Acknowledgements
The funding and support required to adapt this online textbook was made possible by an Open Educational Resources stipend from the Universities of Wisconsin, and in-kind support from the Department of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (RGSS) at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. The original source textbooks are credited in the title page. Melina Packer, Ph.D., adapted these source texts in 2025 for RGS 100: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Class, an introductory, general education course at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, which enrolls approximately 800 students per semester.
In the past, RGSS has assigned textbooks which cost approximately $70 per book. Many students, including the parenting and working-class students who attend UWL, experience financial hardship in purchasing such expensive required texts. In addition, the intersectional and interdisciplinary content of this course is unique and we felt could not be found in any single existing textbook currently on the market. In recent years, some department faculty have supplemented traditional textbooks with e-reserves for assigned course readings. While more accessible, students and faculty agree that this approach tends to lack the structure found in a textbook, as students are missing an anchoring reference text, and moreover can create inequitable differences across teaching sections. This situation prompted us to adapt an open-source textbook that reflects the interdisciplinarity of our field, creates more consistency between different faculty-taught sections of RGS 100, allows faculty to make timely changes in content, and is freely available to our students.
While this textbook draws from and engages with the interdisciplinary fields of ethnic and racial studies as well as gender and sexuality studies, it reflects the disciplinary expertise of the original authors (across multiple OER source textbooks), who are mostly social scientists. This is both a strength and weakness of the text, as it provides a strong sociological approach but does not cover the entire range of work in the field, such as that from humanistic scholars.
We would like to continue the practice of having our students access online content available in the Universities of Wisconsin Pressbooks directory free of charge and hope this resource will be useful to anyone interested in learning more about the rich, vibrant, and urgent fields of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
