Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

The next words I want to give you are not mine:

Dur­ing the course of the Inde­pen­dent Study work I did on per­sonal essays this semes­ter and when I was in Pro­fes­sor Newman’s advanced com­po­si­tion class last semes­ter, I found my voice, [which] ha[d] been silenced for many years […] Now I find myself in a sit­u­a­tion where I want to say what my new voice has been say­ing for a while now, but I’m a bit afraid. This is all very new to me — shar­ing my work with an audi­ence, allow­ing some­one other than myself to lis­ten to my words.

The essay that I’m going to read to you is very per­sonal. Writ­ing the essay has helped me come to terms with cer­tain things that have hap­pened to me in my life. What I’m going to say may shock some of you and may even dis­turb some of you, but I’m in the busi­ness of writ­ing the truth.

Cas­san­dra read that pas­sage dur­ing the annual Inde­pen­dent Study Col­lo­quium at the col­lege where I teach, a forum in which all stu­dents who do inde­pen­dent stud­ies in a given year are required to present their work in order to receive col­lege credit for it. As she spoke, tears came to my eyes. I knew what her essay was about, and I knew how hard it had been for her to write it in the first place, much less gather the courage to read it pub­licly, and I was deeply moved, the way any teacher would be, to hear a stu­dent speak about their work together the way Cas­san­dra had just spo­ken about ours. I was also cry­ing, how­ever, because in the process of help­ing Cas­san­dra to find her voice, I’d given voice to some­thing in myself that I too had “silenced for many years,” and it felt good to be let­ting that silence go.

This part of my story, though, begins not with Cas­san­dra, and not in the inde­pen­dent study we did together, but with Esther, one of Cassandra’s class­mates in the Advanced Com­po­si­tion class I’d taught the pre­vi­ous semes­ter. The cen­tral ques­tion I’d used to frame my syl­labus and the assign­ments I asked my stu­dents to do had been What do you care about enough to write about? Esther made what she cared about very clear from the start. She brought her pro­gres­sive and fem­i­nist pol­i­tics into class dis­cus­sion with­out hes­i­ta­tion, and she pep­pered me in almost every class with ques­tions about writ­ing that bespoke a level of pas­sion and com­mit­ment to the craft that few stu­dents bring with them to col­lege. It was Esther who first approached me with the idea of doing an inde­pen­dent study. She wanted to be a writer, she said, a writer whose words could change the world – and those were her exact words – and she let me know that, as much as she was look­ing for instruc­tion, she was look­ing per­haps even more for a role model. A few weeks later, when she handed me the first draft of the essay that would even­tu­ally become the one she read at the Inde­pen­dent Study Col­lo­quium, I had to decide just how much of a role model I was will­ing to be.

Esther’s essay dealt with the sex­ual abuse she’d sur­vived as a child and how she had shaped her ideas about moth­er­hood – she had three chil­dren – in response to that expe­ri­ence. Like any draft, the piece was full of holes, but because I too am a sur­vivor of child sex­ual abuse, and because I had strug­gled for many years, and was in many ways still strug­gling, to learn how to write about had hap­pened to me, I knew that sim­ply focus­ing on the mechan­ics of mak­ing the words work and/or pro­vid­ing Esther with model essays by women who had writ­ten suc­cess­fully about this topic, would not be enough. The dif­fi­cul­ties Esther was hav­ing in say­ing what she wanted to say were as much emo­tional and psy­cho­log­i­cal as they were writerly: the shame of reveal­ing what had pre­vi­ously been hid­den; the ques­tion of whether she really had the courage to make such a rev­e­la­tion; wor­ry­ing about how her fam­ily, espe­cially her mother, would react; wor­ry­ing whether any­one would even care about what had hap­pened to her; and, most impor­tantly to her, at least in terms of  why she was in my class, won­der­ing whether she was tal­ented enough to write in a way that per­suade any­one else that they should care.

