what to wear when teaching queer

elizabeth j. wenger

Ames, IA is a decidedly un-queer town surrounded on all sides by fields mostly planted with its signature crop: corn. When I first moved here to start a graduate program and teach, I was hit by a sudden wave of creative oppression. It was as if the monoculture, which has turned so much of the state into nearly identical acres of corn stalks, had homogenized the culture as well as the land. Classically a swing state, Iowa has moved further right in the past years following the wave of conservatism that has similarly swept the country. With conservatism and ruralism comes a certain commitment to standardization of identity, dress, and behavior in the public sphere. The goal of dressing here is not to ‘pull a look,’ but rather to conform as much as possible to an unspoken, preset, uniform.

On my first day of class, I knew that when I entered a room full of freshmen from largely midwestern suburban or rural towns, my flagrant queerness and masculine appearance would in itself be something of a teaching moment. My anxiety about the first day manifested itself in a recurring nightmarish fantasy in which, upon my entrance into the classroom, a student muttered the word ‘dyke’ under his—for it always was a ‘he’—breath.

No such thing happened on the first day of class when I stepped into the room wearing a floral polo and stained Carhartt jeans, though I could see my hands shaking as the printed syllabus vibrated in my nervous grasp. Who knew 18-year-olds could be so terrifying? Alas, the students said nothing of my home-bleached hair or my dirty-brown steel-toed boots. In fact, it was a miracle that I could get them to so much as tell me where they were from.

It is a tired truism that as a teacher, I learn from my kids as much as they learn from me. There is another, more complex side to this old teaching aphorism: I begin to see myself through my students’ eyes. And this seeing of myself through others is inflected by my own views of myself.

Wenger stands in a classroom, holding a piece of paper. Wenger wears a red, plaid flannel and blue carpenters jeans.

What does it mean to see oneself through another’s eyes, when all we possess is our own stilted sight and our own insecurities?

Teaching, when done right, is not hierarchical, but rather a reciprocal-relational act. It is an exchange of projections. I understand that my fears of my students have less to do with them as people and more to do with my egocentric anxieties of being butch in a gender-normative state.

In my ideation of their vision of me, I am the butch caricature my internalized homophobia has always made me fear I’d become—slouching, self-doubting, absent of charm and appeal, existing on the margins of society or in the dark, smokey corners of dive bars.

Though no student has directly questioned my gender or sexuality, my imposter syndrome as a young teacher was tested one day when I gave my students flashcards on which to write anonymous feedback.

“Before you leave today, write one thing that is going well in the class, one thing you don’t understand, or one question you have,” I said to the students who were already packing their backpacks in a rush to get out of the classroom. “You don’t have to write your name on them.”

After they all left, I looked through the stack of unsigned cards and read through them. They were mostly after-thoughts about class going well, or questions about assignment due dates. But on one card, written in the faintest pencil, was an observation that I realized I had quietly feared and expected all along:

You always wear interesting non-teacheresque outfits. Not a bad thing at all, but I’ve never had a teacher like it.

I left class wondering whose handwriting it was, wishing I was a graphologist and could ascertain the identity of my critic merely by the slant of the letters. Was it one of the two sorority sisters who enter and leave class together as if joined at the hip? Or one of the boys who always wore huge crosses dangling from their necks? Was it the agricultural engineering student with long legs he hasn’t yet grown into like the paws of a Great Dane puppy?

But this was anonymous, just as I wished it to be. I would never know who wrote that observation on the notecard. But I wanted to know who. I thought that if I knew who it was, I might better discern their meaning—might be able to read between the lines of the note to either my secret fear (angry, homophobic students, taking note of my every mistake) or my secret hope (that I might be inspiring a student to dress and exist as they truly wished).

I put the unsigned note in a drawer in my office. It brought up in me too many questions that I could not answer. It’s hard to let go of unanswered questions.

*

This card was in actuality but a blip in one long semester that consisted less of existential crises and more of the humdrum habits of a classroom. Each class period, three times a week, my students enter the room and sit for 50 minutes half-listening with their laptops open as I lecture them on how to communicate. We read the script of the classroom: them, playing the hesitant-but-willing learners and me, the part of enthusiastic instructor.

And it is a stage play. Stepping into the role of teaching also means stepping into the role of performer, of object, of spectacle. Standing under the fluorescent institutional lights, it is difficult for me to move past the feeling of being ‘on-stage’ as a transmasc lecturer. Being butch in the world is hard enough without 46 young eyes trained on you. To add to all this, professionalism has never been my strong suit. Before returning to academia, I worked for a time at a food pantry, then doing conservation work, and finally construction—a series of jobs that tailored my dress to increasingly less formal wear. I moved from white t-shirts and jeans, to a dirt-covered-Carhartt-sponsored-assemblage, to sweat-stained hole-ridden shirts and pants patterned with industrial glue and drywall mud.

Unlike many of my well-groomed, clean-cardiganned colleagues, I enter the classroom looking like a punk-rock, sheet-rocker; this is the aesthetic that best agrees with my anti-authoritarian temperament. My short, but shaggy, bleach-blonde hair; my baggy, stained, carpenter’s pants; my flannels and graphic-t-shirts; and my dinged-up work boots—all of this undermines the normative image I have of what a teacher should be: a plain-looking woman in a modest dress and flats, or a middle-aged man with a button up tucked into slacks.

Being different is in some ways, exactly as I like it. I am rebellious by nature, a kid who broke rules just because I disagreed with the principle of them. At the same time, I am terribly aware of social norms and the potential dangers of breaking them. These two versions of myself—the revolutionary, idealistic queer and the paranoid closet-case—clash when it comes to occupying the space of the classroom.

