End of Summer Semester

This is the last week of my second semester of my Master of Arts in Literature. It has been…quite the semester. It was a good semester overall, but it was not without its moments of anger and pain. It’s interesting how different my graduate experiences have been in comparison to my undergraduate experiences. Maybe I was just really lucky in the community college and university I attended for my undergraduate degrees, but I honestly feel like grad school has been kind of a bait-and-switch situation. The positive, safe experiences I had in undergrad are not and have not been the experience I’ve had in grad school so far.

This summer in my MA program, I took a Monsters Lit class and an LGBTQIA2S+ Lit class. In the latter, I had a teacher who used incredibly outdated language when referring to trans people (it’s now considered a slur), and while he was receptive to me pointing out his use of outdated language, he clearly resented my opinion that a teacher who is teaching a literature course about a marginalized group of people should do their own due diligence and make sure that they’re not using harmful language in their course descriptions. The apology he offered was essentially, “I’m sorry that I’m old,” and then veered towards nothing more than a justification of why he used the slur. I tried to explain to him that this word has been outdated for decades now, and as a teacher, it is his responsibility to ensure that he’s creating a classroom environment where students feel safe to learn – especially those students who belong to a marginalized group of people. He ignored that bit and simply kept on justifying.

I actually ended up reporting him to the Dean because I was fuming mad, and for more reasons than the use of the slur. For weeks, his class discussion questions had revolved around horrifically harmful ideologies regarding sexuality and queer identity (one of the first weeks, he asked if we thought teaching LGBTQIA2S+ literature was a form of grooming), and at no point did he ever clarify why he was asking these questions. And as I ended up explaining to him, by asking questions like that, he was literally inviting homophobia into the classroom, thereby completely negating any safety queer students were entitled to and expected to have.

It’s one thing if a student, unprompted, says something homophobic. Teacher’s can’t control what gets said in a classroom conversation, nor can they anticipate how many students will be homophobic. But by asking this question outright at the beginning of the semester, he was setting the tone for the rest of class by establishing a platform of safety for those who genuinely did hold homophobic views. Thankfully, no one in the class said anything homophobic to that extent, but the fact remains that he still invited that kind of discourse into the classroom conversation.

When I pointed this out to him, his response was, “If we know we have an enemy, shouldn’t we try to understand what they think so that we can fight them with more knowledge?” This was the point that I reported him to the Dean because I realized that absolutely none of what I was saying mattered to him. And as I explained to the Dean, it’s a literature course, and I joined it expecting to be taught about queer literature, not to be an unwitting pawn in a teacher’s personal game of chess. And while I absolutely am an activist, and while I will absolutely stand up and fight homophobia wherever I encounter it, including in the classroom, I am the one who still gets to decide when and where I invest my energy. As a student, I have a reasonable right to expect certain things from a classroom environment, and one of those things is that I, as a bisexual woman, will have a safe space to learn about and discuss the subject of the class.

But because the teacher felt emboldened to literally invite not only conflict, but bigotry and hatred into the classroom as part of our learning process, my ability to learn and focus on the literature itself was absolutely severed. And there was one student who, due to the nature of one of the questions asked, ended up vocalizing a perspective on straight, cis people playing queer and trans roles that was not only ignorant, but completely unrelated to the literature we’d read that week. And when I pointed out the flaws and the harm in the ideologies she was perpetuating, the teacher accused me of focusing on my feelings rather than on the literature. Even though I responding to the question he asked.

All of that to say this: even people within our own community can carry internalized homophobia and harmful views. Ultimately, I stood up for myself and for any other potentially queer students in that class. And while I wouldn’t classify the teacher as my enemy, I will say that he’s doing a lot of the homophobes’ work for them, and that, more than anything, was what upset me the most.

But aside from that, I’m also undergoing a personal change in my aesthetic. I haven’t had my own personal style since I was a teenager. Even as a young adult, what I wore can’t really be called a “style.” It was just bottoms and tops I liked and/or felt comfortable in. But now, that’s changing. I’m embracing the metal head/alternative/goth look. The specific style is called “corporate goth,” and I am loving every single thing I choose. My hair is full on shag now, and I love it so much, I can’t even articulate it. I’m learning how to do my makeup in a darker, more alternative way. And I’m using my clothes to express my age as well as my more goth vibe, and never before in my life have I felt more like myself.

With more piercings, more tattoos, and more clothing accessories, I think I’ll get some really awesome outfits going. You can see some pictures on the right hand side of the page from my Instagram. Anyway, it’s a change I’ve wanted for a long time, and I’m loving how it’s going and how it makes me feel.