In Teacher Narrative as Critical Inquiry: Rewriting the Script, Joy S. Ritchie and David E. Wilson write:

The development of a professional identity is inextricable from personal identity and when personal and professional development are brought into dialogue, when teachers are given the opportunity to compose and reflect on their own stories of learning and of selfhood within a supportive and challenging community then teachers can begin to resist and revise the scripting narratives of the culture and begin to compose new narratives of identity and practice. They can begin to author their own development. (1)

To take this work seriously—to take narrative seriously—means, for me, to enact and enmesh the lived world with theoretical practice. I often find myself asking questions about the narrative that leads to the classrooms I shape now. What is the story of this teacher I am? What is the story of the person who searches for a queer pedagogy ? How is intersexuality an intersectionality whereby the teaching body might continuously come into being? This essay is an attempt of one queer teacher and scholar to “author their own development.”

* * *

All the children are laughing. The two first-graders, Lucy Cavaro and Craig Larson, have rocks. Lucy is taunting, “Are you a boy or a girl? Boy or girl?” I don’t say anything. I keep doing what I do whenever I feel cornered like this. I look off through the green fence and picture myself as capable of movement. I picture myself faster than I am, as fast as a boy, I suppose. I see myself leap the tire swing and head for home. But Lucy won’t quit. She hurls one of her rocks at my feet. “Can’t you even talk?” she wants to know. I can’t rid myself of the fire rising in my small round belly. There’s a pasty coating on my tongue and the lump in my throat is growing, expanding like a party balloon. I can’t breathe. When Miss Sherri finds us, she’s angry. When I tell her Lucy does this to me, she wants to know why I don’t answer. “Tell her you’re a girl,” she says. But I can’t think of what to tell—the way I can’t think of any sins to tell the priest during confession. I saw a face of contradiction, I was frozen, unnamed.

* * *

I had never had a male teacher, so going into the third grade you can’t blame me for my suspicion. Let me explain. Mrs. Guarino taught kindergarten, and in those days I wore my father’s flannel shirts as smocks; I painted green trees around the suburban house. Mrs. Guarino was heavy and jolly, deep-voiced and tender. I had the sense I was different, but the other kindergartners couldn’t put their fingers on it. They were still learning difference, still playing the “find what doesn’t belong” games in the Highlights Magazine. My best friend was Robby O’Reilly. He hadn’t punched me in the face yet, but he would. One hot summer day when I tip the bucket in which we keep the garter snake, the snake gets away. Robby punches me in the face. That’s it. First grade was Mrs. Killian. She lets me take home the class gerbil on weekends. She’s old and fragile and thinks of me as the caretaking kind—responsible and sound in judgment. She catches me and Jillian Becker trading kisses in the jacket room. She tells my mother I am “confused about my role—perhaps it’s the four older brothers,” she says, and she’s kind and gentle enough for my mother not to be threatened or alarmed, but my mother does begin to dress me more gender appropriately, crying one morning when I refuse the dress and barrettes. Second grade, Mrs. Walsh. I remember her very little. She did not like my handwriting and was the first “B” grade—penmanship. I spent second grade failing at the alphabet sheets, not touching my capitals to the top line, missing the cursive “z” over and over. I cry at the bus stop. My mother says, “No one’s perfect,” and signs the report card with alacrity. My father leaves my mother for his nurse. He leaves a note on her pillow that says he “went with plan B.” My mother drinks second grade away.

* * *

It seems to have started quite early—the idea that some things that I found so strange and terrifying were, to others, quite obvious and comforting. There was, however, some consensus like the idea that I should accept the invitation to join the third grade “Gifted and Talented Reading Group” at Forest Brook Elementary School. I don’t remember any of the books we read in that group except one—Call It Courage, by Armstrong Sperry, about a young boy whose mother was killed by the sea in a hurricane. Of course, the young boy, Mafatu, was terrified of the sea and felt cast out by his community, which valued courage above all things. As narrative would have it, Mafatu goes out to sea alone to face his fears. Mrs. Sullivan, the beautiful librarian who painted on her eyebrows and drove a gleaming red car, chose me for the reading group. I had been a library aid for two years, and I suspect while my grades weren’t always strong, she chose me because of the sheer number of books she had watched me check out. To this day, I am not exactly certain if I read any of them. But Call It Courage I did read. I read it on the school bus, on the way to Little League practice, late at night when just enough hall light (which I insisted be left on) shined through the bedroom door. I was obsessed with Mafatu’s fear, and with the idea that there seemed to be no one else in his entire community who feared the sea. I had a hard time believing this, and when I told Mrs. Sullivan that there was no way no other kid was afraid of the sea except Mafatu, she said that even though we lived on Long Island we had no concept of how close Mafatu lived to the sea. And living so close, she explained, the sea was just part of everyone’s life, so it is believable that no one living that close to the sea and looking out to the sea each day would be afraid of it in the way that Mafatu was.

