Gettysburg College will host the Central Pennsylvania Consortium’s (CPC) annual Women’s Studies Conference, “Gender, Sexuality and Poverty,” on March 31. The women’s and gender studies programs at Dickinson, Franklin & Marshall, and Gettysburg will join together to sponsor scholars and speakers to discuss these issues so relevant to many people’s lives today.

Gettysburg Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGS) Prof. Nathalie Lebon said, “Anyone can attend, including folks from the greater Gettysburg community. We have scholars and graduate students from as far as California and even England, as well as undergraduate presenters and people from the community coming to speak this year.”

The keynote speaker will be Dean Spade, assistant professor of law at Seattle University School of Law. In 2002, Spade founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit organization providing free legal services to low-income transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people.

Every year, the WGS programs from CPC colleges choose a significant and thought-provoking topic related to women and gender issues. With the current economic situation and the financial difficulties faced by many women and other sexual minorities, poverty was chosen as the relevant 2012 subject.

“Discussions focused on unequal distribution of opportunities and resources between the 1% and the 99% highlighted by the Occupy Wall Street Movement make it even more timely,” Lebon said. “Now that all three of our programs are integrating sexuality in their curriculum more thoroughly, we thought it was important to highlight sexuality as well as gender in the way they affect people’s constraints, opportunities, and encounters with poverty.”

Gettysburg College students and professors will also be speaking, including profs Brendan Cushing-Daniels, Amy Young Evrard, Erin Fletcher, Heather Odle-Dusseau, Janet Powers, and students Allison Barrett ’12, Stephanie Gulden ’13, Elizabeth Rupert ’13, and Liz Stevenson ’12 as well as students recently participating in an immersion field trip, “Living with AIDS in America.”

The conference is free and open to the public. A comprehensive schedule of the conference events can be found at http://centralpennsylvaniaconsortium.org/.

Article by: Libby Conroy, office of communications and marketing intern
Contact: Nikki Rhoads, assistant director of communications, 717.337.6803