This week, I thought I might instead share some self-reflective poetry/creative writing as my blog post:

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to me

To hold a book in my hand. Why I’ll never forget

My uncle throwing my book into the bushes as we walked to a bar at a family reunion, why

It stung so much, why I was so angry. Why I crawled in after it. Why when I found it there I felt warm again. 

I think I understand. The love of reading and writing 

is a part of me,

I am made from it. It is made for me. It is a feeling but 

It is my everything. Thrilling. 

My greatest fantasy is of a beautiful, aged, ornate library, full

Of ancient books and closed to the public,

Just for me to explore, to hold the books in my hands and 

Smell the disintegrating pages. 

I hope that someday, I too can take my students to a place

Where in their minds there can be no greater beauty than clasping a book

In their hands, and then getting dirty

From diving into a bush to save it

From someone who couldn’t understand

That they couldn’t feel warm without it

The Queer Pedagogue in a state of exception 

It is amazing how much being alone with my thoughts has changed me as a queer academic. I think ‘identity politics’ do affect who we are in the classroom, and I have begun to question aspects of mine. Recently, one of the biggest questions I have been entertaining is whether or not I identify as an ace lesbian, as opposed to bi. These thoughts have occupied my consciousness far more as of late as I think about the things which are most important to me at the very core of my being. When I imagine happily ever after, it is always with a woman. In fact, when I imagine ‘happy’ at all, the same is true. I have also begun to question elements of my gender presentation. I feel very much like a woman, but I also feel that I have lived a life so afraid of being perceived as abnormal that I have not felt free to explore a queerer representation of what womanhood means. For me, it has been empowering to stop shaving during this lockdown, and experiencing what that looks and feels like. I am interested in the whole spectrum of creative gender presentation, meaning I can wear feminine dresses and make-up, more androgynous looking clothes, or a mix between the two, and feel no real conflict with that. I like how I look in gowns, yet I think I’d also feel pretty euphoric to attend a fancy event in a suit. I’d like to begin presenting openly as queer, something I have never been comfortable to do in the past, and something which I think I can do with impunity in New York City, where I will be moving to graduate school. I do not fit the label of either femme or butch entirely, but have elements of both. 

I have done a lot of thinking about how this kind of gender non-conformity might affect how I am perceived in the classroom. Currently, I am a medievalist who studies Iberian legal codes. Much like Jody, I have a hunch I may research, write about, or teach classes on gender related topics just due to my own positionality and education on the topic, regardless of my professional specialization. I constantly make an effort to read about contemporary queer issues because my ambition is to be a leader in the queer community. I want people to know I am a safe person. I want my students to be aware that I am working towards an intersectional pedagogy coming from my own perspective as a queer person. I will likely write, in a journalistic fashion, articles about what it means to be queer and in academia. 

I do not intend to call attention to myself, nor will I arrive at Columbia’s graduate school and proclaim my queerness to everyone I meet. They are definitely going to notice it, but I plan to at least start out by simply being myself and going about my work. This is a much more difficult undertaking than it would seem to be. It has taken me a lot of self-reflection to arrive at the point at which I am comfortable enough with myself to make my own body a site of resistance just by being myself. 

I honestly cannot wait to take my hard earned place in the academy, at least for these next seven or so years. I can’t wait to be a serious medievalist, and queer, both openly, in all of the traditional academic spaces. I do have the feeling that I must somehow ‘be better’ because I am queer, that I must somehow outperform the field’s expectations for me simply to prove that I can. But more than anything, I want my young queer students to leave my classroom and be just as euphoric and hopeful as I was years ago when I found out that Jody was a lesbian. 

Claire Dwyer

In high school, I was acknowledged as having a “gift” for language acquisition. In regards to Spanish, I probably do. I could pick up the language with little study, and I would frequently get 98-100% grades in the class. Over the decade of serious Spanish language study in lower, middle, and high school in which I engaged, I had a very wide range of Spanish teachers in regards to their expertise in teaching.  For me, it didn’t matter that much with Spanish, because I could do it no matter how good or bad the teacher was. 