I’d always been very care­ful to keep my iden­tity as an abuse sur­vivor out of my class­room teach­ing. Not that there were many sit­u­a­tions in which I was tempted to reveal this aspect of who I was, but when it did hap­pen that a stu­dent shared her or his own expe­ri­ence of abuse, there was a part of me  that wanted to say, “Hey, some­thing like hap­pened to me too. You are not alone.” I wor­ried, though, that talk­ing about myself in this way would shift atten­tion away from the stu­dent in a way that would be anti­thet­i­cal to the focus on her or his per­for­mance and needs that con­sti­tuted what I believed good teach­ing to be about. Not to men­tion the mis­un­der­stand­ings that could arise if, based on my per­sonal rev­e­la­tions, the stu­dent assumed a level of inti­macy, or that I was try­ing to estab­lish a level of inti­macy, inap­pro­pri­ate to the student-teacher relationship.

Work­ing with Esther, how­ever, forced me to ques­tion whether this sep­a­ra­tion between my per­sonal and pro­fes­sional iden­ti­ties needed to be as absolute as I had thought. Because she was so pas­sion­ately intent on becom­ing a writer, because this essay about her hav­ing been abused was so clearly part of what she believed she needed to do to become the writer she said she wanted to be (as opposed to being, sim­ply, a means of cathar­sis), and because I had already been through the strug­gle she was fac­ing, I taste in the pro­fes­sional dis­tance I would nor­mally have main­tained from her not merely the sac­cha­rine sweet­ness of arti­fi­cial­ity – because of course it was arti­fi­cial; it was a very care­fully con­structed pose – but also the sour­ness of dis­sim­u­la­tion. It was not just that the pro­fes­sional dis­tance I had so care­fully cul­ti­vated was, in this sit­u­a­tion, very clearly a way of hid­ing a truth about myself from Esther – a truth that I doubt any­one would argue she had a right to know – but rather, and  more so, that the dis­tance was a way for me not to face the vul­ner­a­ble and fright­ened part of myself that hav­ing to respond to Esther’s essay had touched.

It had become rel­a­tively easy for me to write about my expe­ri­ence, to pub­lish that writ­ing, even to get up and read that writ­ing in front of an audi­ence; after all, in those sit­u­a­tions, it was only me up there, or on the page. Peo­ple could take or leave what I said, believe it or not believe it, respect it or not. I had long ago reached the point where what was impor­tant to me was less that any given indi­vid­ual should give cre­dence to what I had to say than that I had said it in the first place.Few if any peo­ple were talk­ing at that time about the sex­ual abuse of boys (and I am not so sure this sit­u­a­tion has changed all that much), and so the sim­ple fact of putting my expe­ri­ence out there – and I really did believe it would even­tu­ally find an audi­ence who needed to hear it – was what I cared most about.

As I said above, how­ever, respond­ing to Esther’s essay scared me. Reveal­ing to her that I had been abused meant putting myself on the line as a sur­vivor in a very dif­fer­ent way than I was used to. It meant allow­ing Esther to use the process of my sur­vival – and writ­ing was absolutely cen­tral to that process – as a model for her own, and that meant mak­ing myself vul­ner­a­ble, both per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally, in ways that were very new to me. I will write more below about the very con­crete form that vul­ner­a­bil­ity took in my life. For now, I will tell you that I decided to test these new vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties because doing so meant break­ing yet one more of the many silences behind which I had hid­den my abuse and because I felt that not doing so would betray the trust that Esther had shown me by show­ing me her essay in the first place.

So I wrote Esther a long response in which I talked in very per­sonal terms about how I had faced pre­cisely the issues she was fac­ing. It trans­formed the way we worked together. For Esther, know­ing that I too had been abused gave her the courage to say and write things she’d never before expressed, and the fact that I’d been able to do what she wanted to do, become a writer, gave her hope that her goal was indeed reach­able. For me, teach­ing became less a mat­ter of man­ag­ing the rela­tion­ships between and among my class­room expec­ta­tions, my student’s per­for­mance and the grades they would receive and more about exam­in­ing the rela­tion­ship between life expe­ri­ence – mine and Esther’s – and our cho­sen dis­ci­pline. As a result, when Cas­san­dra came to me with an essay about her his­tory of sex­ual abuse, and since she too was com­mit­ted to becom­ing a writer, I did not hes­i­tate to share my expe­ri­ence with her as well. I also sug­gested that she and Esther would make good inde­pen­dent study part­ners. They agreed. They wrote pro­pos­als which were approved and we began to work together the fol­low­ing semester.