What I loved most about Mrs. Sullivan was after school hours, when I’d stay to laminate book covers in the back room—a job given to only the most careful and efficient library aid. Mrs. Sullivan had taken to a nickname she called me only in private. She’d come to the back room and say, “How many books covered, Sir?” She’d say it in this military way as though we were performing some wartime version of book covering. Or sometimes she’d walk me out to the late bus and say, “See you tomorrow, Sir.” And we’d both smile. Something seemed fitting about it. I liked it. It didn’t feel judgmental in the way it did when rude old ladies asked my mother if I was a boy or a girl, or the way it felt when the other kids teased me. It felt right. I didn’t need to defend myself, or my “womanhood,” against this claim. Sometimes I had dreams I married Mrs. Sullivan next to the ocean. And I was a man, and I was dressed in that perfect black suit the way I had seen my father dressed a few times. And I was wearing a tie, the blackest, shiniest tie.

* * *

My relatives were always trying to give me my gender in the form of dollhouses, Hello Kitty blankets, pink things, yellow things, Barbies, the beloved Cabbage Patch Dolls. I wanted them to give me another version of gender, and sometimes, usually in private, someone would. My mother: a hockey stick. My grandfather: a baseball hat. My brother: advice. “This is how you punch back,” he says. “Right. Like this. This is how.”

* * *

In third grade, I distrusted Mr. Shellhorn right away—his dark mustache, his hard, full chest, and thick-rimmed glasses. I never raised my hand to sit on his lap during “John Brown Jalopy.” I didn’t raise my hand to turn the pages of afternoon stories. No matter how hard the other children laughed at his character voices, no matter how many times he praised my drawings and even my handwriting, I would not budge. I would not, as it were, love him. Then the science fair. And I hate the other students—their maps of constellations lighting up on cardboard, their mud mound volcanoes erupting over the desktops. I don’t want to make anything. I don’t want anything to explode or light up. I don’t want the bad-smelling oak tag, the construction paper dry against my fingers. I would rather make up math problems sitting on the radiator. For a few days, Mr. Shellhorn leaves me there. He doesn’t ask what my project will be. But by the time the light-up planets begin to show he’s back there with black construction paper and a handful of orange tissue paper. He folds the black paper in half and cuts for what feels like a half hour, moving the big “teacher scissors” in curves and inside-out holes. And when he opens the paper, it’s wings. He glues the orange tissue paper behind them. “It’s a monarch,” he says. “They are perfectly symmetrical. Do you know what symmetrical means?” And I’m still not budging. “I don’t care,” I answer, directing my stare through the back window toward the school lot where the cars are lined up in a green blur. I do care. I want to know what symmetry means. I like the sound of it, how his teeth joined at the “s,” his lips touching at the “m” and curling together to end on the “try” of the word. I do love him, you understand. I do make five more butterflies when he goes. And as for symmetry, the dictionary says, “Match exactly.”

* * *

I did try to be a real girl. In the eighth grade, I swore, to my father’s new wife, that I would give up my brother’s old jeans, that I would stop swearing, that I would blow dry my hair in the mornings and stop tucking it back underneath what she and my father called “a ball cap.” I couldn’t bear it very many days. The kids at school were not so willing to let me change identities before their eyes. “You look weird,” Greg Blackstein said. “Where’s your Yankee hat?” Jodie Lipkin asked. They wanted to know where I had gone. They wanted the rules of my old identity, one I didn’t so much shed as I left back at the house, tucked away, where it was safe. I am not yet aware that years later I will read books from a discipline called “queer theory .” I do not yet know that Judith Butler will write, “That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility” (3).

* * *

At age 17, a close friend says to me, “If you want to be a teacher you better take off those freedom rings and stay in the closet. You can’t be queer around kids. People don’t like that.” And later in college, an education professor gives me advice about my student teaching experience: “Especially for you, Stacey, it’s important you keep your classroom and office door open, and do not touch your students for any reason.”

* * *

I’m not a good teacher. I make messes where there is supposed to be order. I trouble boundaries—my authority performance some kind of All-American-Boy-Gone-Feminist-Not-Quite-Man vibe. I give impossible assignments. I stand before my students, an unknowable body in context (the classroom) where the assumption is there is something to be known, some body of knowledge (me, or the subject of the course) to be ingested, understood. But I (not surprisingly) became a teacher of writing, and in this landscape there both is and is not a body of knowledge at hand. Writing as subject: the body of knowledge a kind of moving process.

