The Spaces In Between

Happy Pride, everyone! It’s been a while since I have published anything here, and I have some big updates!

First, a job update: As blog readers know from my last post, over Winter Break, DePauw let me know that my visiting contract would not be renewed, which meant that Indigo and I would be leaving Greencastle in the summer, destination unknown. I am now excited to announce that after many, many job applications and interviews, I landed a tenure-track job in the Department of Women’s, Transgender, and Queer Studies at Wells College in Aurora, NY!

(Ironically enough, this was the first job application that I submitted in September 2021. The academic job application process is often long: I applied in September, had an interview in November, then a second one in February, and finally I was offered the job in March.)

The job search has been time-consuming and exhausting and exhilarating. Given the state of the academic job market, I thought that this was the year that I would be stepping out of a faculty role into something new. Becoming a high-school teacher, or a diversity director at a boarding school, or the director of a women’s center would have been a new adventure. I am grateful for the ways that this job search required me to think creatively about my work and introduced me to different types of diversity and teaching work.

However, while I know that there are a lot of different ways to teach, and I know there are big issues within academia, I felt sharp grief at the thought of leaving the academy. I love what I do and I have fought hard to stay here. I am so grateful that I get to teach in a university classroom again next year, and I do not take this opportunity for granted. I am excited to bring my vast teaching experience from 5 different institutions (University of Maryland, Towson University, Amherst College, Dickinson College, and DePauw University) to Wells College.

Another move: Indigo and I are sad to be leaving Greencastle and our community here. It can be tough to be queer and trans in rural Indiana–and the Indiana legislature is trying to make it even harder with transphobic sports bills and homophobic curriculum bills. However, there are also LGBTQ community spaces like Conspire: Contemporary Crafts, and we feel very loved here. Along with folks at Conspire, we will miss the farmer’s market (especially our friends at Meadowbrook Farm, and Jills’ Succulents), the Putnam County Library (where Indigo has been working the last six months), and the Nature Park. And while DePauw has been a tough place to teach at times, I am deeply sad about leaving my students and feminist colleagues.

That said, it will be great to be closer to family and friends on the East Coast. Wells College is on the Finger Lakes, near Ithaca, and it is only 5.5 hours from both of our families in DC/MD and 6.5 from my brother in Vermont. It is a micro-college which means it only has 300 students, and it is located on the shores of Cayuga Lake. We are in the process of finding housing (which has been quite stressful) and are excited about being able to settle more permanently in one place after many years of uprooting every few years. Indigo is already planning our garden! We hope that once we settle we will have lots of visitors.

Teaching Updates: This semester was full on: I taught three classes, Feminist Theory, Trans Representations, and Queer Theory, Queer Lives. I also taught an Independent Study, and advised two honors scholars thesis, one about queer children’s cartoons, and the other about diversity and the outdoors. It was a tough semester, as I juggled different teaching obligations, job apps, and moving logistics. I also tweaked my neck the week after Spring Break and spent a week on the couch with a splitting headache.

Tragically, a senior DePauw student died unexpectedly in April–and many of his close friends were in my Feminist Theory class. I didn’t know him, but I was a witness to their shock and grief. My own experiences of loss have given me the bittersweet gift of understanding this specific type of trauma, and as terrible as it was to see my students in pain, I was also able to provide resources for them, and to offer support and comfort. I was dismayed to see that many other professors did not respond in helpful ways (and sometimes were outright dismissive of students), and I want to include information about grief in my upcoming blog post about a “Pedagogy of Care.” It is not done yet, but I have been working on it the last few months!

Despite the stress and challenges, overall my classes were a wonderful success, and as usual, my students were fantastic. I especially appreciated the community that we created in Feminist Theory, which my students began calling “The Feminist Club” because they said it didn’t seem like their other classes. It was great to be able to teach upper-level students who had a background in WGSS and we dove into some deep theoretical texts including work by Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Ann Cvetkovich, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Eli Clare, Kath Weston, Adrienne Rich, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Elsa Barkley Brown. They particularly enjoyed the class where we looked at the Asian-American Tarot Deck curated by Mimi Khúc & Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis. When I get a chance, I will post all of my syllabi from the Spring on my teaching page for anyone interested in learning more about the class.

The end of the semester was even more of a whirlwind than usual–as soon as classes finished Indigo and I drove to NY to look for housing. When we got back I finished grading Spring semester work, and prepped for my May Term class Queering Nature with Feminist Ecologies which started on May 25th. Indigo and I also packed up our whole house as our lease ended June 1st, and we moved into our friends’ side-apartment during the first week of that class!

Overall teaching Queering Nature was a fantastic experience! I co-taught it with Christy Holmes who is also in WGSS at DePauw. We volunteered at the DePauw Farm, went on bird-walks and plant-walks at the Nature Park, visited Shades State Park, McCormick Creek State Park, and Indiana Dunes National Park (this was a weekend unofficial/unrequired trip). I hope that I get to teach a similar class in the future–Christy and I are even brainstorming ways that we could teach the class with both DePauw and Wells students, with trips in the Midwest AND in the Finger Lakes region. Here is the course description:

This course invites students to interrogate their relationships to nature, and to explore queer and feminist theoretical understandings of land and ecology. Historically, those who have been minoritized along gender, racial, ethnic, and sexual lines have been at the forefront of environmental justice, land reclamation, food justice, and related movements that focus on social and environmental domination. For oppressed communities, maintaining or rebuilding relationships with self, community members, and the natural world offers stress relief and recreation, healthier food cultivation, spiritual connection and other paths toward healing.

While queering nature, the course will examine the intersections of gender, race, ability, nationality, and class in regards to knowledge production about human-nature relationships,  access to outdoor spaces and recreation in nature, and focus on cultivating a better understanding of our local relationships to land through paying close attention to our surroundings. In addition to readings, and other course texts that introduce these topics, guest speakers and field trips will offer experiential learning opportunities and skills training related to mindfulness, bird-watching, small-scale farming, cooking, and community organizing. 

More personal updates: I completely shaved my head over Spring Break, and I am loving the new look! The cover photo for this post (as seen on my home page) was taken shortly after I cut 12 + inches off.

Indigo and I have been going on hikes at local state parks–Shades State Park is one of our favorites–and playing the board-game Wingspan as ways to destress in the midst of the big life changes we are navigating. We have also enjoyed watching the queer high-school romance, Heartstopper (netflix), and the campy, gay, pirate show Our Flag Means Death (HBO max). I highly recommend both! I have also been doing a lot of collage art in my journal, and I am hoping to put together a zine about my experiences this semester, which I will make available in electronic form here.

As always, dear readers, I hope that you are doing well. Thanks for reading!