I wish I still had a copy of that pro­posal and of the read­ing list that accom­pa­nied it, not for any­thing that my hav­ing either of them would con­tribute to this essay, but for entirely sen­ti­men­tal rea­sons. The semes­ter I spent work­ing with Cas­san­dra and Esther was the most ful­fill­ing expe­ri­ence I have ever had as a teacher. We met once every two weeks to dis­cuss either the mate­r­ial they had cho­sen to read or the essays they were work­ing on, and, as the semes­ter pro­gressed, our dis­cus­sions became more and more per­sonal and inti­mate. One of the most remark­able aspects of this shar­ing – and it was one of the short­com­ings of the orig­i­nal ver­sion of “My Daughter’s Vagina” that I gave what I am about to talk about very short shrift – was the way race fig­ured into the dynamic of our work: Esther had been born in the Domini­can Repub­lic and had come to the US as a young child. Cas­san­dra was an American-born child of Hait­ian immigrants.

My own racial iden­tity, or at least the way I under­stand my own racial iden­tity, is a bit com­plex: On the one hand, to all out­ward appear­ances, I am white, and I fully acknowl­edge that, all else being equal, I ben­e­fit from white priv­i­lege and from the racism that is per­va­sive in the United States. On the other hand, though, once the fact that I am Jew­ish becomes known, white priv­i­lege is no longer as straight­for­wardly mine to claim. The anti­semitism I expe­ri­enced when I was younger would be famil­iar to any per­son of color who grew up in a neigh­bor­hood where racism was expressed both with words, spo­ken and writ­ten – in my case, on the walls of the pub­lic library, where you can still read some of those words even now, thirty years later, because the town I grew up in never both­ered to remove them com­pletely; and I know this because I was there the other day with my son–and with fists, rocks and other weapons. More to the point, the peo­ple who wielded those weapons were all white; and I have been in sit­u­a­tions too where Chris­t­ian peo­ple of color have stood united in a com­mit­ment to Jew-bashing with white Chris­tians — white Chris­tians who, were it not for the fact that there were Jews to bash, would have been hap­pily bash­ing the peo­ple of color instead.

When Esther, Cas­san­dra and I met, in other words, we brought with us into that very small room a very potent mix of racial and sex­ual issues. (Class was there as well, but it always remained an unac­knowl­edged sub­text, which is a topic per­haps for another essay.) While we dis­cussed these issues almost every day in terms of both the work Cas­san­dra and Esther pro­duced and our read­ing list, how­ever – which included, among oth­ers, James Bald­win, Julia Alvarez, bell hooks, and Andrea Dworkin – we did not talk about how the very par­tic­u­lar con­fig­u­ra­tion of race and sex that we rep­re­sented stood in rela­tion to the con­text of our meet­ing – school, grades, etc. – until the semes­ter was around three-quarters finished.

I do not mean we did not talk about our dif­fer­ences. Of course we did. Cassandra’s story about being harassed in a cam­era store in Gar­den City (a very white, very wealthy neigh­bor­hood on Long Island) when she went in there to buy the equip­ment she needed for a pho­tog­ra­phy class is still with me, and I know, though I do not remem­ber spe­cific exam­ples, that Esther told sto­ries about what
it was like to be a Domini­can woman in the US; and I shared my own expe­ri­ences as well. Still, while I do not want to deny the impor­tance of shar­ing sto­ries like these, telling them, once we trusted each other, was rel­a­tively easy. What we did not talk about were the stakes involved in the three of us doing the work we were doing in the set­ting in which we were doing it.