However, I was never truly inspired by language study. The closest I came to being inspired was my AP Spanish class. We were introduced to music, literature, and culture. The class was always challenging for me, but in that challenge I began to realize that language was something I could really sink my teeth into. 

Though language was a part of my life for so long, it was always pushed to the side or felt to be peripheral in my secondary studies. I never imagined I would do something with my life in which language would be so critical like medieval studies. I certainly did not know I would become a historian in high school. History was to me in many ways, the sweetest rose, my greatest love. I already had a lot of the love for the study of history that I do now. I did not, however, fully realize that I could become a historian for my career. Now that I have—heaven help me. Historian will always be the #1 way in which I identify myself. 

As I have spent so much of my time studying different languages in college, I have reflected a lot about language pedagogy. As my studies have become more serious and more critical, the quality of my professors has become more critical as well. I have thought a lot about what is important to me in the classroom, the best ways that I learn, and how I might teach in the future. How I would manage a wide range of students taking my language classes for so many different reasons I honestly do not know. My own difficulties in language learning were enough to make me approach teaching them with serious apprehension. 

Language studies are one area in which I think progressive education could be fairly easily implemented. If nothing else, please world, give us progressive education in language classes. Don’t neglect to teach grammar of course! Don’t neglect to teach the proper way to decline, to conjugate, to construct a sentence. But so often in language classes, the joy of the language is lost in those details. In my view, the only way to encourage a student to have a lasting relationship with a language, and to actually wantto study it, is to make it full of joy. Too often, language classes are taught as though the language can be constructed like a mathematical formula. This blinds students to the fact that languages are always living, even when dead. 

Feb 27, 2020

The first time they sent me to the “Hall of Shame” was when I forgot to copy my V’s and W’s. We were learning cursive. In fact, I was relegated to the “Hall of Shame” four times that year. It was the third grade and I was eight years old.

However, third grade was nothing compared to fourth grade. In fourth grade, they’d pull us out from recess and force us to do the missed homework in front of everyone else, leaning against a wall designated for that purpose. 

These punishments stopped in fifth grade. However, by that time the fear was already deeply ingrained within me. You can perhaps tell how these experiences are seared on the inner parts of my soul. I will never forget the way they taught us times tables. It is the first time I can remember feeling truly insecure about my academic abilities. They had ice cream sundaes on the walls, and when you’d complete a certain part of the times tables you’d get another scoop of ice cream added to your sundae. Then at the end of the year, there was an ice cream party. Each child could only have as much ice cream and toppings as was in their times table sundae. Of course, I didn’t care about the ice cream. I understood even in elementary school that the primary purpose of the sundae was to shame us, and the final cherry on top of it was that end of semester ice cream party. Thank God I am not the worst was frequently my thought. In fact, this was so traumatic to me I can still remember the names of the students who were the worst, and who were the best. I will never forget them. 

This was a special school for gifted children. I had to send in ERB test scores to prove I was highly intelligent. I had to take further testing on top of the ERB, in fact. It was perhaps a more extensive review process, as far as this school testing my IQ, than it was to get into my private high school. However, when I arrived, I found myself completely alone. I was as close to the concept of gifted as a child can be. However, and I hate to say this, most of my peers weren’t. I was relentlessly bullied just like I would have been anywhere else, for thinking differently, for being in some ways behind in my emotional and social development. I had a lot of brain power and no ability to control it. I felt deeply, and I was still learning how to exist as a highly sensitive person in a world which tries to teach highly sensitive people that there is something wrong with them. I think part of the intent behind putting me in the gifted school was to save me from bullying. However, when you’re an 11-year-old kid who hides in the technology lab at recess to read academic articles off of academic databases, you’re not exactly setting yourself up to be invited to all the birthday parties. I wasn’t smarter, or at least I didn’t feel I was. I was just fundamentally different, and I would have probably felt that way anywhere I went.   

 In some areas, I was so many years beyond my grade level that there’d have been no way to challenge me in the third grade. But in some ways, socially, emotionally, and intellectually in regards to my quantitative reasoning, I was still very much a third grader. Part of me is glad for the gifted school. It challenged me enough that no one noticed how far advanced I was in areas like reading and writing and tried to make me skip a grade. Skipping a grade would have been disastrous for my emotional and personal growth. 

