Name Kaitlyn Regehr | ||
Kaitlyn Regehr and Matilda Temperley on "The League of Exotic Dancers"
Kaitlyn Regehr is a Canadian scholar of gender, media and cultural studies, a writer and broadcaster, who serves as a lecturer at the University of Kent. She is best known to the public as a presenter of documentary programs on Canada’s the Slice Network and as a topic specialist for BBC World, as well as through her popular publications.
Contents
- Kaitlyn Regehr and Matilda Temperley on The League of Exotic Dancers
- Early Life and Work
- Virally and Digital Feminism
- Current Work
- References
Her current work focuses on digital activism and women's presence online. Regehr's book, "The League of Exotic Dancers" (Oxford University Press), on one of the first sex workers’ unions in America, was published with photographer Matilda Temperley was published in May of 2017.
Early Life and Work
Regehr was born on April 29th 1985 in Toronto, Canada. Her mother, Cheryl Regehr is the Vice President and Provost of the University of Toronto. Her father is British born psychiatrist, Graham Glancy who has worked on notable cases including the Paul Bernardo case, and has served as president of both the Canadian and American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
After receiving a bachelor's degree in theatre at the University of Victoria in 2007, Regehr went on to train with the Moscow Art Theatre and study Russian Physical Theatre at the Stanislavsky Summer School Harvard University.
Around this time she was also working as one of the original fitness instructors at the groundbreaking Flirty Girl Fitness Studio in Toronto, where she first began teaching workshops that focus on women's empowerment through dance. These workshops allowed her to form new philosophies on modern feminism. Her interests drove her to pursue a joint master's degree from Britain's esteemed King's College London and the world-renowned Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Completed in 2010, her thesis, which was published in the journal Sexuality & Culture in 2012, explores the rise of recreational burlesque and questions the connection and distinctions between objectification and empowerment.
Sandwiching her time as a master's student, Regehr starred as a presenter on the popular Slice Network (Canada) and Bio Network (UK) television series Re-Vamped (Entertainment One), which examined historic forms of beauty, body type and dance forms.
Regehr returned to King's College London to work on a doctorate and graduated in 2016. Her doctoral project was an ethnographic study of a group of former exotic dancers, who unionised in 1955, and now live and perform as an ageing community in Las Vegas. The project examined both the gendered and identity politics present in the dancers’ relationship to their ageing bodies, as well as their previous experiences during the demise of the burlesque theatre and the subsequent transition in both space and social construction, as dancers moved from stage to strip club in the 1960s - 1980s. Among the outcomes of this study were a feature documentary film on burlesque queen “Tempest Storm”, which she wrote and produced and was released on iTunes and ARTE (FR); a chapter in a forthcoming book (Oxford University Press); and monograph (Oxford University Press).
Regehr is also the creator, producer and director of a pin-up calendar featuring women who live with or who have survived breast cancer: "Pink Ribbon Pin-Upsfor the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation." Her observations from this project were published in her paper "Pink Ribbon Pin-Ups: Photographing Femininity after Breast Cancer" in the journal Culture, Health and Sexuality.
Virally and Digital Feminism
In 2015, Regehr reported an assault which occurred on a West London bus on social media. This viral, and heavily publicised incident sparked her recent work with Jessica Ringrose (University College London) surrounding contemporary digital feminism and social media campaigns responding to sexual assault and rape culture. Regehr has gone on to serve as a topic specialist for BBC World on these themes.
Additionally, building off previous work on the survivors of sexual violence- such as her paper, "Let Them Satisfy Their Lust on Thee: Titus Andronicus as a Window into Societal Understanding of PTSD" for Traumatology - Regehr is currently working on a variety of projects in this area. Included is a study, conducted with her mother, Dr. Cheryl Regehr, on fame and sexual violence, as well as developing a project based off narrative research and storytelling around the definition of consent.
Current Work
Regehr continues to contribute to both academic and mainstream media. She is presently working on her second book with photographer Jessica Earnshaw on the criminalisation of midwives in twenty-three US states and the intensification surrounding the politics of women's bodies in the Trump era. She is also working on a documentary project that draws from her upbringing as a child of a ”clink shrink” and takes a narrative and personal approach to presenting the professionals who analyze the world’s most notorious sex offenders. The series has sparked an ethnographic project, "Murder at the Dinner Table: Narratives From the Children of Forensic Professionals", which was presented at the International Academy of Law and Mental Health in Prague in 2017.