Renowned Gender Studies Speaker Jackson Katz Kicks Off Fordham American Studies’ Campaign 2016 Lecture Series

Just days after the first presidential debate, Fordham students filled up every seat of room 302 in the Lincoln Center campus’ School of Law building on Thursday, Sept. 29, to hear award-winning scholar Dr. Jackson Katz’s lecture, “Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity.”

Katz, a renowned educator, author, and filmmaker, was invited to speak at Fordham as a part of the American Studies Fall Campaign 2016 Speaker Series. The series, which is co-sponsored by the Communications and Media Studies department, will attempt to help students understand the role played by social factors such as race and gender, according to American Studies Program Director Dr. Micki McGee.

“There was this great enthusiasm to come up with a Campaign or Election 2016 program that would be a series of events focused on the issues raised by this exceptionally unusual campaign season,” McGee said.

In addition to Katz, McGee said that the department plans to bring in “two or three other speakers talking about the issues of race, ethnicity and citizenship, the questions that are so important to the national election going on.”

“It seemed to me that the question of masculinity, which is so often invisible to us as a culture, is so visible in this election. I think most people cannot miss it in the Trump candidacy,” said Dr. Amy Aronson, a professor of the Communications and Media Studies department who helped to organize the event. “It’s furthered by the fact that his opponent is the first woman candidate.”

The lecture was based on his book of the same name, which was released earlier this year. During the speech, Katz said that the original version of the book had been written before Donald Trump became the Republican nominee, but was reworked to include him once Katz realized that Trump was garnering much more public support than expected.

Katz’s lecture focused on the role of masculinity in politics throughout American history and cited several examples of former presidential candidates being judged for their masculinity, as well as instances where presidential candidates attacked their opponents’ masculinity as a campaign strategy. He examined at Trump’s campaign strategies since the primaries, and highlighted the Republican nominee’s tendency to flaunt his own masculinity while undermining that of his opponents.

Katz noted the increased role masculinity plays in the 2016 presidential election in particular, as this is the first presidential election to feature a woman as a major party’s nominee.

“So much of this is about white male identity politics,” he said.

The presentation also attempted to explain many American voters’ support for Donald Trump, despite his many controversies.

“People equate the decline of the U.S. with the decline of white male centrality,” Katz said. “There’s a notion that we’ve lost something in the U.S. There’s this romantic idea of America, and people want to go back to that.”

“We have the choice,” Katz said at the conclusion of the lecture. “Do we want to put white men back on central stage again or do we live in a diverse society where women and men and people of color and white people all share in the political governance of the country?”

When asked if the event was purposely scheduled to take place the same week as the first presidential debate between Clinton and Trump, Aronson said, “We had a couple of possible dates when he was available to come and we ended up selecting this one because we thought it would be really powerful for students to hear what he had to say within a week of this first debate.”

The next lecture in the Campaign 2016 Speaker Series is scheduled for Oct. 26.