This school made me into the driven and focused academic that I am today. It taught me discipline, focus, how to handle academic rigor, how to relate to my peers. I learned such an immense amount from that school, and I truly did have a lot of positive educational experiences there. However, I would have never ended up the creative, silly, open person that I am today if it weren’t for my internal drive to rebel. I was intuitive enough to realize the problems with this traditional education and how it was getting in my way. I created my own educational worlds within it. I’d write my essays in poetic verse. I’d refuse to play sports. I’d wear only solid colored clothes to protest the classism. I took pride in being terrible at handball. I’d carry around large heavy books in my backpack, and stack them up at the corners of classrooms. I’d tell off straight white boys in my discussion groups when they spoke over me or didn’t do their work. I planted seeds in the dirt next to the playground. I’d lay down in the grass during capture the flag.

I did a thousand little rebellions, but never enough to get me in trouble. I created unconventionality out of convention. But the biggest thing I wonder is how it could have been in a progressive school where a kid like me had been allowed to follow her passions. What if they’d stopped shaming me for being mediocre at math and instead had focused on fostering the critical reading abilities that I hid from sight? This kind of thing probably happens to a lot of “gifted” kids, and it is exactly the reason why gifted schools aren’t the answer. The answer is changing how all children are taught. It didn’t matter to me how smart my peers were. It mattered to me that I felt so alone. To this day, I am so grateful for my friends. They probably have no idea how I really feel. For left over from my childhood is a feeling of relief when I hang out with someone.

Finally, a friend.

Claire Dwyer

            President Barack Obama was a “philosopher king.” So was the medieval king that I study, Alfonso X. Trump is obviously nota philosopher king. But this platonic ideal, which comes directly from The Republic, gets infused into our peculiar sense of western idealism, I think because the philosopher king is who we would like to imagine ourselves to be. Strong, fit, kind, well-spoken, intelligent in all matters, studious, athletic—and the list goes on. The philosopher king is such a powerful ideal for us as Americans because he represents two very important things that the capitalist American patriarchy holds dear—power and intelligence.

            Despite my widely known obsession with the philosopher king Alfonso X, I do not idealize the ideal. I don’t pretend that my own particular desire to have a philosopher king at the helm of our nation is not a product of the culture and environment in which I have been raised, and that there aren’t a number of problems with how much I idealize the “scholar.” In my thesis, I also argue that Alfonso X’s “intellectualism” is a product of his particular political situation in thirteenth-century Castile. In fact, it is clear that Alfonso X manipulates this “philosopher king” ideal to a certain extent within his legal codes in order to legitimate his own sovereignty in an era of feudalism and custom law. 

            Now, having been deprived of a philosopher king for so long, my thoughts drift frequently to how nice it would be if our president did fit this classical ideal. But make no mistake. There is a very big difference between the philosopher/scholar (what my chosen career path is) and the philosopher king, and that is one simple concept: power. 

            Alfonso X was not a true intellectual, at least in the way that we today might conceive of an intellectual as a professor or academic invested in her students and attempting to understand her discipline first and foremost as knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Alfonso X was a philosopher king, and I’ll argue that philosopher kings are actually invested in knowledge not for the sake of knowing it, but for the political ends which come from it. There is of course a complex political dynamic within academia as well, so I can’t claim that our quest for knowledge quest isn’t at all political. In that sense, a truer intellectual might be a hermit, because even a cloistered monk is likely to have some politics attached to his interactions with his confreres.However, there is something different about portraying oneself as a powerful intellectual in the explicitly political world because of the immense amount of power over others that you simultaneously possess. Alfonso X does this by emphasizing in his legal codes the importance of education for a wide range of individuals in his society, and to shape the most perfect version of the institution of the king. His intention in promoting education though his legal code is not because he so values intellectual conversations, but because he wishes to use the intellectual ideal to maintain the perception that the king should have power and sovereignty over all in an era in which this was not a given. President Obama does this in his behavior within all his public appearances in the American political arena—in his relations with others it is easy to tell that he is well-read and well-educated. This is intellectualism, but it is intellectualism with focused ends attached to it. It is intellectualism as part of an image.  

