Episode 26: Resilience: Queer Professors from the Working Class

This is an anthology with 14 chapters written by professors who are from the working class and queer.

And overall, the professors featured in this book are older.

They're from perhaps the silent generation.

baby boomer generation, not really too far below that.

And so it gives some perspective on older generations trying to fit into this academic work environment that is really structured for people like my father who are straight white men, middle class, and from previous generations.

And so one of my interests is how the academic institution as an occupational workplace is changing, especially as it tries to incorporate new demographics of professors into the workplace.

And so I thought this book was really interesting.

I do think it is good that we get this historical perspective because these are generations where, you know, it was really scary to come out as queer.

Some of these folks were raised in the 50s, in the 60s, in the 70s, where, you know, they faced real discrimination within their families and within the workplace that perhaps, you know, my generation, Gen X, or millennials don't face as much of.

In this book, there were only two people of color, two men, black men, and so one of them is the co-author and one of them is another featured author in the book, and so it didn't include any women of color, immigrant women, and it also didn't have any transgender or bisexual people.

So these were just like white men, white women, lesbians, gay men.

So, of course, one of the overall themes that all of the participants wrote about was just their family life, of course, growing up, discovering their queer, discovering their academic abilities, their interest in reading.

and how that might have marginalized themselves from their educational community as children in grade school, children in high school.

And plenty of them, of course, suffered major discrimination, stigma, prejudice from their own family members.

So a lot of them really had to keep their queer identity secret from their family and even distance themselves from their family.

So going away to college was really this moment of freedom where they could explore their sexuality, they could really embrace their academic identity, and they could really thrive within an educational environment.

Of course, all of them talked about growing up working class and the culture that that contributed to their lifestyle, to their perspective, and how they felt that the working class background that they had was really at odds with the academic environment that they were trying to fit in.

And so they all went into detail about this kind of disconnect between how they've been raised, working class, what that means, what work looks like, you know, hard work, working on the farm, doing manual labor, and then how that contrasts to academic intellectual labor.

and how, in a lot of ways, manual labor, of course, is a lot more satisfying.

At the end of the day, you can really see what you've accomplished, whereas academic labor is really elusive and hard to really feel good about, feel productive about.