Profile
Joe Baez is an Adjunct Lecturer in Women and Gender Studies. Joe is a PhD candidate in the American Studies department at George Washington University, Washington D.C., Columbian College of Arts & Sciences. In 2018, she received her BA in Women’s and Gender Studies and Political Science from CUNY Brooklyn College. She earned her MA in American Studies from the George Washington University in 2021. She is a former Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, a former CUNY Pipeline fellow, and an alumnus of the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers’ (IRT) summer internship program.
In her dissertation, tentatively titled “‘Blessed Are the Hot, Fat Girls’: The Aesthetics of Black, Brown, Fat Femme-ininity,” Baez examines how fat women and fat trans femmes of color represent themselves in the arts and media. Her project begins from the premise that fat women and fat femmes of color are made to feel ashamed of their bodies because of racist, misogynistic, fatphobic stigmas ascribed to them. In her chapters, she looks at the artists Laura Aguilar, Mark Aguhar, Yesika Salgado, and TS Madison Hinton.Baez is currently a Dissertation Research Fellow with the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+). More recently, she served as a faculty member for the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers’ Summer Workshop. In 2022, Baez was a Summer Pedagogy Fellow with BBQ+. As a scholar, Joe dreams of radically transforming the ways we love ourselves, our bodies, and each other.