Nov 18, 6:00 PM: "Regarding Susan Sontag": Film Screening and Discussion with ...

The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Chicago Women’s Alliance and the UChicago LGBT Alumni Network will co-host a special event this fall: A screening of the film "Regarding Susan Sontag" followed by a discussion led by Professor Deborah Nelson. The event will bring together UChicago alumnae/i interested in gender, feminist and LGBTQ studies to explore the life and work of the famous writer, filmmaker and political activist, Susan Sontag, AB’51 who is among UChicago’s best known alumni. REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG is an intimate and nuanced investigation into the life of one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the 20th century. Passionate and gracefully outspoken throughout her career, Susan Sontag became one of the most important literary, political and feminist icons of her generation. Her 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp” made her reputation as a cultural critic. This documentary explores Sontag’s life through evocative experimental images, archival materials, accounts from friends, family, colleagues, and lovers, as well as her own words, read by actress Patricia Clarkson. From her early infatuation with books and her first experience in a gay bar; from her marriage in adolescence to her last lover, REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG is a fascinating look at a towering cultural critic and writer whose works on photography, war, illness, and terrorism still resonate today. Deborah Nelson, Associate Professor, Department of English Nelson studies late twentieth-century U.S. culture and politics, and her interests include American poetry, novels, essays, and plays; gender and sexuality studies; photography; autobiography and confessional writing; American ethnic literature; poetry and poetics; and Cold War history. She is completing the manuscript for a book, Tough Broads, which explores the unsentimental, rigorous, and often "heartless" view of pain (to borrow a term from Hannah Arendt) in the work of some of the twentieth-century's most prominent women artists and intellectuals. Her first book, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, examined the discourse of privacy beginning with its emergence as a topic of intense anxiety in the late 1950s. Professor Nelson served as Deputy Provost for Graduate Education from 2011-14 and as Faculty Director of the CSGS (then the Center for Gender Studies) from 2006-09. More on Sontag’s legacy and UChicago: http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2015/01/12/exploring-life-and-legacy-susan-sontag-uchicago-and-beyond Part of the 20th Anniversary Series at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Co-hosted with the University of Chicago LGBT Alumni Network and the Chicago Women's Alliance.

Date: November 18, 2015
Time: 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

See:https://www.facebook.com/events/1670599039827110/