Gender Conference

Anna Deavere Smith, actress, playwright and Stanford professor, will kick-off the three-day Gender as Performance Conference in a performance on Thursday, October 22. Smith has been hailed as "the most exciting individual in American theater" by Newsweek. In her one woman performance of Snapshots: Glimpses of America in Change, she portrays Reginald Denny, the white truck driver beaten into a coma during the L.A. riots, and Mrs. Huhn, a Korean shopkeeper who lost her store. See Calendar for more information. (photo compliments UPE)

October 22-24, 1998 California State University, Chico's Center for Multicultural and Gender Studies is hosting a conference on Gender As Performance. Bringing together the theorists on gender construction with performers who play with gender, the three-day program kicks off with Anna Deavere Smith, black actress and Stanford professor. Friday morning Sue-Ellen Case, theatre professor at U.C., Davis and well-known scholar in the field of queer studies, will discuss gender in cyberspace; with her will be Pat Oleszko, performance artist who critiques various uses/abuses of the female body in sculptures and costumes.

A sample of numerous other presenters includes transgender activist Kate Bornstein; Loren Cameron, noted San Francisco photographer, who will present her transformation from a woman to a man documented in writings and photographs; Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante, Cuban intellectuals, performers, and activists, who demonstrate in humorous and in-your-face ways, the uses of the Latina body by colonizers of all stripes in a multimedia show Stuff.

For more information, contact either Carol Burr, x4131 (e-mail cburr@oavax.csuchico.edu), or Elizabeth Renfro, x6319 (erenfro@oavax.csuchico.edu).