That old table metaphor

Today I had brunch with a fabulous and wise older friend. We were talking about our various interactions with students and organizing methodology we struggle with conveying. Ze referenced another friend, Lorenzo Herrera, who has adjusted the table metaphor. Instead of thinking about who we invite to the table, he says, we need to think about who is present when we build the table. How apt--happy year end.

What to do with Christmas?

I'm currently in Liberal City, Southern State visting chosen family while on winter break. I have a very ambivalent relation to Christmas and for the first time this year, found myself celebrating it in a way that didn't make me uncomfortable. I ate brunch with friends and drove out to a local state park to wander around trails and waterfalls. We passed around a bottle of champagne as we sat watching the water and chatted while the sky lit up with neon colors towards sunset. Then we went and got Thai food. There was no discussion of Jesus or his birth or death, no emotional landmines to navigate with my bio-family, and no presents. Having grown up in a conservative Christian household, these are the things I expect to accompany Christmas, and I've found that I really hate the holiday. In the past few years, I think I've only grown to hate Christmas more because of how very oppressive and omnipresent the holiday seems.

But this year brought new complications, a new experience of the holiday, and questions about what it might mean to reclaim or to queer Christmas, if it is a politically worthwhile personal goal, what kinds of celebratory and sacred spaces/times I want in my life, and what such revaluations might mean for how I think about my allyship to those who do not share Christian cultural or spiritual beliefs. In the past, I have with various degrees of ambivalence participated in gift giving and holiday gatherings, while refusing to do the rest of the commercialized junk or recognize any of the spiritual components that spring from the Christian tradition I still find so very oppressive. Christianity has been the primary justification of my parents' inability to accept my politics or identities. The church folk I grew up with believe in ideas of meritocracy as much as they believe in Jesus, and I have for several years now been struggling with the idea that there are Christians out there who value and appreciate social justice and/or other spiritual belief systems. The Christianity I grew up with is founded on the idea that Christianity is the only true religion and fundamentally opposed to the idea that other religions may be equally valid in their understandings and explanations of the world.

With this model in mind and memory, I gave up on Christmas. And this year with no bio-family in the immediate vicinity and no chosen family who reveled in the gift giving, I ignored it. But then I found myself gathering with friends in the space created by, if not the name, of Christmas. I realized maybe I do need to make allowances for the sacred in my life, and Christmas might be a good time to do this. I, of course, have no real idea what I mean by the sacred. Perhaps I mean meaning that is bigger than me and those in my immediate circle. I honestly don't know. I struggle equally with other normative holidays--for me Easter's a more spiritually exclusive version of Christmas and Thanksgiving is a day of public amnesia and mythologies surrounding the origins of the U.S. and genocides of indigenous peoples. Various people in my life have talked about reclaiming these holidays, but that process has never been one I felt comfortable taking part in.

Thanksgiving and the Christian holidays require different sorts of work to my mind, though both necessitate education and reform around the ways they are forced upon us to the exclusion of other holidays within our institutions. But beyond the institutional work, I don't know what a personal queering might look like.

I've spent so much time dreading them that the possibilities are hard to consider.
This year is the first year I've found myself able (financially) to spend holidays with those I chose. I don't know how that will shift the possibilities I see.

Syllabi fun

I am teaching a class this spring semester about transgender folks in pop culture. It's been great fun to design the syllabus, though I quickly realized there was no way to fit everything I wanted to talk about in a semester. I have defined transgender very broadly and am encouraging my students to think about the the political effects and limitations of such identity terms. We're looking at everything from Mulan to The Aggressives. But not surprisingly, I've been having real difficulty finding television or film representations of trans folk of color that aren't documentaries. Same problem for trans folks with dis/abilities. Those facts are also worthy of discussion, and we'll certainly address it in class, but if anyone has any suggestions, I'd really appreciate it.

Starting a blog: where's the justice in higher education?

I went to graduate school thinking I wanted to be a professor and discovered that that was in fact a ludicrous idea. I spent all my time working with students in social justice-oriented centers and minimal time doing academic work. And so last year, I dumped the phd program and got a job in higher education as a queer program coordinator at a small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere. I work with four amazing similarily minded folk who are invested in students, anti-racism, feminism, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism, in no specific order. Like most liberal arts institutions, the student body is largely white and middle to upper class. But unlike most comparison schools, many students are really invested in social justice and an intersectional analysis of our world. And this sense of communal investment promotes feelings of guilt in those who aren't. In our office after every guilt-laden training or facilitated discussion, we talk about making t-shirts that say "Acknowledge, and THEN MOVE ON." Many of the students we meet are mired in their guilt and immobilized by their fears of offending. These students and similarly-minded staff, faculty, and alumni describe our campus as an overly politically correct space. Saving my rant about the phrase "politically correct" for another day, I begin this blog as a conversation foray into the questions of privilege, identities, power, oppresion, and the ways these forces play out in institutions of higher education and in my every day life. I make no promises, however, about limiting my thoughts to the workplace as I find that my relationships with students and co-workers comprise the majority of my social life in such a small town.