Cas­san­dra had just fin­ished read­ing a draft of an essay in which she talked about how mas­tur­ba­tion had been for her a con­scious act of rebel­lion against her tyran­ni­cal and phys­i­cally vio­lent father. A cen­tral point of the essay was that, at the time, she thought she must be the only girl on earth who mas­tur­bated. When Cas­san­dra fin­ished read­ing, Esther looked down, smiled, and said in a very quiet voice, “When I started doing it, I thought the same thing.” It was a con­scious­ness rais­ing moment on which I did not want to intrude, so I said noth­ing while we sat there in silence, until one of the women – I don’t remem­ber which one – said, “Can you imag­ine what peo­ple would say if they knew what we were talk­ing about?”

And there they were, the eyes of the insti­tu­tion peer­ing in at us, aus­tere, judg­men­tal, male.

“What do you think they would say?” I asked, and Cas­san­dra answered by ask­ing me who would be at the hon­ors col­lo­quium when they read their work. I recited the list that I knew: other inde­pen­dent study stu­dents and their guests, their men­tors, what­ever fac­ulty were invited to attend, the col­lege pres­i­dent, the vice pres­i­dents of aca­d­e­mic and stu­dent affairs – all three of whom were men — the head of the hon­ors pro­gram, and I told the women that I imag­ined other mem­bers of the col­lege com­mu­nity would be there as well.

I repeated my ques­tion. “Well, what do you think they would say?”

What struck me most about the con­ver­sa­tion that fol­lowed – and I wish I remem­bered it in more detail – was that Esther and Cassandra’s first con­cern in terms of what “peo­ple” would say was to worry that I might get in trou­ble. When I asked them what they thought I might get in trou­ble for, they pointed of course to the fact that they were writ­ing, that we’d been talk­ing and read­ing, not just about child sex­ual abuse, a sub­ject which made peo­ple uncom­fort­able enough, but also about female sex­u­al­ity in terms far more explicit than you find in most com­mu­nity col­lege lit­er­a­ture classes. More than that, though – and I think it was Esther who made the point first – they were wor­ried that peo­ple would look at who we were, a white col­lege pro­fes­sor in his mid to late thir­ties work­ing with two beau­ti­ful women of color, one ten and the other almost twenty years his junior, and auto­mat­i­cally assume first that I was some­how exploit­ing them – get­ting my vic­ar­i­ous jol­lies through my stu­dents’ very per­sonal sex­ual rev­e­la­tions – and, sec­ond, that the women could not pos­si­bly have cho­sen to make those rev­e­la­tions on their own, for their own pur­poses, and/or that, being women, and given the nature of what they wanted to write about, they would never have cho­sen me, a man, as the per­son they wanted to work with.

It was a pro­foundly teach­able moment for all of us. For Esther and Cas­san­dra, it was a more pow­er­ful les­son than I could ever have taught them in the abstract in the power words can have and in the eth­i­cal respon­si­bil­i­ties a writer con­fronts the moment he or she chooses to put pen to paper. They were so con­cerned that they might have put me in some kind of pro­fes­sional dan­ger that they were each will­ing not to give the required pre­sen­ta­tion and to take the result­ing F I would have had to give them. For me, for rea­sons I will explain in more detail in a moment, this meant con­fronting both the degree to which I had kept my iden­tity as a sur­vivor of sex­ual abuse sep­a­rate from my pro­fes­sional iden­tity as a teacher and the degree to which my work with Esther and Cas­san­dra had moved far beyond what might rea­son­ably be con­sid­ered the “nor­mal” para­me­ters of col­lege writ­ing instruction.