The ideal of the philosopher king is a beautiful one. And it is one that I like very much. But when you add “king” to “scholar,” the value of the scholarship will nearly always be corrupted by power. 

 Claire Dwyer

In class, Jody’s discussion of “does a ‘good’ really exist” stuck with me quite profoundly. I don’t believe that there is one good that exists, and never have. Additionally, I have an ecumenical view towards religion and morality. I believe that if a “heaven” or a “hell” existed, it wouldn’t matter what faith you had allegiance to, or even if you were an atheist. It would matter only that you lived your own version of good, treated others with respect and kindness, and worked in some way (even if it was small) to better the world. Essentially, it would matter if you were “good,” whatever the definition of “good” was for you in the context of your life. 

            After our discussion of the “good,” our class moved to discussing gender dynamics in the classroom. We mentioned, throughout the course of our discussion of potential ways to incorporate Platonic ideals into the classroom, that one educational inequity to be addressed is the fact that at a certain age, some women/non-male folks especially stop participating in the classroom for fear of saying something wrong. In my opinion, this is one of the greatest “gender gaps” in the classroom, as the fear of saying something wrong still occasionally holds me back at academic conferences or in professional settings. 

            However, I thought it would be useful to share a certain educational experience as a part of this blog post that has shaped the way I think about my own presence in the classroom. For those that don’t know, I am actually an introverted person. I think some folks might be surprised by that, considering how social I am. My extroversion is actually an illusion, however, that I have cultivated from being a performer for so long. It is performative—even now, as someone who participates quite vociferously in class and who has a rather “loud personality,” I am still actively telling myself to participate and speak. It takes me a long time to think through what I want to say, and to put together my thoughts in the way I want them. So sometimes, when a discussion moves especially quickly, if there are very extroverted or loud people in the room, etc, I tend to struggle a little bit more. I doubt many of my professors have especially noticed this considering how practiced I am at performative extroversion, but it is still a challenge. I am an odd kind of introvert who has so much performance experience that I am fine speaking to groups of people—though I do get a kind of heart-wrenching stage-fright to this day. I have been told by a professor before that I need to stop speaking so much in class and leave more space for the other students. What she probably didn’t realize is how easy that is for me. I am perfectly comfortable in silence. 

            In high school, I had to more actively think, “participate.” And I would participate no matter what. Regardless of whether I knew the right answer, I would raise my hand and just say something. I am so glad now that this was my attitude. I think it is the reason that I have not faced any barriers due to my natural tendency to quiet—I am comfortable with myself, and I am not shy in any way, shape, or form. I think people often confuse introversion with being shy, and they are not the same thing at all. I think being shy is what prevents people from making social connections. I am an introvert with a lot of friends. What that looks like is that I have a wide social network but I only meet them one on one for the most part because that is what I can handle. And that’s ok. 

            I will never forget the report card I received where I was celebrated for being wrong so much. It was in sophomore year of high school, and the fact that I can still remember it now is indicative of how dramatic an impression it made on me. My teacher wrote that I seemed comfortable participating in class—that I wasn’t always right but I did always add something to the educational experience of the students in the class. I am trying to hold on to this boldness as I move into academia, though I will admit that professionally this attitude is somewhat more difficult to maintain. 

            I think if we are going to optimize this Platonic ideal of education, we as educators have to encourage students to be comfortable with being wrong. I think that this particular English teacher made a big impact on my life in encouraging me in this way. This class began my journey of boldly participating no matter what—of taking risks, standing up for what I believe in, and then going home to tea and Netflix and everyone leaving me alone. 

Claire Dwyer

Historians are people who exist in their own particular historical contexts and attempt to look back objectively at the past. I think it is somewhat easier to separate myself from the medieval Iberian history that I study than it would be if I studied the history of the American civil war. But there is something culturally about the Classics that has always made it a little bit harder for me to do this for some reason. In class, I finally realized what that was.

