#314b

It is also a story that can, as romance writer Jennifer Crusie observes, be profoundly alienating to women. In her former career as a Ph.D. student, Crusie writes, “I had to read Madame Bovary, I had to read Anna Karenina, I had to read ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,’ I had to read Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Lawrence. I had to see Hester Prynne as the great American heroine who triumphs by remaining celibate for the rest of her endless life.” While in the middle of this mandatory curriculum of stories of disastrous female sexuality, Crusie, looking for examples of women’s narratives, begins reading romances:

‘For the first time, I was reading fiction about women who had sex and then didn’t eat arsenic or throw themselves under trains or swim out to the embrace of the sea, women who won on their own terms (and those terms were pretty varied) and still got the guy in the end without having to apologize or explain that they were still emancipated even though they were forming permanent pair bonds, women who moved through a world of frustration and detail and small pleasures and large friendships, a world I had authority in.’

For Crusie, romance is not utopian fantasy. It describes a world more familiar and real to her than the world of the academic literary canon, in which sex condemns a woman to an early death (often at her own hand), and marriage means slavery. In the world of romance, the autonomous woman need not “die insane and alone.” She can live on and have a successful relationship that assists rather than thwarts her self-realization—which, after all, is something that many women actually do.

In other words, time, more than anything else, shows me what I need. I know however, that if I, Audre Lorde, do not define myself, the outer world certainly will, and, as each one of you will discover, probably will define each one of us to our detriment, singly or in groups. So I cannot separate my life and my poetry. I write my living and I live my work. And I find in my life truths which I hope can reach across, bring richness, to other women beyond the differences in our lives, beyond the differences in our loves, beyond the differences in our work. For it is within the sharing of these differences that we find growth. It is within these differences that I find growth, or can, if I am honest enough to speak out of my many selves, my loves, my hates, my mistakes, as well as my strengths. I feel, and stake my life and my living upon it, that we become strong by doing whatever it is we need to be strong for. Solstice. I am constantly defining my selves, for I am, as we all are, made up of so many different parts. But when those selves war within me, I am immobilized, and when they move in harmony, or allowance, I am enriched, made strong. Yet I know there are Black women who do not use my work in their classes because I am a lesbian. There are lesbians who cannot hear me nor my work because I have two children, one of whom is a boy, both of whom I love dearly. There are women, maybe in this room, who cannot deal with me nor my vision because I am Black, and their racism becomes a blindness that separates us. And by us I mean all those who truly believe we can work for a world in which we can all live and define ourselves. And I tell you this. My friends, there will always be someone seeking to use one part of your selves, and at the same time urging you to forget or destroy all of the other selves. And I warn you, this is death. Death to you as a woman, death to you as a poet, death to you as a human being. When the desire for definition, self or otherwise, comes out of a desire for limitation rather than a desire for expansion, no true face can emerge. Because any ratification from the outside can only augment my self-definition, not provide it. Nobody telling me I am worthy, or that a poem is good, can possibly match that sense within my self of worthiness, or of having done what I set out to do.”

I have already begun incorporating inclusive pedagogical practices into the six courses I have taught in women’s, LGBTQ, and African American literature at UT, especially in the realm of assignment design. In my Fall 2016 women’s lit course, for example, students created a portfolio of five “Interpretive Mode” assignments in lieu of writing traditional literary analysis papers. One of these assignments was to create a class zine inspired by Imogen Binnie’s Nevada—a novel whose trans lesbian protagionst, Maria, uses zines to explore her identity and her place within a larger queer community. In creating their zine pages, students drew on passages from the novel as well as secondary sources like Emi Koyama’s “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-V, and Twitter debates between transfeminists and trans-exclusionary radical feminists. This assignment helped students develop a richer vocabulary for discussing trans identities and a more nuanced understanding of the contemporary landscape of trans politics. They also practiced modes of collaborative creation developed within feminist zine communities, developing a project that emerged out of—and was thus responsive to—the values of the cultures they were studying.

For the Mellon workshop, I want to design an assignment that will help students engage with primary source materials in a more immersive, interactive way. When I first taught 1980s-90s AIDS lit and film in my Rhetoric of LGBTQ Politics course, I required students to write an essay analyzing a cultural artifact from this period. This assignment produced somewhat flat readings of the period, as the detached form of the analytical essay did not encourage students to delve deeper into the creative, resourceful ways in which queer activists responded to the crisis. Furthermore, while I showed them material from the rich archives of this period in class, such as the ACT-UP Oral History Project and the Visual AIDS Project, I did not integrate those resources into the assignment itself as effectively as I could have. In designing this new unit, I want to think about how I can get students to explore for themselves new forms of grassroots protest, activist art, and queer kinship that emerged during this period.