First, though, I had to reas­sure my stu­dents that I would not lose my job because of the work we were doing, so I explained that, because I had tenure, the only way the col­lege admin­is­tra­tion could dis­miss me was to prove that I had done some­thing so egre­giously wrong that dis­missal was the only appro­pri­ate response; and the only way such a case could be brought against me was if either or both of them filed a com­plaint. Oth­er­wise, while there might be peo­ple in the col­lege who would object to the work we were doing, no one could take any con­crete dis­ci­pli­nary action against me. (Inter­est­ingly, though, there was one per­son who felt it nec­es­sary, after the col­lo­quium, to inquire in a semi-official capac­ity about who first sug­gested that my stu­dents should write about sex and sex­ual abuse, but more about that below.)

Once Esther and Cas­san­dra were reas­sured that I couldn’t get into any seri­ous trou­ble, we had to deal with their anx­i­eties about what it would mean for them to speak pub­licly the very pri­vate truths they’d been writ­ing about. These con­cerns ranged from wor­ry­ing about how their fam­i­lies would react to the fear that the admin­is­tra­tors present would inval­i­date the work we had done because it was inap­pro­pri­ate in con­tent. My stu­dents’ most imme­di­ate con­cern, how­ever, was whether they would even be able to say out loud the words they had writ­ten, and so I arranged for them to give prac­tice read­ings in front of my own classes. I don’t remem­ber whether Esther gave such a read­ing, but I remem­ber Cassandra’s very clearly because I could see, as she took ques­tions after fin­ish­ing her essay, how my class’ gen­er­ally pos­i­tive response helped her see that the world would not end if she said out loud the things about her abuse and its after­math that she wanted to say.

Nonethe­less, read­ing in front of my class was very dif­fer­ent from read­ing in front of the pres­i­dent of the col­lege. In my class, any stu­dent who wanted to “have a go” at Cas­san­dra for being inap­pro­pri­ate or what have you, would have had to go through me first. The sim­ple fact of my pres­ence, in other words, was a buffer against any inap­pro­pri­ate­ness on the part of my stu­dents. Esther and Cas­san­dra were quite rea­son­ably con­cerned that no one would be able to run that kind of inter­fer­ence at the col­lo­quium since, after all, the admin­is­tra­tors in the audi­ence were my superiors.

We talked about this for a long time. I pointed out to them that since they were my stu­dents and had pro­duced their work under my guid­ance, it was my respon­si­bil­ity, not theirs, to val­i­date their work in the insti­tu­tional con­text of the col­lo­quium, and so I said that I would intro­duce them by telling a lit­tle bit of my own story of abuse, focus­ing not on the abuse itself, but on the fact that when I was strug­gling to come to terms with what had hap­pened to me and to fig­ure out how to write about it, at a time when the sex­ual abuse of girls was barely acknowl­edged, much less the abuse of boys, there had been no one to whom I could turn as a men­tor, no one who could be for me the kind of role model I had been for my stu­dents. I would tell the audi­ence how ful­fill­ing it had been for me to help Esther and Cas­san­dra find the voices in which they could say what they had to say, and any­one who wanted to say that their work was inap­pro­pri­ate to an aca­d­e­mic con­text would have to come through me first.

I gave the intro­duc­tion; Esther and Cas­san­dra read their essays; and they were each rewarded with a stand­ing ova­tion from the stu­dents who were in atten­dance. Even some of the fac­ulty and admin­is­tra­tors stood, and almost all of them walked over to the two women to offer praise and con­grat­u­la­tions. Only two of my col­leagues had any­thing to say to me, how­ever. One with his eyes averted, shook my hand, said, “Nice job,” and walked away, while the other let me know in no uncer­tain terms that by allow­ing my stu­dents to read what they’d read I had triv­i­al­ized and demeaned what was sup­posed to have been a seri­ous occa­sion of intel­lec­tual inquiry. We argued about it; I did not per­suade him, though our con­ver­sa­tion made clear to me that my intro­duc
tion had made him at least as, if not more uncom­fort­able than my stu­dents’ essays. Par­tic­u­larly egre­gious in their work, he felt, was that Cas­san­dra had ended her essay with the story of the first time she’d been able to have an orgasm dur­ing inter­course, after years of suf­fer­ing because one piece of the psy­cho­log­i­cal dam­age her abuse had done to her was to make pen­e­tra­tion painful. He would not even respond when I referred to points I made in my intro­duc­tion about the need to open up the dis­course of the acad­emy, of cre­ative and intel­lec­tual inquiry, to include sto­ries like the ones my stu­dents had to tell.

