Alyson Hoy, PhD
Alyson Hoy, PhD
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Biography
Biography
Alyson holds a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of British Columbia and a Master’s degree in Women and Gender Studies from York University.
Working at the intersections of memoir writing and queer theories of feeling and embodiment, her writing explores themes of queer identity, anorexia, self-harm, sex, and trauma.
Alyson is a vocational rehabilitation counsellor at Canadian Mental Health Association, where she supports individuals with multiple barriers to employment to find meaningful pathways to work, education, and recovery. A queer-identified person with lived experience of eating disorders, Alyson is a writer and advocate for eating disorders awareness and prevention and has been a volunteer in the Hand in Hand program at Looking Glass Foundation for Eating Disorders.
She lives with her partner, JT, and two cats – Lily and Tuna – in Vancouver, BC.
Writer and Independent Scholar
Writer and Independent Scholar
~ Selected work ~
~ Selected work ~
Forthcoming book
This book asks what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s queer theory might offer for thinking about current mental health crises among queer individuals in Canada and specifically the experience of eating disorders.
Weaving queer theories of feeling and embodiment with the author’s own memoirs and critical essay, this book disrupts “objective” medicalized and pathologized accounts of mental illness by turning the focus inward, tracing queer feeling, queer subjectivity, and queer embodied presence.
There are chapters on the queer temporalities of eating disorders, identification and illness, queer childhood and precocious development, and the haunting of the starving body.
Grappling still with the hard facts of research that show that queer persons in Canada experience significantly higher rates of eating disorders and attempting suicide compared to their heterosexual and cisgender peers (www.nedic.ca ), the book, as a whole, underscores the significance of these facts as related to stigma and experiences of bullying and discrimination, or what Sedgwick describes as the “spiralling violence of gay-and lesbian-bashing” (1993, p. 3).
Throughout, Sedgwick’s work represents a touchstone for thinking that both informs the author’s writing on queering eating disorders and her belief that reading and writing queer books saves lives.
Chapter: “Haunted by Real Life: Art, Fashion, and the Hungering Body” in Canadian Curriculum Studies: A Metissage of Inspiration / Imagination / Interconnection
Chapter: “Teaching/Depression as a Queer Theory for Living” in Re/Imagining Depression: Creative Approaches to “Feeling Bad.”
Dissertation: "Trauma and the elsewhere of queer: autobiography and the erotics of haunting”
Article: “Feeling at Home in My Body: My Personal Revolution”, National Eating Disorders Association
Article: “Reconfiguring Recovery”, Looking Glass Foundation for Eating Disorders
Article: “Some Reflections on Recovery”, Looking Glass Foundation for Eating Disorders
Article: “On Learning to Rest and Not to Quit - Alyson's Story”, Outrun the Stigma
Article: "A Queer Pandemic” in Untethered Vol. 6.1
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