Many people in American society are raised with Protestant cultural values, a good American Protestant work ethic, a mild to moderate affection for Christianity. Our country is deeply diverse but this is the “white American ideal”—the archetype that white America is shown in movies and TV shows, or at least was historically shown until quite recently. 

I wasn’t raised this way. I was raised going to avant-garde theatre. I was encouraged in my skepticism. My parents didn’t punish—no time outs, no “being grounded,” only natural consequences. I was rebellious, but only intellectually. As it turns out, if you expose your kids to the diversity of the world, they don’t end up confused but open minded. They end up intellectually inquisitive. You produce curious scholars.

 Both of my parents had grown up hating the Christian church for different reasons. My mother’s parents had to elope because one was Protestant and one was Catholic. My grandfather rejected the familial expectation that he become a Protestant minister and instead chose to be a doctor. He had to join the military to afford medical school. My mother was raised to question authority and question religion as a result. My father was raised in a strictly Roman Catholic household, and his hatred of organized religion came from it being forced upon him.

They raised me to think Socrates was the Lord. I kid you not. Of course, they did not literally teach me Socrates was God. But they did bring him up and teach me loosely about the history of intellectual inquiry and the Socratic method. They taught me that it was the best way to learn—to question, to attempt to understand the world around you, to learn by thinking, to create new and fantastic worlds in your mind. They taught me that there was never an answer, to liberate me from Christian creeds. They taught me values like honor and justice came from within, and were not something dictated to me by God, a religion, or any system of belief–including that of being “American.”

Socrates came to represent something for me. He came to represent intellectual liberation. My parents used the name Socrates without even really understanding what Socrates was. The Classics had also been a part of both of their educations in various ways, and they had latched onto them as a way to liberate themselves from creedal religions. 

That is why I decided to “question” whether or not Socrates was guilty of “mansplaining.” I saw this in these texts. I knew it was anachronistic to place such a designation on this material. I knew it was anachronistic to challenge Socrates in the way that I was challenging him. But it was oddly necessary to me. Plato and Socrates had become cultural symbols to me in my childhood, much like how Sappho has become that for many of us in the queer community. I decided to make a conscious decision to challenge my own belief system, and the cultural values upon which my sense of self was constructed. The Classics are a big part of why I am like I am, for the simple reason that they include the strong value of being taught to question and to never stop doing so.   

“Then an argument came up about injustice being more profitable than justice, and I couldn’t refrain from abandoning the previous one and following up on that. Hence the result of the discussion, as far as I’m concerned, is that I know nothing for when I don’t know what justice is, I’ll hardly know whether it is a kind of virtue or not, or whether a person who has it is happy or unhappy” (I:354b)

One of the most profound parts of our group discussion for me was the chance to really look at the text and attempt to understand how it related to my own life and my own ambitions in academia. So often in American society we look towards Scripture as the only way to obtain abstract, moral guidance on the decisions we make in our lives, when there is a centuries old intellectual tradition which we can appropriate to additionally help us understand the world around us. In that way, the above quote caused me to reflect on my own behavior, and on the behavior of other academics in my field of medieval history.

How can we ever be trusted as medievalists if we do not admit to the fundamental problem at the center of our field–in reality, we know nothing. We are creatives who never stopped imagining the beauty of the past, the lives of those which exist in a space so wildly different from our own. Much like in Book I of The Republic,we ask constant questions in the pursuit of an elusive “truth” that we know we will never reach. When we write books, we extrapolate to construct the reality of the historical figures that we are studying. There must be some worth in Socratic reasoning–there must be something to be learned from this chain of ostensibly meaningless questions about justice in The Republic. This line of reasoning is essentially the same one I make use of myself when I try to eke out details of the life or political ambitions of the object of my study, Alfonso X of Castile. I ask questions, I investigate immaterial claims, and oftentimes the most profound things that I learn throughout the course of my study of medieval Castile come about somewhere in the middle of my investigative process. The arrived at realization is always that I know nothing–the important part is that I have learned through investigation, understood through listening and engaging with scholarship, and further advanced my understanding of the topic through focused thought.