Angry as he was, how­ever – and he really was angry, not just dis­ap­prov­ing or dis­agree­ing, but angry – he did not express that anger to my stu­dents, and I spent the rest of the evening with Esther and Cas­san­dra talk­ing with the stu­dents who had been in the audi­ence, sev­eral of whom revealed that they too were sur­vivors, and they thanks Esther and Cas­san­dra for hav­ing had the courage to read their work, and the look of sur­prised hap­pi­ness on my stu­dents’ faces as other stu­dents actu­ally thanked them is the most endur­ing image I have of that semester.

I did find out, sev­eral days after the col­lo­quium, that one of my col­leagues did approach Esther and Cas­san­dra to ask whose idea it had been to write about sex in the first place. They felt the ques­tion was patron­iz­ing, since it assumed that they might have been manip­u­lated into pro­duc­ing work that was, for them, not only the result of a fully con­scious choice, but also some­thing they felt they had to do for rea­sons hav­ing noth­ing to do with school or the grade they received. I saw the ques­tion, on the other hand, as not entirely unrea­son­able; I had heard more than enough sto­ries of pro­fes­sors who tit­il­lated them­selves by get­ting their stu­dents to talk about sex in class. On the other hand, though, I have often won­dered if this col­league would have asked that ques­tion if I hadn’t given the intro­duc­tion that I did – because the moment I acknowl­edged that I had an emo­tional agenda in work­ing with Esther and Cas­san­dra, I also admit­ted that my work as a teacher was not pure and dis­in­ter­ested, that it was more than some­thing I did out of the com­pletely self­less desire to help young peo­ple learn; and I can imag­ine how, for some, this admis­sion might be pro­foundly unset­tling. It reveals teach­ers to be in our own way as hun­gry as our stu­dents are to make mean­ing out of what we know of the world. It is to admit not only that we can be hurt – that we are hurt – when our stu­dents refuse to see the value of what we teach, but also that the pas­sion and excite­ment of teach­ing stu­dents like Esther and Cas­san­dra can as intense and mean­ing­ful, and there­fore also as full of heart­break, as the pas­sion and excite­ment of falling in love.

A few years ago, I gave a paper at a con­fer­ence in which I used my expe­ri­ence teach­ing Esther and Cas­san­dra to raise ques­tions about what it means to make teach­ing per­sonal, to rec­og­nize that teach­ing is per­sonal. One of the responses from the audi­ence was, I thought, very telling. Teach­ing, the woman who raised her hand said, is not ther­apy; it would have been entirely pos­si­ble, she con­tin­ued, to elicit from my stu­dents fully sat­is­fac­tory essays with­out mak­ing things as per­sonal as I did. Whether that state­ment is true or not, I don’t know. Per­haps I could have “elicited” – which is an inter­est­ing choice of words in itself, in terms of how it struc­tures power rela­tions – “fully sat­is­fac­tory” essays through a more imper­sonal approach, but I doubt they would have been the essays my stu­dents ended up writing.

More inter­est­ing, though, I think, is the asser­tion that by mak­ing the teach­ing sit­u­a­tion as per­sonal as I made it, I was some­how turn­ing it into a ther­a­peu­tic activ­ity. Because it seems to me that it is the instruc­tor who does not make teach­ing per­sonal, the instruc­tor who refuses any con­nec­tion between – or at least refuses to make vis­i­ble the con­nec­tion between – what a student’s writ­ing means to the stu­dent and what the student’s writ­ing means to the instruc­tor, both as a class­room arti­fact and as a very per­sonal form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, who truly resem­bles a ther­a­pist in her or his pro­fes­sional detach­ment. Which is not to say that I think such pro­fes­sional detach­ment is wrong. It is, of course, absolutely nec­es­sary, but I have – as a very pre­cise result of my expe­ri­ence with Esther and Cas­san­dra – more and more come to ques­tion its deploy­ment as a near-absolute bound­ary that instruc­tors are not sup­posed to cross; or, per­haps more pre­cisely, what I have come to ques­tion is the def­i­n­i­tion of pro­fes­sional detach­ment that sug­gests stu­dents ought not to be allowed to see/understand/experience their instruc­tors’ very per­sonal invest­ment in the work of the class­room and in the work that the stu­dents produce.

