Gordene MacKenzie Bio

Gordene O. MacKenzie, Director of Women's and Gender Studies Program, Merrimack CollegeAward-winning feminist professor, gender activist, and author of Transgender Nation, Gordene chairs the growing Women’s and Gender Studies program at Merrimack College and lectures wildly on sex and gender, media politics, popular culture, film, and women’s studies. She also co-produced and co-hosted GenderVision video and GenderTalk radio.
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Gordene is a gender activist dedicated to social and environmental justice. A native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Dr. MacKenzie has been formally recognized for her teaching, research, and gender community work. A long-time researcher of transgender issues, she authored the visionary book “Transgender Nation,” as well as a number of articles, including “50 Billion Galaxies of Gender: Transgendering the Millennium,” published in Reclaiming Genders: Transsexual Grammars at the Fin de Siecle edited by Kate More and Stephen Whittle. She is currently working on a book about ranching women in the Southwest.
Gordene on Camera
In 2001 Gordene taught an upper level seminar titled “Gender, Sex and Society: Public and Private Bodies” in the Honors Program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, as well as courses on “Sociology of Gender” and “Sociology of Deviance” at Albuquerque’s Technical Vocational Institute. In 1985, Gordene founded the first transgender and cross-dresser support group in New Mexico. She co-directed the group and ran the TG help phone line for over seven years. In 1997, while serving as an assistant professor of Women’s Studies, Gordene developed and taught the first transgender studies course offered at the University of New Mexico. She has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Wyoming, and an adjunct professor at Antioch University. Gordene has been interviewed on many local and national radio and television programs, and she helped direct a documentary on women and violence for public television.

Gordene enjoys exploring the activist and natural world through the viewfinder of a video camera. In her first co-creation with her partner Nancy Nangeroni, she co-produced the music video In Memory of Rita, in remembrance of the candlelight vigil for murdered transwoman Rita Hester, an event that inspired the International Transgender Day of Remembrance. In 2010, she and Nancy produced Rally for Transgender Rights, a short film that played in the 2011 Boston Museum of Fine Arts GLBT Film Festival. She and Nancy also co-wrote a few gender detective short stories about 2 transvestite/drag queens, one born female and one born male, who investigate gender crimes.
Beaded Lizard, totem for her Albuquerque jewelry business
Gordene also works as a freelance editor, and has been a hypnotherapist, and co-owner (and designer) of a jewelry business in Albuquerque for over 20 years. In her spare time now, she writes and makes jewelry.
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