Filmmaker keynotes Rider's 35th Gender and Sexuality Studies Colloquium

Documentary filmmaker Nancy Kates will offer the keynote address at Rider University’s 35th Gender and Sexuality Studies (GSS) Colloquium on Wednesday, March 29. Her keynote,  "A View from the Margins: Susan Sontag, Bayard Rustin and the Art of Documentary Filmmaking,” is scheduled for 1:30-2:30 p.m. in Sweigart Auditorium at Rider. The event is free and open to the public.

An independent filmmaker based in Berkeley, Calif., Kates has received national and international recognition for two recent films, Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) and Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (2003).

Sontag, an influential cultural critic and activist until her death in 2004, rarely alluded to her private relationships with women, including her 15-year partnership with the photographer Annie Leibovitz. That omission may have allowed greater acceptance of her intellectual criticism and activism. Bayard Rustin, the civil rights activist organized Martin Luther King Jr’s march on Washington in 1963, lived openly as a gay man but his sexual orientation resulted in suppression of his key role in King’s civil rights campaigns and made him subject to arrest, blackmail threats and sexual harassment. Rustin, who died in 1987, was recognized with a posthumous Medal of Freedom in 2013.

GSS will host a screening of Regarding Susan Sontag, followed by a panel discussion of the film, on Monday, March 27, from 6:30-9 p.m. in the Sweigart Auditorium. The screening, which is free and open to the public, offers a chance for the Rider community to view the film before Nancy Kates, its director, presents the keynote address at the 35th GSS Colloquium.

Kates’s documentaries on Sontag and Rustin explore how Rustin’s unwillingness to deny his sexual identity and Sontag’s unwillingness to reveal her sexual identity affected their acceptance as public figures. Kates, a member of the LGBTQ community herself, has discovered that documentary film offers a compelling medium for viewing significant cultural and historical figures marginalized by their sexual identities.

Rider’s 35th GSS Colloquium also offers five student panels comprised of papers, multimedia presentations and creative projects focused on issues of gender and sexuality across the disciplines.  All panels will be held in Sweigart Auditorium. Dr. Megan Titus, assistant professor of English, winner of the Sadie L. Ziegler-Bernice Gee award, and junior John Modica, winner of the Virginia J. Cyrus Scholarship, will also be recognized during the Colloquium.

The Ziegler-Bernice Gee award is presented annually to the person that has most significantly contributed to the effort to end discrimination based on gender and sexuality. The Virginia J. Cyrus Scholarship was established in honor of the founding director of the Women’s Studies Program and recognizes students who show academic promise of excellence and show potential to improve the status of women and girls through scholarship and/or activism.

University’s Gender and Sexuality Studies program explores the complex interactions among race, class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Courses in gender and sexuality studies explore the current debates on key issues such as reproductive rights, domestic partnerships, health, communication and law. Students taking courses in gender and sexuality studies benefit from understanding how gender, race, class, ethnicity and sexuality affect the way that individuals think and act.

Within the University, the Gender and Sexuality Studies program may be best understood as an evolution from the Women's Studies program, which offered its first courses at Rider in the fall of 1979. Since its inception, the name of the program has been changed on two occasions. In the spring of 2001, the name of the program became Gender Studies and in 2007 the name of the program became Gender and Sexuality Studies. These changes occurred in order to recognize formally the program's more comprehensive attention to gender and sexuality.

For more information, please contact Professor of English GSS Program Director Mary Morse at 609-895-5570 or [email protected].