I deal in nothing. I am a historian of nothing. I deeply believe in “the nothing,”–in looking to where there is nothing to be read and where the silence is awesome in order to better understand what hides in those absences in medieval society. There is no reason that we have to be uncomfortable with knowing nothing–there is no reason that we as scholars of the humanities should be afraid of being unable to answer the questions that we set out to ask. The profound beauty of the way that we do research and understand the medieval world is that we may always continue to ask while still knowing nothing.

Of course things may be learned from this dialogue. Learning how to think and how to exist is far more important than any concrete answer that is to be arrived at anyway. I am reminded of a profound quote from Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” The real lessons we learn throughout our investigation are certainly not factual ones. Presumably, we will forget what we said and did in college, the exact facts we learned, the content we examined. What will be left with us after this class (and others) are over is probably, for the majority of students, not the facts that they learned, but how they internalized meaning and the way they went about discovering it. 

Recently, a friend of mine and I were reflecting on what labels mean to us as members of the queer community. As part of this discussion, I realized that it wasn’t just these queer identity terms which meant something to me—I had numerous other labels I applied to myself as well, some of which were just as integral to who I was as my queer identity. The term medievalist loomed quite large in my mind as a term which really quite accurately describes who I am. It may not be this way for everyone, but I am truly a medievalist before I am anything else. It is true that being gray ace and gray aro (and a mostly Sapphic bi) actually makes it far easier for me to become a medievalist in the first place. I can be more or less “monastic” without it being much of a sacrifice for me, because I really don’t have the same romantic needs as an allosexual or alloromantic person might. It’s fun when it happens, but if it doesn’t I don’t really care? And that can be really hard for some people to understand. 

There is a lot of space in my life for academic study because of this. I occasionally feel that it even gives me an advantage. I don’t need a whole lot to feel fulfilled. I sometimes read hagiography and wonder if a lot of these supposedly virginal nuns and female saints may have shared my sexual orientation? Mostly lesbian, partly asexual? I could definitely see the attraction of living around all women, all the time, and then being able to more or less focus on one’s scholarship without dying an early death at 25 trying to birth the child of a man you are most likely not attracted to? 

Could it be that scholarship (and being queer) saved their lives? Could it be that such things saved my life? In a way, I feel that they did. I had my own conversion experience of sorts—by far, the most significant educational experience of my life was choosing to take Professor Wolf’s medieval Mediterranean history course. I had no particular vision that I would be a medieval historian before taking that class, and by two weeks in I had already decided my future. I began identifying as an “aspiring” medievalist before I openly identified as queer. I came out in 2017, spring break, after I had already “become” a medievalist. I didn’t tell Professor Wolf or anyone else until much later (after the first 2 weeks) about the medievalist path I had chosen, because I figured that I wouldn’t be taken seriously at that point if I did. I questioned myself a lot, as a person who had enrolled in pre-med and who had previously harbored ambitions to become a doctor or a lawyer—two weeks into a class, how can you possibly already know that this is your calling? It was an ace/aro version of falling in love at first sight. Once I stepped into that classroom, I knew almost immediately that this is what I wanted for my life. Once I did declare the LAMS major early in the following semester, I started to experience various people challenging my commitment to LAMS and my follow through. Even now, I have people who challenge it. But I’m not going anywhere. That’s what I told the Classics/LAMS faculty when they were surprised that a first year would declare LAMS, and I think it is abundantly clear that I am a woman of my word. I’ve been living on the couch in Pearsons basement which bears my name (not literally I’d hope you know) for years now. I haven’t gone anywhere, and I probably never will. That couch has my spirit ingrained in its fibers. But more than that, it is a symbol—I’m claiming my place in this field, and I will continue to do so throughout graduate school and beyond. I wouldn’t have signed myself up for this life if I wasn’t passionate about medieval history beyond my wildest dreams. 

For this class, I just plan to relish in the opportunity to honestly take an introspective look at myself. I haven’t been able to reflect on who I am that much, and how the identity of “academia” and “educator” has sort of melded with my sense of self. I look forward to taking such a look. I am proud of what I have achieved in undergrad, and I plan to use this class to critically engage with the identity as a medievalist that I have constructed for myself out of years of work, so that I can be the best educator, and the most present friend and colleague that I can possibly be.