RGSS faculty are committed to expanding the horizons of students beyond the classroom. Examples include:

Annual Civil Rights Pilgrimage, open to all students, in January term, exposing students to 10 historic Southern cities and more than 15 museums and historic sites over 10 days, anchored by faculty expertise.

Summer study abroad program to Japan.

Student mentoring: hands-on approach to helping students plan for academics, careers, and involvement, including links to community mentors.

Numerous connections to community experts in areas such as gendered violence prevention, some of whom offer “peer review” on student projects.

Campus programs and invited speakers: RGSS faculty work to bring in speakers from beyond the campus and invite campus leaders to speak on topics of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Connections to social justice programs and events across campus: RGSS helps connect students to resources to fuel their passions and meet their needs to create a sense of belonging and involvement, through relationships with areas like the Center for Transformative Justice, the Pride Center, and the Office of Multicultural Student Services.

RGSS Library: Adjacent to the RGSS office, this historic library of feminist, anti-racist, social justice literature provides a study resource as well as educational displays and a student-friendly study and gathering space.

Student club: Affiliated with RGSS, the College Feminists provide students as well as the La Crosse community with advocacy on women’s and gender issues, often collaborating with other clubs for educational activities as well as fun socializing.

Sample courses

RGS 310 Topics in Queer Studies This course offers students the opportunity to explore contemporary and historic issue through the lens of Queer studies and builds on the current Introduction to LGBT studies course in order to expand students' understanding of Queer history, activism, and/or theory. The course takes an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach through which students can build understanding of the connections between Queer studies and other fields. Department approval is necessary to apply more than three credits toward the RGS major/minor. Repeatable for credit - maximum nine. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. Offered Annually.

RGS 314 Race, Gender, and Sport Sport has long occupied a place at the heart of American culture and society. Organized athletics have also served as symbolic sites of protest, power, and inclusion for the nation's populations marginalized, oppressed, and discriminated against based on their racial, gender, and sexual identities. This course will explore the terrain of American sport in the twentieth century as a way to understand the profound impact that the phenomenon of athletic competition has had in the development of American race and gender relations. We will pay particular attention to how the racial, gender, and sexual identities of African American, Native American, Latino/a, and Asian American athletes shaped the purposes, participation, and meaning of sport. Moreover, we will delve into the events, icons, and cultural meanings of sports over the last century. Prerequisite: ERS 100 or RGS 100 or WGS 100. Offered Occasionally.

RGS 316 Gender, Sexuality, and Social Change in Religion This course examines the various gender roles, norms, mobility, restrictions and empowerment that people experience within religious traditions, for example: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Global case studies and engaging narratives focused on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and religion will be considered. Special attention will be paid to feminist laypersons and religious leaders who are reformulating traditional understandings and practices, and in turn, negotiating their agency within secular and spiritual spaces. Prerequisite: one of the following: ERS 100, RGS 100, RGS 150, WGS 100, WGS 130, WGS 150, SOC 110, SOC 120, EDS 206. (Cross-listed with RGS/SOC; may only earn credit in one department.) Offered Occasionally.

RGS 320 Violence and Gender This course will examine the connections between gendered violence and power distributions within our society using an interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective. Three specific types of violence and abuse will be examined in-depth: sexual harassment, intimate partner violence, and sexual assault. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. Offered Alternate Years.

RGS 328 Sex/Work In this course, students explore the topic of sex work. While course material will focus primarily on sex work in the United States, students also engage in comparative analyses in the international context. Participants in this course learn about the various types of labor that comprise sex work, as well as the different social, theoretical, feminist, regulatory, political, and legislative understandings and approaches to these forms of labor. Students also learn about the impacts that these understandings and approaches have on those engaged in these forms of labor and society more broadly, particularly as it relates to questions of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Prerequisite: one of the following: ERS 100, RGS 100, RGS 150, WGS 100, WGS 130, WGS 150, WGS 212, EDS 206, POL 205, PUB 210, SOC 110, SOC 120, SOC 150. Offered Fall - Odd Numbered Years.

RGS 373 Gender and Human Rights This course will provide an overview of transnational women's human rights movements in a variety of locations around the world; locations will vary with the instructor. Included in this overview will be the study of women's political participation as a human rights issue; women's bodily integrity as a human right; violence against women and reproductive sexual health and rights; human rights as a framework for social and economic and gender justice; and human rights as (quasi) legal accountability; UN agreements, treaties and venues of redress. Prerequisite: one of the following: ERS 100, RGS 100, RGS 150, WGS 100, WGS 130, WGS 150, EDS 206. Offered Fall - Odd Numbered Years.

RGS 409 20th Century Civil Rights Movement This course explores the modern civil rights movement in the US and the struggle for African Americans and other marginalized groups to gain equal rights in voting, education, employment, housing, and other facets of life in the US. It begins with the MOWM and examines the seemingly completing philosophies of civil rights organizations such as CORE, SNCC, SCLC, BPP, AIM, SDS, NCAI, YLP, RG, NOW, NBFO, the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, STAR and other civil rights organizations, leaders, and local people in shaping their own destinies. It highlights and interrogates major national and local political struggles rooted in racial, gender, and sexual identities and their reciprocal relationships with international political and anti-colonial movements from 1941 to the present. It concludes with exploring the link between convict leasing, prison reform movements, political prisoners, and the prison industrial complex as the New Jim Crow. Prerequisite: one of the following: ERS 100, RGS 100, WGS 100, EDS 206, HIS 210. (Cross-listed with HIS/RGS; may only earn credit in one department.) Offered Spring.

RGS 353 The Disability Experience in the Contemporary World Disability studies is a field of study which offers a critique of commonly held assumptions regarding oppressive binaries such as normal/abnormal, disabled/non-disabled, rational/irrational, human/subaltern, white/racialized, civilized/savage - binaries that are justified by claiming that they are rooted in irrefutable "scientific" fact. This course aims at fostering a critical conversation among race, class, gender and sexuality studies, transnationalism (or global studies) and disability studies. Offered Alternate Years.