Before the gaze of so many still-developing minds, I am aware of myself as a queer teacher to a group of mostly straight, cis students. A juxtaposition arises between my butch accoutrements and their gender-normative college wear each day when they shuffle in dressed in oversized t-shirts, sorority sweaters, and athletic shorts.

Wenger sits in a chair wearing brown overalls, a green hoodie, and a blue and tan baseball cap.

Through all this, I’ve begun to view the presentation of my body and the clothes I dress it in as a literary text or artifact that can be analyzed much in the way my students analyze advertisements, short stories, and poems. I say this in the rhetorical sense of the words:

nouns. ˈär-ti-ˌfakt + ‘tekst

a group of symbols that is meaningful to a culture
a thing created by humans which gives information about the culture of its creator and users

It is not uncommon to view fashion, and especially fashion and the body, as rhetorical artifacts. The overlap of the body and text is clear even in the language we use to talk about writing. Consider: the essay is constructed by ‘body’ paragraphs, ‘footnotes,’ and ‘headers.’ And writing, when done well, has much in common with good fashion: it has texture, color, movement, and meaning. Together the body and clothing form a web of symbols and signals.

I think often, too, of the connection between the words gender and genre, and how the two terms can feel confining and restrictive. Gender says, “This is what it means to be a woman.” Genre says, “This is what it means to write an essay.” And yet both gender and genre can be bent, expanded, and tailored to the individual.

French theorist and essayist Roland Barthes argues in his books The Fashion System and The Language of Fashion that fashion is in many ways a written thing, a fountain of symbols, a transmitter of culture, power, and subversion. In the history of queer fashion, clothing has often been used to send subtle or overt messages. It is a way to mark oneself as belonging to the queer community; to communicate desire (like in the case of the handkerchief code); or to express gender.

When I teach rhetorical analysis, I ask my students to identify the audience, author, purpose, and context of a rhetorical artifact. In this manner, I begin to think of myself as an author as I swipe through clothing in my closet. Getting dressed is much like writing. It is a process of selection, editing, and consideration of flow between components—all in order to communicate a message. As in writing, you must be aware of context and tone: Does the tone of this Unabomber t-shirt match the context of the campus? And of purpose: Do these Birkenstocks with my blue, mushroom-printed socks convey ‘teacherliness’? And audience: What will the students think of my thrifted jean cap that reads “WAILIN’”?

Wenger stands at a lectern wearing black pants, brown sandals, and a black baseball cap.

The answers to these questions are ones I’m still searching for. In reality, the answers may be a more embodied thing. My audience is the world I move through—a world of academic advisers, coworkers, friends, family, students, lovers, and strangers on the sidewalks. That which I wish to convey or achieve varies daily. Sometimes I desire attractiveness, respect, a certain suaveness I’ve always admired in older butches, a vague vibe of intelligence, or a punk-rock, fuck-it-all ethos.

Ultimately the question of fashion a queer author must ask is the question of subversion and safety. It is a line constantly walked between self-hood and conformity. Some days I wish I could dress without an audience and without purpose—wish that my fashion was hermetically and hermeneutically sealed. But I have to go to work. I have to go to class. I have to leave the comfort of my apartment, walk the streets, and be perceived.

Wenger sits in a chair, arms crossed, dressed in a tan polo shirt with green and red stripes on the collar and sleeves.

The class period after I received the notecard, I played dress-up as a teacher listening to the quiet people-pleasing impulse that had been nagging at my mind since I read the note.

I wore a collared shirt peeking out of a crew neck sweater and my least-stained pair of khakis. It was, what I believed to be, a teacher-esque outfit. I felt slightly stiff in the preppy clothing. It was the sort of clean-cut outfit Ellen popularized for lesbians when she made gayness a palatable thing in the early 2000s. It recalled my own days as a freshman, back when I was still in the early stages of finding clothing that didn’t confine me or make my body feel like it wasn’t mine.

I told friend after friend about the unsigned note, hoping to be witnessed in some way. Here were my fears, confirmed. But the more I talked about it, the more I realized that though it said outright that my fashion was ‘not a bad thing,’ I had read past the words and into my own psyche. Really, my friends assured me, my open queerness might even be good for students who might be hiding their own otherness behind baggie ISU hoodies and backward hats. My queerness might embolden them to step into themselves.

I soon returned to my normal cycle of outfits, relaxing into the comfort of men’s jeans. The comfort of my un-teacheresqueness. Being queer often means existing outside of normal boundaries and space. Whenever I resist my own otherness, I end up feeling like a fraud. I feel my body like a Polly Pocket in the hands of the little girl I never was, dressing me to her taste in plasticized, pink dresses. In academic institutions, I’ve decided it might be best to dress just as I please, allowing my simple, queer existence to stand as a challenge to the institutional structure.

In Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilites for Writing and Knowing, Stacey Waite writes, “Queer bodies have certainly the potential for pushing up against what is possible, and this potential can cause us to be deemed impossible. That is not necessarily a problem; in fact, it is sometimes desirable to be impossible, illegible—to become a difficult text.”

In writing, as in life, I find the most liberating practice to be shirking prescriptions and ‘pushing up against what is possible.’ As a teacher, I want to encourage my students to do the same. I want to teach them how to break the script, to veer from the prompts they are given, to write themselves into existence, make up their own definitions, and be their own authors. I want to teach them how to do this in spite of what their audiences may want.

I want to show them how to be a difficult text, even if I’m not sure what that looks like in my day-to-day life. I’m choosing to aspire to illegibility and, like all aspirations, it is a process, not a product. It will take practice to continuously own my body, my clothing, and my space. It will take holding myself back from editing the parts of me that might bring unease to my readers. It will take persistence in dressing and moving through the world just as I write: honestly, vulnerably, and without fear.