Hillbilly energy: from middle-school dropout to academic tenure

There have been times when Georgiann Davis felt that “sociologists are some of the most hypocritical people I have ever met”.

Part of the explanation can be found in her remarkable new book, Five Star White Trash: A Memoir of Fraud and Family, which traces her startlingly unconventional journey from obese middle-school dropout to associate professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico.

A better grounding in grade school would certainly have helped her. Even before she was 13, Davis was obliged to take responsibility for managing the payroll in the family ice-cream business “with only a calculator and an IRS [Internal Revenue Service] publication guide”. Then again, such a business was never likely to succeed given her family’s spectacular, criminal dysfunction.

Her brother punctured a fellow pupil’s lung while still at school and has been in trouble with the law ever since. Her mother, meanwhile, tried to steal her identity several times and ended up in jail alongside a child murderer. And although she took her mother in after her release, the latter’s behaviour was so enraging that she threw her out again even while her mother was undergoing chemotherapy.

The details of her predicament are horribly compelling even as she tries to situate them in a wider sociological context. Davis sees her book as “a research-driven memoir. Everyone has a story to tell. I wanted to use sociological knowledge to make sense of mine.” Yet it was hard for her to “study social problems as an outsider coming in with a magnifying glass or a notebook. My family, friends and I have experienced some of these issues. I’m in the weeds.”

Nevertheless, it was ultimately “more freeing” to write from personal experience. “It reaches more people and brings sociocultural ideas to a broader audience,” she told Times Higher Education. “I’m kind of bored with books which say ‘Here’s my theory. Here are my methods. Here is how I collected my data. Here’s my analysis and findings.’”

Five Star White Trash is certainly very far from the typical scholarly monograph. It is full of sharp sociological insight but is utterly lacking in any kind of academic decorum. It offers a vivid account of what it is like to be part of a family that “used credit cards to go on elaborate Caribbean vacations and buy real fur coats...We were white, but not the right kind of white. We were five star white trash. We had borrowed money and tried to use it to buy class.”

It also describes the horrific experience of being intersex at a time when both doctors and families would typically decide on a sex and then operate on the child accordingly without explaining why. Davis has since become an activist and expert in the field, publishing a 2015 book titled Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis.

Her memoir offers a vividly unvarnished account. When she was almost 12 and suffering acute abdominal pain, we read, her mother assumed it was “a sign that I was about to get my first period. She brought me to the washroom and used toilet paper to wipe herself. She showed me her discharge, asking me if I had something similar. I didn’t, and I remember being quite disgusted with her nonchalant presentation of bodily fluid.”

After undergoing “stomach stapling” to address her ongoing and related issues around weight, Davis experienced acute pain when food got stuck in her narrowed stomach passageway, which she could only relieve by vomiting. Hence, she tells us, she grew “increasingly comfortable throwing up in public in front of anyone, and everywhere from a crowded parking lot to in the car at a red light. The bag my fast food came in often doubled as my vomit bag. I also went through many rolls of duct tape using it as a makeshift belt to hold up my shorts and pants that didn’t have belt loops.”

She later resorted to over-the-counter pills, which meant – such was her desperation to lose weight – that she would “get excited every time I had to take a shit because the medication minimizes the amount of fat the body absorbs while eating and expels it through greasy bowel movements”.

Although she dropped out of school at the age of 12, largely to help out her needy mother, Davis always had a passion for education.

As a small child, she told THE, she “would line up all my stuffed animals and dolls and reteach everything I had learned in class. I really felt drawn to go into education.” Her memoir describes how she began taking courses in a community college, initially in remedial writing and mathematics, as soon as she was able to. (She now teaches regression analysis to her students and has even co-authored a textbook on statistics.) She became fascinated by sociology and went on to acquire associate, bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees, and eventually a tenure-track position.

For some of this period, she had to cope with the predictable problems of looking after her mother’s unhouse-trained dogs. After her doctorate, she also became the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ first-ever “professor-in-residence”, she noted, “and lived in the dormitory with the students. I was in my thirties living in a dorm! Colleagues would ask me why on earth I wanted to live in the dorm with students. I said: ‘Because I don’t have the privileges not to.’”

Back in 1997, before deciding to go back into education, she also worked as a clerical supervisor in the X-ray department of a hospital – as part of which, she had to put patients’ files into blue or pink folders depending on their sex. As a gender scholar, she is horrified by the reflection that, by doing so, she was upholding a view of sex as binary “that decades later I would teach my students is not only deeply flawed but also incredibly dangerous”. She is even embarrassed about her early enthusiasm for the sitcom Friends, “given the show’s rampant racism, anti-fatness, and transphobia”.

