I had forgotten that academia is a collective, and I had also forgotten that its lexicon is constantly in the process of being both reinforced and redefined.
#DEFINE RUMPUS SKIN#
Barely separated by the thin skin of fabric covering the better part of our noses and mouths, we pored over the musty secondhand pages of our texts, tried to connect their themes to what was happening outside our classroom, an army of raised hands gunning to share interpretations, concepts shifting like clouds in relation to one another’s comments.
Then, a year later when I returned to school in person to pursue my PhD, I was shocked by our closeness, literally breathing the same air as we co-crafted metaphors, the networks of buzzwords and assumed archives that define our field. Perhaps in this fidelity to division I was mirroring the inherent isolation of adjunct work - being given access to $5 Duke University Press exam copies but no health insurance operating both as an integral part of, yet remaining outside of an institution, like a phantom limb that only firms and animates at the behest of the body for purely functional purposes, like lifting a cup of coffee. But after reading Monica Huerta’s Magical Habits, I wondered: What was the point of shielding my students from my life? Of neatly separating thought and the rudimentary grit of my day-to-day experience? Angling the camera away from my floor mattress and laundry pile, strategically selecting sweats that doubled as pajamas for those 8:00 a.m.
Such was the nature of teaching during a pandemic, holding lectures and student meetings from my greasy laptop screen in rented rooms, first in Los Angeles and then in Portland. I had not been living far off from the world I was about to enter, adjuncting at a number of art schools, teaching art history and critical theory and Latinx studies, mostly straddling my bed in front of the stained white wall of my bedroom, tamping down my pillows and comforter so my setting didn’t tell on itself.