Congratulations to Katelyn Dykstra Dykerman, a second-year PhD student in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at The University of Manitoba and the current winner of Lambda’s Les McAfee Memorial Award. She tells us: “My current research engages questions regarding the eugenic treatment of LGBTI+ peoples but instead of focusing on historical eugenics, as I have done in my previous research, I discuss current debates regarding LGBTI+ people in the realm of genetics. I focus particularly on contemporary debates surrounding the medical treatment of intersex conditions and how these treatments can and do mirror the exclusionary practices of historical eugenics in an effort to construct clear, and normalized, bodily categories of sex, gender, and sexuality.”
Katelyn is a member of the Queer Biopolitics research cluster at the Institute for the Humanities, as well as a casual contributor to Notches: (Re)marks on the History of Sexuality Blog. She is also actively involved in graduate student politics both at the departmental and larger institutional level. Her research interests include queer theory, biopolitics, and early 20th century literature.