Jackie Schoemaker Holmes PhD

In my almost 20 years of studying, teaching, and researching empowerment, I have dedicated myself to helping women and marginalized communities locate their power, purpose, and potential. When I became a mother, my focus intensified because my entire world fell apart. My book, Eating Her Young: Poems for the Disruption of Motherhood, tells this story. This work has become my calling and now my personal and professional collide in my empowerment work with mothers, helping them in their empowerment journey by providing the space and the enabling guidance to tell their truths and to live their most realized and contented lives.

As a Sociologist, my teaching and research expertise centres around critical feminist sociology where I have undertaken in-depth, ground-breaking work on the sexual politics of nude public spaces (beaches), to complex constructions of self and other in the power dynamics of online dating, to gendered fat phobia in online spaces and the implication of health at every size to disable systems of power, and of course, a critical interrogation of the oppression of motherhood in contemporary society.

This varied work in gender and sexuality has given me a deeper understanding of the complex contexts of the lives and identities of women and mothers. Through this lens, I have successfully helped women from diverse backgrounds and circumstances reclaim their lives through evidence-based practices that result in the experience of greater self-love and self-compassion, more confidence, effectiveness and assertiveness, and more gentleness and ease with themselves and the world.