Article 23: Pandemic Academic Parenting: Finding the Radically Queer Within Our Mundane, Monotonous, and Sometimes Homonormative Experiences

As scholars, the pandemic threw our usual work routines into a whirlwind. As parents of children under two, our teaching, research, and service had to take a backseat to caretaking, something none of us were used to doing, especially while working full time. Additionally, as queer parents, we also felt that our experiences were different from the op-eds published about the experiences of working mothers during the pandemic (e.g., Cooper 2020). Here, we—two cisgender lesbians and one nonbinary queer person, all white and employed as assistant professors—describe how our identities as academics and queer gestational parents of young children were, and continue to be, impacted by the pandemic. At the time of writing, the United States has been facing this crisis for approximately 11 months and we are all struggling to cope. Though we are at different institutions in different areas of the country (a public liberal arts university in the rural Midwest, a public research university in the southwest, and a private federally chartered university in the mid-Atlantic), and work in different fields (teacher education, counselor education, and psychology) our lives during the pandemic illustrate similarities between queer academic parents. We thank the Motherscholar Collective, of which we are members, for support during the pandemic as parents and scholars.