Frederick King

Faculty, Management

I said, ‘If I’m going back to school, I’m not going to do anything practical. I’m going to do something I love.’

I grew up in Saint John, New Brunswick in the shadows of the pulp and paper mill on one side of town and the second-largest refinery in North America on the other. And I was getting asthma in the middle. It’s one of those places where you don’t feel like you’re ever going to be able to leave. One of the reasons I went to grad school in Ontario was to get out of that. I was in my early 30s and it was like 'I need to see the world from a different perspective' and that really helped.

I came from a very low-income, very poor background. My father was a butcher, my mother worked as a waitress for most of her life, very working class, big Irish-Catholic families. On my mother’s side, I’m the third person to ever get a university degree and the first person on my father’s side. So they had no clue what a university degree meant and all they understood and therefore all I understood at 17 was 'Oh, if I get a business degree, then I get to wear a white collar and carry a briefcase and work at a bank, and that means I’ll make lots of money and I won’t have to do all the physical labour and break my back the way my parents had to all their lives.'

My original degree is actually in business administration. But then I didn’t want to go into business, so I ended up working in social work for a number of years. I was a case manager for a number of years for social assistance clients in New Brunswick. I did a lot of other jobs, a lot of contract work, a lot of precarious employment, and the precarity of it made me decide that I wanted to go back to school. But I said, ‘If I’m going back to school, I’m not going to do anything practical. I’m going to do something I love.’ So that was English. I went to Western and did a Masters and PhD in English Literature and studied that. My dissertation involves things like book history and queer theory and Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley and all these strange authors and artists. I loved every minute of it.

I struggled with the word queer for a long time because anytime I heard it, it was usually followed by turning around and seeing a rock being thrown at my head. I’m from an era when it was still used as a slur. It still is used as a slur but it has been reclaimed. I studied queer theory, so I understand the value of that. I would never personally identify as queer. I identify as gay, but it's a language thing. And that’s another communication thing, I was teaching a class in Ontario and we were talking about the ephemerality of terminology . . . Just because one person likes a term doesn’t mean that it’s meant to reflect you. You’re not required to use it. Let other people do what makes them comfortable. Twenty years from now there’s going to be words that you’re using at the moment that your kids or the next generation is going to completely reject because the language will change. It’s always evolving in terms of how we read these different expressions of what we are and the languages changes.

A colleague and I are trying to write a book on decadence and postmodernism and history because decadence and postmodernism have a lot in common in terms of looking at the margins of history. And queers have to do that because history excludes you. So you end up creating a history that isn’t necessarily . . . you know, it’s based on the facts and the documents that existed in history, but more so than other things that are readily available, you kind of have to create and infer and suppose what may have happened in many cases. And through that you end up having a conversation about history where history is in the middle of it and all the documents are there but it’s actually some sort of new creation that’s just wild and interesting and fun.

What I’m interested in here at Dal is how I can take the research I’m doing and find its relevance to everyday life. So teaching communication here, I find I’m working with first- and second-year students who are trying to mold themselves into something that an employer will hire for a co-op and oftentimes they’re trying to become a thing before they’ve even figured out who they are yet. I’m interested in figuring out how I can take the individuality of Oscar Wilde and use that to inspire students to develop a brand that isn’t just what an employer’s looking for but is actually reflective of who they are.

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