Episode via Podbean: S1: E2 “Queer, Sober, and Academic: Unmasking Alcohol’s Hold on the Ivory Tower, a Chat with Dee”
Episode via YouTube: S1:E2 of Queerstories of Recovery on YouTube
Episode via Riverside FM: Queerstories of Recovery: Voices from the Margin, S1:E2 (Riverside FM)
“Lecture Off Tap, A Chat with Dee”
About the S1:E2
In this episode of Queerstories of Recovery: Voices from the Margin, I speak with doctoral candidate Dee about queer identity, recovery, and navigating academic spaces.
Dee discusses their ethnographic research on social media content creators who display and monetize hairy, non-normative bodies, using this work to challenge dominant beauty standards and highlight how gender, sexuality, and race shape bodily norms.
The conversation also reflects on Dee’s wider academic and activist work, including organizing symposiums, collaborating to address sexual assault on campus, working as a legislative assistant, and publishing research on LGBTQ educators and critical pedagogy.
Together, Dee and I connect these topics to the realities of queer sobriety and recovery in academia, discussing how scholars can bridge the personal and political while working to dismantle systems of oppression in education, media, and institutional culture.
About Dee, ABD
Dee has done work with ethnography, studying content creators who use social media to display and monetize their hairy, non-normative bodies.
As a doctoral candidate, Dee has organized symposiums, worked with Project IX to address sexual assault on campus, worked as a legislative assistant with Congresswoman Lois Frankel for an eight month appointment in DC as the 2017 Lindy Boggs Fellow, published a chapter about critical pedagogy and LGBTQ high school educators in a Bloomsbury compilation about Paulo Freire, and has taught Social Problems and Sociology of the Family.
As a lifelong educator and student, Dee is committed to bridging gaps between the public and private and addressing root causes of systemic issues. Whether working on issues around education, sexual violence, social media, or the role of hair in gender, racial, or sexual stratification, they strive to work with others to dismantle systems of oppression without reproducing structures of power.
Dee has been particularly interested in understanding and illuminating the experiences of middle and high school educators who openly identify as both LGBT and/or queer, and as practitioners of culturally relevant, social justice-oriented pedagogy in their work with marginalized youth.
To further explore these educators’ intersecting personal and teacher identities, Dee conducted semi-structured, qualitative interviews and engaged with theories of change and resistance in the classroom. Dee found that their participants acted as bridges for students along lines of race, class, sexuality, and gender, and that more studies are needed on both sociocultural impediments to educator efficacy and coming out/being outed in schools.