ASS-HAULING



So Kalamazoo. For lo, it was good. Many cheap plastic cups of wine were consumed, many old friends caught up with and embraced, many old grad school friends pulled up in rental cars alongside me and demanded I go to dinner forthwith.

Like the Fretful Porpentine, I too wanted to go to the session on teaching medieval studies at HBCU's. And in retrospect, I am glad I didn't, as it would have likely made me annoyed, given Fret's report about the actual content of the session. I really do want to know: how do we, how do I, "get over" the bullshit assumption that medieval literature is the exclusive purview of white people? Indeed, I came to medieval studies because it WAS NOT actually all about whitey. I wanted and needed ... alterity, in all its guises; alterity as a way of thinking; alterity as a means of puncturing stupid binaries and privileging the messy middle space between. I needed a space to question the hell out of things, and to think about language, and to consider otherness and my place in it.

Now I'm as white as the next flat-assed white lady with weird glasses and a PhD. And I cannot deny the ways in which medieval studies does indeed reify all kinds of things that scream "white!"--not least of which is the sheer abundance of arcane nerd-knowledge one must acquire in order to be a medievalist. Latin? Anglo-Saxon? Paleography? Middle English dialects? Uh, yeah. White people kinda like that.

But STCU is predominantly brown and black, and very working-class. And that is, at the end of the day, the pedagogical context in which I feel most at ease. That's how I was educated, and that's where I feel at home. And yet I am constantly faced in my classes here with the assumption that studying old stuff is only for elite weirdo white people. Reading Chaucer and Aristotle is, in the words of one student, "totally bourgie." Aristotle IS bourgie, I know, and in so many ways. But the Great Books are the Great Books and they are for everyone, and you can damn well bet that our president and his wife have read the Poetics. Literature is a widening gyre that might include deeper understandings of history and language, that might place us within a context that is far more complicated than we presume. And it is for everyone. It does not discriminate.

I very much do want to know: how to make the medieval more ... attractive? I don't mean "relevant," or god forbid, "relatable." And I don't have difficulty, yet, in filling my seminars. But I want a medieval studies that my students don't feel they must so forcibly resist.

As for my own discursive participation, the panel I organized and presided over was bitchin', and smart, and replete with classy and tightly ordered papers, as I expected. Nice work, ladies! Afterwards, there was going out and lunch-acquisition. Whereupon some strange shit occurred, of the Ivy League universalizing variety.

There was much commentary about how hard it had been to tell one's advisers and grad school colleagues that one's job was a writing intensive 4/4. To admit the truth of this was somehow shameful.

And there was further commentary about how desperately one wished for better advising about teaching, and jobs, and placement. One woman complained that she had gone abroad and had a child, and had not published or taught for two years, whereupon she attempted re-entry. It was brutal. She wished someone had told her what to expect, had guided her in some way.

I realized that, as irritating as I find Beloved Advisor and Second Reader when they do their gay man anti-child prattle, they have had my professional back from the first day. Ain't no way BA would have allowed me to take two years off without a plan; he'd have sat me down and given me a list of things I had to do in order to stay employable. It was always clear to me that the point of the PhD was employment, and that he'd help me get a job.

Ain't no shame in ass-hauling! And damn, but I am happy that I ended up where I did. I'll take a 4/4 pressing Chaucer and Aristotle on the open-admissions skeptics than just about any other kind of teaching gig. Ask me again in 5 years, I know. But here, at the culmination of year one on the tenure-track, I feel like I landed in the right place, and I am certain that my advisers and grad school peeps are proud of me. For that I am grateful.