The phrase “body of knowledge ” is most familiar to us as institutional, a set of sanctioned practices—this body of knowledge is understood to be located outside the self. It is something we can grasp toward, something we can know, something we can teach, but it is not, however, something that we are. In this model, I have the body of knowledge ; my students do not. However, even as I have this body, this does not mean I am this body or can ever be it. Our bodies are forbidden to be this body of knowledge ; our bodies are meant to be outside, separate from this body. What we know, then, is not supposed to be at all about embodiment. The body of knowledge replaces the body, substitutes institutional sanctions in its place, intending to forever codify and compartmentalize what we know from what we do, from what we are, from the lived experience of our bodies. The political stakes of this “body of knowledge ” are then quite high. It even paves the way for us to dismiss or disregard what the body knows in favor of what the institution knows.

So then it is no accident that the idiom, body of knowledge , takes the metaphor of body—steals it from the body in order to disembody education. But in the echoes of the idiom’s erasure of the body, we can still hear that somehow what we know, or what we come to know is part of bodily expression and bodily composition. Most of us don’t want to talk about our bodies, at least not in the brainy mind space of academic discourse, and especially when it comes to teaching and students. Part shame, part fear, part binary of body and mind, this hesitance can be particularly amplified for queer bodies, or bodies like mine.

* * *

I used to teach Tai Chi to elderly women from a church in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. After three years of teaching them, some refer to me as “he,” some as “she.” They don’t seem to notice the disparity between their pronouns. I show Evelyn, a 76-year-old two-time cancer survivor, how to stand. I place my hands gently atop her shoulders and press down. Her back and shoulders relax. I place my hand at the small of her back and push softly forward. Her knees bend as she falls into a stance known as “wu ji,” the most balanced and relaxed a person can be. Perhaps another way to think about a body of knowledge .

In teaching Tai Chi, the physical relation is obvious, necessary. Even when I am not touching my students, they watch my physical movements intently, looking for when to step, when to circle their hands, and how to use their waists to lead the rest of their bodies. In the college classroom, the body’s force is less obvious, or perhaps less admitted. In his essay from The Teacher’s Body, Jonathan Alexander writes about the ways his “embodied queerness ” had intense effects on his teaching and relationship with his students (163). He quotes Marjorie Garber’s declaration that “It is [the] very potential for loving, and for falling ‘in love,’ that makes education possible” (324). Garber claims, he says, that “subconscious erotic interest underlies most student/teacher interactions—across genders” (Alexander 163). I read Alexander and Garber not as reducing teaching to seduction, not as easily dismissed Socratic romanticism, but as a theoretically and practically complex acknowledgment that bodies matter, that the relationships between bodies in a classroom are real and multi-faceted, contested relations. And these relations become particularly fraught with a genderqueer teacher, like myself. My body first, for most students and most people, watched for clues for what might be underneath my clothes, what body of knowledge my body conveys. What does it mean for my uncertain body to teach my students? What does it mean for my queer ambiguous hand to write words about my students’ work? And do I also, in writing about their work, write about their bodies?

Bodies do matter. A body of knowledge has everything to do with bodies. And as a person whose scholarship draws most often on students and student writing, I have to contend with their bodies. I have to raise questions over and over again about how, if, and when to represent their bodies as part of their writing or their classroom presence. I have to make decisions about what representations are ethical or necessary. I have to consider my own fears about being a queer scholar who pays attention to bodies. I am supposed to be one of those good queers, if I am to be a teacher, one who says appropriate things, unerotic, eunuch. I am supposed to desexualize and ignore my students’ bodies. Of course, the question arises, can I really do this when so many of my courses ask students to think about gender, sexuality, and embodiment, when I ask my students at times to write about themselves, their bodily experiences? Take, for example, the following passage, written by a student (whose permission I have to use her writing but not her name) in one of my first-year writing classes. I had asked students to spend the five days between two class meetings keeping a gender journal, one in which they were to take notice of anything they saw that they thought might be connected to gendered bodily expression. One student writes:

When I am walking down the street alone, I rarely make eye contact with other people who are passing me. I never thought of this attribute as a female one. But I think maybe it might be. When I walked down the street, I tried to make eye contact with people I passed. I noticed it was much harder to make eye contact with other women than it was for me to make eye contact with men. I wonder if it’s because women evaluate each other in secret. Like we look at each other’s clothes and stomachs and stuff to see how we compare. With guys, who cares.

