Phil Tiemeyer, Ph.D., will discuss the history of male flight attendants at 4:30 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 6 in Honors Hall on Lycoming College campus. Tiemeyer is the author of “Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants.”
In his book, Tiemeyer traces gender roles over the past nine decades starting with the founding of the profession in the late 1920s. He examines the hardships male flight attendants faced at work, paying particular attention to the conflation of gender-based, sexuality-based, and AIDS-based discrimination. He also notes how male flight attendants facilitated key breakthroughs in gender-based civil rights law, including an important expansion of the ways that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act would protect workers from sex discrimination.
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Equality Affinity Community Housing (EACH) group. EACH is one of several residential campus communities formed as part of a new program in which students and faculty explore thematic academic interests beyond formal classroom boundaries.