For Immediate Release:  March 8, 2006
Contact:  Alisa Giardinelli     
(610) 690-5717     
http://www.swarthmore.edu/news/

Sager Symposium in Gay and Lesbian Studies
to Be Held at Swarthmore College March 23-26

Speakers, performance artists, and films make up the 18th annual Sager Symposium on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies, to be held at Swarthmore College from Thursday, March 23, through Sunday, March 26.  The symposium is free and open to the public.

"This year, we want to explore the ways in which people's sexual practices set them apart from the mainstream, whether or not they identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer," says symposium co-coordinator Harris Kornstein '06.  "The purpose is to expand the Swarthmore community's understanding of what it means to be 'queer,' and to suggest that perhaps 'normal' as a category for sex or for people doesn't truly exist."

Speakers include Siobhan Brooks, an expert on women of color in the sex worker industry, who will speak on respectability, nationalism, and queer politics within the black community. New York University professor Lisa Duggan will discuss how, during the past decade, organized gay politics in the U.S. and Europe have moved rightward. Tristan Taormino, award-winning editor of lesbian erotica, and Laura Kipnis, cultural critic, theorist, and professor of media and cultural studies at Northwestern University, will also speak.

For more information and a detailed schedule, visit the symposium web site at
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/org/sager/.

The Sager Fund was established at Swarthmore in 1988 by Richard Sager '73. The symposium is designed to combat homophobia and related forms of discrimination.