disclosures, identities, politics, academe
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Reading the critical memoirs thus far has been quite a humbling experience; thank you to all of you for being so open to the spirit of the assignment and of the writers we have been reading in class. Having begun many drafts of more concrete moment-based memoirs, in the end I offer you some disconnected thematic reflections.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 As I prepare for class and reread Samuels and Chen, I am thinking about the politics of identity and of disclosure: of the triumvirate race, class, and gender, to which our readings for this week add sexuality and disability. For Samuels and Chen, visibility is crucial when disability and sexuality intertwine. In Samuels’s older article, we see a much closer focus on identity; Chen’s argument is less centrally concerned with the self than Samuels’s, yet the passages addressing the body are among the most compelling. We’re drawn to the personal in scholarship even while it also elicits suspicion––at least I am. In my graduate training, I learned to wonder about the lives of the people writing scholarship even as I learned not to voice those wonderments too loudly in the classroom––if they don’t morph into a smart critique, save them for the bar. Yet Julie’s memoir shows the negative as well as positive power that questions about identity still hold, especially in disciplines where who we are and what we write about seems as if it should obviously align.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 My own relationship to the scholarship of identity cuts in several directions. I came out as bisexual at 17, but didn’t feel much sense of connection to a queer community until I applied––more or less on the spur of the moment, though I’d been sure of my academic pathway for some time––to a Master’s degree in “Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change.” After that, though being bisexual and femme led me to experience many of the same challenges Samuels describes in my gay-male-dominated MA program, the queer scholarly world felt like home. My queer identifications shifted gradually over the years from bisexual into lesbian, and that offered even more of a sense of home. Travelling to the US was like stepping through a transatlantic looking glass into which I had been gazing for years, as the works from which I had learned to understand myself as a queer person were so frequently from here; being a foreigner was an identity I could embrace much more easily than I could feel fully at home where I came from, a feeling I have always associated with a queerness based in more than sexual identity.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 Yet my education in queer studies once I came to the US was to give me many complications to ideas about identity, leading as it did through questions of race and empire, global transnational traffics in more than identity. The works that drew me in were no longer ones that spoke directly to my personal narratives of self; perhaps another way to say that is that the more secure I was in a queer identity, the more other things seemed more important. A former partner once asked me why it was that I always chose to write and teach works by ethnic minorities, when I am white myself. My shortest answer was that those were the lives that felt most like mine when we read and talked about them; the academic realms in which a world outside of school continued to matter felt the most familiar, though my ambitions lay firmly in the ivory tower. Though my experience is of a white working-class-ish world outside the US, within US academia the worlds of closest relation to that most often belonged to critical ethnic studies scholarship in which writers faced these contradictions head-on. The deeper into academia you penetrate, the more powerful the class hierarchies underlying its claims of meritocracy become; the more effectively you pass within those hierarchies, the harder it can be to talk about them. Yet I can just as easily make an answer that has nothing to do with personal narratives: I teach and study these works because they matter, for reasons that are political as much as they are aesthetic; my commitment to them is a commitment to that mattering and to the racial justice it demands.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 The presence of Samuels and Chen in our syllabus for this class speaks to my growing sense that something is missing from the ways that intersectionally focused scholars of critical race/gender studies, and myself in particular, engage. I still don’t know as much about disability studies as I would like, and yet I’m keenly aware that its insights critically permeate so much of what we do. The expectations that workloads and pressure levels are reasonable (I’m thinking of Lauren’s memoir post and of the way it made me think immediately of my CV as the analogue to the dancing-studio mirrors she described); that pressure not to fail, to get the A, that we talked about putting on ourselves. I’m not disabled, but not wholly an outsider to the idea of disability either; this article offers an idea of “relationship to disability” that is interesting. I have a chronic illness that only briefly disabled me and may never do so again but that is the invisible disability described in several accounts, within disability studies scholarship, with which I am familiar; my sister is developmentally disabled; my mother has worked with physically disabled adults for most of my life; my partner is deaf and a scholar of disability. I’ve never much considered writing about any of those lived relationships, though my lived experience of gender/sexual identity and class are certainly the unspoken forces that have shaped the direction not just of my scholarly work but of my life. As disability studies enters my view to a greater degree, I wonder now whether some day I will.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Reading the Samuels and Chen pieces, I wonder what brings aspects of our lives into the realm of the critically memoir-able; how moments become exemplary for teaching and thinking… Are those moments the things that our theory-sharpened gaze just happens to catch, or do they bring that gaze into being in the first place?
Thank you! I am glad you found it useful.