Yet her academic persona hasn’t entirely erased her earlier sensibilities. For instance, while she has become convinced that “prisons need to be replaced with community social services that do not enact racist and classist systems of punishment for social problems”, she can’t deny that she also still thinks the best place for her own brother is behind bars.

Still, there are other ways in which Davis feels that her “lived experience” enriches her research, rather than throwing up cognitive dissonance. In her work on intersex, for instance, she recalls a leading expert in the field, who was not herself intersex, being baffled by her idea of writing a paper about hair. Yet Davis “knew this could be an issue for people in the intersex community because I was living that experience. Many of the people I interviewed would talk about how their romantic partners would make comments about their body hair or lack thereof. It may sound like a trivial thing, but it showed me a piece of the puzzle which is not visible to someone who has not had that lived experience.”

Davis also feels that her effectiveness as an educator of her many first-generation students is enhanced by her ability to “relate to their boredom sitting in a lecture, their excitement and ambition, their annoyance with faculty. I see myself in them…Sometimes I feel about my colleagues: ‘You are so out of touch and disconnected from our students!’”

It is here that the alleged hypocrisy of sociologists comes in. Though they study social problems and understand inequality in theory, they often fail to act on that understanding, Davis believes. A good example is their frequent hostility to students who want to bring children into the classroom, which Davis considers “so rude and disconnected from the reality of our students’ lives. No one wants to bring their kid to class. They do so because their childcare fell through...And it’s not about letting their children have a play date while you’re teaching. For every student I’ve ever met, when a child acts up, they leave – and come back when the child has calmed down.”

Sometimes the children even follow what she is saying better than some of her students. She remembers logging one child aged seven or eight into an extra computer to allow him to play video games while she explained the notion of statistical significance. Unfortunately, this proved something of an uphill struggle that particular day: “When p is less than alpha, it’s significant,” she explained. “What is this one? No, it’s not significant! What is this one? Come on, folks.”

Eventually the little boy also got impatient, raised his hand and called out: “She’s said it so many times!”

Davis’ publisher is marketing Five Star White Trash as an “unflinching response” to US vice-president J. D. Vance’s celebrated 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Davis herself described it as “a queer response”.

Vance also wrote about “an upbringing filled with familial trauma, drug addiction and alcohol abuse”, she explained, and of “his hard work and determination to overcome the family he was born into”. She can relate to his stories of “having to tend to family issues while trying to focus on academic study and being pulled in different directions”. What she objects to is his failure to consider “how his race also shaped his experiences”.

Vance managed to find support from “mentors and colleagues, who just [saw him] as a working-class guy from Middle America trying to do better than [his] family. Yet such olive branches or helping hands are extended a lot more to white people than to people of colour.” Since most of Davis’ classes are mostly populated by first-generation students of colour, she feels that she “owes it to them to, yes, talk about the adversity I overcame to get where I am – and for many of them that’s inspiring – but also to acknowledge that my whiteness meant I had it differently from others”.

Her advice to those pursuing social mobility through higher education is to do their best to “find a ‘peer-plus’, who is slightly ahead of where you want to be, and who represents your aspiration or dream. Look up to them and go down the path they have already carved.” It is a suggestion that you might expect Vance to endorse, but, like others associated with the Trump administration, he sometimes seems now to “challenge the importance of education in people’s lives”, according to Davis. “It’s embarrassing. He wouldn’t have gotten to where he is now without education. Don’t forget where you came from, sure, but also don’t forget how you got to where you are.”

Equally objectionable to Davis are the conservative pundits who themselves benefited from an Ivy League education but now claim that “these so-called elite institutions are poisoning the general population”.

One of the MAGA right’s many gripes with universities is their supposed indoctrination of students with what it often refers to as “gender ideology” – with research into and even classroom discussion of gender issues increasingly being defunded or banned. As a result, Davis argues that people like her are now “in a very scary place…Someone like Trump doesn’t believe I even exist. People around him speak openly about sex being as simple as male and female. It’s simply not true in my body. It’s like saying ‘Gravity doesn’t exist’, just on a personal level.”

It is hard for her, she went on, to “separate the personal and professional, given that the type of work I do is very much what I call scholar activism. But I do feel threatened professionally as well [as personally] because at any time we could see universities cave in to political pressures from the administration” and crack down on this kind of scholarship. She also worries about the impact on colleagues of Trump’s threats to grant funding, though she is not herself “a grant-funded scholar”.

Yet she is “less nervous” than she might otherwise be by virtue of being based in “a blue state” (New Mexico) and at “a university which has been very protective of the type of scholarship we do”. While she is disturbed by the possibility of losing her job, “because I worked so hard to get where I am”, she also believes her background has provided her with crucial survival skills:

“Most academics follow a more traditional route and couldn’t pivot to do something else,” she said. “I would really be comfortable doing different things if I had to.”