I was a new graduate student at the University of S____ C_______. I know what you’re thinking: “That must be a great, friendly LGBTQI place!” Yes, I’m being ironic there. Maybe moronic, too. Whatever. NEWAZ, I was taking a variety of classes. One was a survey/history of literary criticism. I know you’re just shivering at the thought. So was I (there’s the irony again: sue me, I’m a huge fan of Machado de Assis). The course was actually engaging, although it was taught in almost reverse chronological order, so that we could be familiar with the “latest trends” and then work our way back to foundations. For many of us, in several different departments, this was our first serious, tough graduate class. There were other students from comp. Lit. There were students from Philosophy, English, Film Studies, and even Religious Studies in the class. A few of us would get together after the seminar and get dinner and talk about the class or about anything but the class. I reveled in the camaraderie and forged friendships with people in my department who had very different interests than mine and with people in other departments.
Part of our class requirements was that each student was to give a report on certain topics covered in the survey. I chose “écriture féminine” because I had read enough of the writings of one of its proponents Hélène Cixous due to my adoration of Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian author whose work Cixous often holds as an exemplar of her theories. (Some of these theories I find quite reductive, but that’s not for this blog. & yes, I am showing the ingrainment of academia into my normal mode of discourse. Sorry if this gets too stultifying.)
NEWAZ, since we were going in reverse chronological order, I had to present early on in the fall semester. I was the only one in the class who could read Portuguese. I was probably one of the few who even knew it was a separate language! So, I presented on Cixous and discussed her theory of écriture féminine and how it is not necessarily bound to be by a female writer. I also talked about Cixous’s idea of ”bisexuality” as evading the notion of privilege accorded to writing or speech that presupposed male domination/patriarchy and heterosexism. It was not a riveting presentation, but I think I articulated what Cixous was arguing. After other presentations and lectures by our professor, we went off to dinner. Melanie, a non-traditional student in Comp Lit who specialized in French literature and theory complemented me on my presentation at the Greek restaurant we had invaded that night. I was beaming, because I was unsure of how I had done, especially since I also called a famous thinker out on some issues in her reading, although I was some lowly, first-year grad student. Talk moved from the class to the latest news to the dumbest things we had seen on TV lately.
Our group that night was pretty large. I was sharing a table with Melanie, Kelly (also from Comp. Lit.), Genara (from Italian and Classics), Ali and Christian from Comp. Lit, and Ivan from the Philosophy Dept. We talked seriously about topics. We bullshitted about nothing. We laughed. Some of us would get up and dance when a good song came on. At one point, Ivan and I were alone at the table. He was also teaching a class for the first time this semester and he was always dressed in a nice shirt and tie when he came to our seminar class. He never even loosened his tie at these dinners, and he had been to a few. While the music played, Ivan looked down and then brought my attention from watching the others on the dance floor to him. “You know, something about this tie always makes me hungry.”
I looked at the tie. It was multicolored in small splashes of various bright shades. It contrasted nicely with his blue shirt that was slightly darker than old denim. I looked at his eyes. I’d never noticed them before. They were beautiful. Hazel but with more green qualities. He was smiling. (Why am I such a sucker for beautiful eyes and a cute smile?). “I see what you mean. All of a sudden I’m starving!” I don’t recall saying that in any sort of lascivious way, but the gleam in his eyes as he continued to smile shook me. Did they turn the heat on in there?
“I liked your presentation tonight.”
”Oh?”
“Yeah. I’m impressed by someone who can manipulate more than one foreign language.”
“I guess God blessed me with an agile tongue.’ (Again, I was not consciously, purposely trying to be Mr. Double Entendre.)
Ivan seemed to sense my guilelessness in that utterance, but still shot back, “Oh, really?” in a way so that I would recognize what I had just said.
“Oh, God! I didn’t mean for it to sound like that!”
Ivan continued smiling and eye-glinting. He looked down at his plate of Greek pizza. “So, that talk about bisexuality was just theory, huh?”
Despite not feeling able to come out at home and being afraid people would mistake the way I viewed myself with how I viewed Sapphira, I had decided that here in grad school in a new place I would not misrepresent myself. “No...it’s not just theoretical, I guess.”
Ivan looked up, with a piqued interest. “Do you practice what you preach?”
This time I did say something provocative on purpose, even if I didn’t then think it applied to me in any way. “Practice makes perfect…”
“Would you like to, I don’t know, go out & do something sometime, just us?”
“I think I would like that.”
He finally loosened that tie a little.
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