It's difficult being a young college instructor, where many of your students are only four or five years younger than you. It's particularly difficult being a young femme lesbian college instructor in the English department at a liberal arts college in a relatively liberal, queer-oriented town.
It becomes especially complicated when you teach a class on critical theory that mainly centers around poststructualism, postmodernism and queer theory. Many of your students are lesbians, hot lesbians, roughly around your age range. Inevitably, there is a certain level of mutual fantasizing that occurs in such predicaments.
The critical theory class I teach actually doesn't have that many out lesbians; in fact, there are only a handful of lesbians, and none of them have openly acknowledged their sexuality, even though I cited queer theory as my research interest.
There are two very shy, giggling, young girls with pink triangle patches on their bags, though, who sit in the back of the room. Neither are exactly my type, but something about them…
Well, at least the one taller, butchier one – though admittedly she's more the emo/punk type than butchie – she blushes in my presence and actually followed me around campus one day, but for some reason refused to speak to me.
Something about this girl, Meg, something about her moreso than Anna (her buddy) has lent an erotic element to my classroom presentation. Even though she's not my type, even though I'm her instructor… I desperately want to show her a thing or two.
I began wearing only skirts to class. Shorter black skirts, and knee length grey wool skirts with black fishnets or with black nylons with seams up the back. I have always worn heels, but I have been sticking to my black patent leather BCBG Max Azria pumps that echo when I walk.
And I do pace, walking between my students and around them; I stop at Meg's desk when I am explaining Judith Butler's conception of the "Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary."
"Try to deconstruct it as," I quote one of my own undergraduate professors," "an organic dildo." I click away, around the room, taking questions, looking intently at the students, pushing up my black cat-eye glasses and flipping my long brown hair. Theory is intense, and they're hungry to learn.
Meg is not hungry to learn, though. Of all the students, she and Anna participate least. I intimidate them, I know, and they never speak directly to me, but I never was good with insolence.
I demand fastidious attention of my students, and treat them with the same attentiveness, should they become active members of the class. In an upper-level English theory class, I assume my students
want
to be here.
I take a chance during the break of a Tuesday morning class, and sit down in front of Meg and Anna.
"Ladies?" I ask, slipping into the desk, only a foot from Meg.
"Do you mean us?" Meg asks.