Does it help in trying to read her writing to know this student is a white body, an attractive traditionally gendered young woman, that she looks me in the eyes all the time, that she cried and slouched in my office two weeks earlier because she missed Australia, where she had spent the summer and had fallen in love with a man named Thomas? Do I tell you I put my hand on her shoulder? Do I tell you I spoke softly, and that when she asked me if I thought it was stupid for her to move back to Australia, I placed my hand on top of hers on the desk and said, “You do what you want to do.” Do I tell you I am uncomfortable telling you that? Do I say she has a tattoo of the word “eternity” on her shoulder in Chinese, that she wears rings on every finger, that she closes her eyes when something is hard to think about in class, that she rolls her eyes whenever her classmate, Jennifer, speaks, that she crosses her legs always when she sits and has a habit of biting her nails. I learn, in her passage above, that I am easier for her to look at, that our bodies are not in competition, that she and I are not women to each other. This is her body of knowledge as I read it, as I am not supposed to be reading it. We know our students’ bodies; we sometimes know the emotional terrain that is expressed through them. We are, by the very notion of an institutional “body of knowledge, ” encouraged to erase this embodied knowledge , to find it irrelevant to our classroom practices. To acknowledge the student’s body would be, in part, to explode the myth of my own objectivity as her teacher, to admit there is more to my comments, more to my scholarship that cites her work, more to the grades I assign inside the institution, the grades that mark her position with respect to writing’s ambiguous, shifting body of knowledge .

The truth is: this is what I am reading when I read this student’s papers, when she raises her hand to speak in class—her body always part of my interpretation of her words. I can hear her voice in her response because I know the sound, because I recognize the sound, because I have watched and listened to the sound of her voice rising in her throat, because I even know the sound she makes the instant before she speaks—the quick taking of breath, the tight shift of the eyebrows. Reading student writing in a traditional non-digital classroom means always to read a body alongside or behind a text. Reading student papers is quite distinct from reading a novel, from reading a book of scholarship by someone whose body you have never seen, whose body you do not know. Reading student writing and representing that writing in our scholarship is always a representation of a body.

At the beginning of one of this student’s essays, titled “A Journey to Womanhood,” she writes:

I was six or seven, and I was playing in the yard with all of my neighbors, all of whom happened to be boys. We were playing Star Wars and since I was the only girl I of course was Princess Leia. We set up the rules for the game and started to play. Only I wasn’t running around with light sabers saving the galaxy. I was sitting in the tree house waiting to be rescued. Since I was the princess, I needed to be rescued.

In closing, she says:

If I could go back and have a conversation with little [me], while she was waiting to be rescued by the boys, I would give her a few pointers. I would tell her that she should do what she wants. If she wanted to be Luke Skywalker, she should go be Luke Skywalker and if she wanted to be Princess Leia waiting for the boys to come rescue her then she should be Princess Leia. Either way, she rescues herself in the end by making a conscious choice. (“Journey”)

Reading student writing is relational, and that relation is both the interpretative relation that occurs in any reading of any text and an embodied relation, in several ways. First, we might consider the ways I can understand and see her body in the text itself—my ability to imagine her younger self, how she might have sat waiting in the tree house, how she might have looked running with the light saber she did not get to wield, how she might have looked pre-tattoo, pre-silver rings, before she learns some of the woman lessons she knows—to cross her legs, and as she says, to keep her eyes away from the eyes of other women, the competition. Second, we might hear the echo of the moment I described earlier, her paper read in the context of my hand on top of hers, my telling her to “do what she wants”—her telling her young body the same, that “if she wanted to be Luke Skywalker, she should go be Luke Skywalker,” as if her little girl frame might emerge from this tree house a new body, a Luke Skywalker body, a body of boy knowledge merged with a body of girl knowledge.

Composition , of course, as a field, has known for a long time that the idea of some official “body of knowledge ” in our discipline is contradictory, even impossible. Consider how much time we spend reaching into other disciplines, blurring and contesting the boundaries of what counts as composition. Consider the ways we tell and re-tell histories of composition , knowing all along that the “body of knowledge” that counts as Composition is not a stable pre-determined body. Consider the work compositionists do in thinking about identity, knowing that this body of knowledge is connected to rather than outside of some notion of self. But what some recent turns in queer theory can tell us is that the idea of a “body of knowledge ” is not only linked to identity as a concept, but also linked to actual bodies; that, in fact, identity is inextricably linked to actual material bodies. This is the pressure trans-theorists are putting on queer theory and a pressure I want to put on our practices of pedagogy and our writing about our students and their work. I want to bring the body back to knowledge, to acknowledge all the material realities of our classrooms—the student who shakes my hand firmly and introduces himself on the first day of class, the student whose hung over and vodka-seeping body slumps in the back row, me (their teacher) whose voice rings of her father’s voice, whose broad shoulders curb her fears of no authority. There is no bodiless pedagogy , no disembodied scholarship to represent disembodied students and teaching. And I wonder, at times, what would happen if we stopped pretending there was, if we consider the meaning our bodies make, if we showed up (mortal, subjective, messy, and vulnerable as bodies are) to, as my student says, “rescue ourselves in the end.”