And still there is a line that should not be crossed. The acad­emy is full of sto­ries of pro­fes­sors and grad­u­ate stu­dents who fall in love on the basis of the work they do together, only to find that, after a time, what they really fell in love with was not the full per­son, but the per­son within the rel­a­tively nar­row bor­ders of what­ever dis­ci­pline they were work­ing in; and of the sto­ries I have heard, more than a few ended unhap­pily. The fact is that teach­ing and learn­ing are about desire and the ful­fill­ment of desire, and so the class­room can be a pow­er­fully erotic space, which means we bring with us when we enter the class­room, when we enter that erotics, all of the ways in which desire and the ful­fill­ment of desire are moti­vated and shaped by age, race, class, gen­der, sex­ual pref­er­ence and all of the other dif­fer­ences that exist between and among human beings. To deny this fact is silly; to nego­ti­ate its ram­i­fi­ca­tions in the daily life of the class­room can be inor­di­nately difficult.

Esther, Cas­san­dra and I shared an expe­ri­ence of sex­u­al­ity that opened a com­mon ground between us that our age, gen­der and racial dif­fer­ences would most likely have oth­er­wise made it very dif­fi­cult for us to find. We occu­pied that space in an atmos­phere of trust, car­ing and account­abil­ity that, in my expe­ri­ence, is rare except between and among the clos­est of friends and lovers. I have talked a lit­tle bit about how this hap­pened in terms of sex and gen­der; a part of me would like very much to say more than I already have about how this hap­pened in terms of race, but the truth is that – aside from not­ing briefly how sala­ciously oth­ers might read the racial makeup of our group in light of the mate­r­ial we were work­ing with – we did not dwell on race very much, except, as I have already said and since nei­ther of the women took on ques­tions of race in their essays, when it arose in our reading.…though even as I write this, I recall an essay one of the women started – I don’t remem­ber which one – about a white boyfriend she’d had and how amazed she’d been that he had been attracted to her, that being with her – and these were the terms she’d put it in – had given him a hard on.

The essay never got writ­ten. I don’t now remem­ber if I ever knew why, though my guess is that part of the rea­son had to do with my stu­dent not hav­ing enough dis­tance from the rela­tion­ship and/or the vocab­u­lary to talk about the racial dynam­ics at work within it. Had we con­tin­ued our work for another semes­ter, maybe the essay would have been writ­ten, and then race might indeed have become a more explicit part of our work together; and maybe that is as it should be, that Esther, Cas­san­dra and I would have taken on the lay­ers of who we were to each other a lit­tle bit at a time, the way friends and lovers do as they deepen their relationships.

So, did I fall in love with Esther and Cas­san­dra? In a way I sup­pose I did. As spe­cial as my rela­tion­ship with them was, how­ever, I have to admit that this love is also a promis­cu­ous one, since there is a part of me that looks for it in every class I teach, won­der­ing which of the men and women I am stand­ing in front of might take me to the edge of where my teach­ing is right now and chal­lenge me to move beyond that point. For if my expe­ri­ence with Esther and Cas­san­dra has taught me any­thing, it is to value not sim­ply how per­sonal teach­ing is, but also how deeply into our­selves teach­ers and stu­dents can invite each other, if we choose to, and that we need to see this invi­ta­tion, even though it is risky, and even though it makes many peo­ple uncom­fort­able, as a legit­i­mate part of what it means to teach.