Now, those of you who know me in any capacity, whether as a former colleague or professor, should know that's not a feeling I often have. Certainly, it's not a state in which you often saw me, I would guess. However, I've been to enough Symposia over the years to know what kind of talks typically show up here, and I haven't given those for quite some time. It's been at least three years since I've written any kind of criticism, and I hadn't been doing much creative work over the past couple of years.
However, since I've moved, I have been writing much more, as often happens when I change my surroundings. The creative nonfiction I've been writing has been on a wide variety of subjects: running, the answering machine messages my junior year roommate and I became sort of famous for, the role fire has played in my life (like I’m Prometheus or something). The poetry, though, has all been focused around the same idea: performativity. Thus, I thought I'd talk about that today, but specifically as it relates to English majors, drawing on the nineteen years of experience I had with them (you) here at Lee.
In Butler's article "Performative Acts and Gender Construction: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory," she defines gender as "an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity, instituted through a stylized repetition of acts." Rather than a fixed idea/identity, gender is fluid, something we create through what she refers to as acts. She goes on to say that, "if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief." She's ultimately trying to make the point that these actions (and, thus, this identity) is both real and not real; just because something is constructed doesn't mean it is an illusion. For example, race is a social construct; it doesn’t exist in and of itself, but it's clear that race is something that affects people's lives on a daily basis.
Like theoreticians who write about race, Butler also talks about how the construction of gender is related to a community or society: "Surely, there are nuanced and individual ways of doing one's gender, but that one does it, and that one does it in accord with certain sanctions and prescriptions, is clearly not a fully individual matter." While individuals might have ideas about how to perform their gender, they form those ideas within a community, both for good and ill. As such, "The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it; but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again." As much as any individual might want to create their own views on gender (or whatever identity tag we want to insert here), the community/society they exist within often constrains them, binds them to the dominant views of that identity.
For those of you who don't know my story, let me tell you a bit about my becoming an English major and, thus, an English teacher. I started college as a math major, as I was planning on becoming either a high school math teacher or a youth minister. Halfway through my first semester of college, I switched from math to Bible, as I thought God was calling me to be a youth minister. After a year and half as a Bible major and a few months working as a youth minister, I changed my major to English. It was my worst subject, and I only selected it because I had a professor who was the smartest person I had ever encountered (or smartest in the way that I wanted to be smart, actually). The next two years were challenging, to say the least, as I never really felt like an English major.
When I was in a Renaissance Poetry and Prose class, which was about as far from anything that interested me could have been, we had to select a poem to read and present to the class. Having recently seen Dead Poets Society, I chose Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time." When I came to the second stanza as I read it aloud, I read the word a-getting as I normally would, which sounds like a-gitting. A student laughed. That student was Edwin Tait. Edwin was sixteen years old, and he was taking a senior-level, college, English course. It was the early 1990s, and Edwin fit the stereotype of a homeschool student at the time, meaning he was wicked smart, but he didn't have any social skills. So, you can guess how I felt when he laughed, even after he explained why he had laughed (a-getting should clearly rhyme with setting).
It was only in my Contemporary Literature class, not surprisingly, that I had moments where I felt like an English major. Even then, though, other people's reactions didn't help me develop that feeling; they undercut it instead. When our professor was reading a selection from Conrad's Heart of Darkness (for the record, I'm not so old that Conrad was contemporary literature when I took the class; our professor simply believed in context (really believed in context), so that class began with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from 1886 and went to the 1980s), he began laughing, as he saw an allusion he had never seen before. The reference was to the Chapman lighthouse, but nobody caught the connection. He added, "Keats?" I responded, "Oh, Keats's poem 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'." A young woman beside me who was so far beyond the rest of us English majors we referred to her as "the English goddess" behind her back smacked me on the arm and said, "How did you know that?" Not the reaction one might have hoped for.
I could tell similar stories from graduate school, and, as with Butler above, I could tell many such stories from my teaching career. In fact, most of the time I spent as a professor, I felt I was playing a role I didn't fit. I wasn't a scholar who enjoyed writing critical articles or reading theory; I had no idea how to teach writing to students, whether that was in first-year writing courses or senior-level English classes; I can't explain how to write a poem or a creative nonfiction essay, and I never felt like I knew enough writers to recommend to students. I've always felt much more like a dilettante, somebody who dips in and out of subjects as they're interested, but never really goes deep into any of them, and that seems the opposite of what a professor is supposed to be.
You might have felt the same way at some point during your time here at Lee as an English major. Perhaps you've sat in a class and heard people drop books and authors you've not only not read, but you haven't even heard of. You read other people's writings for workshop, and you don't feel like you're even writing in the same genre, not to mention writing at the same level. You see other people lead classes or hear about their great moments where they inspired students to produce amazing responses to something they assigned in class, while you've spent the week just trying to make it to Friday and wondering if teaching is really where you want to spend the next thirty or forty years of your life.
And we haven't even talked about the fact that you might not feel like you fit in at Lee or in the community of faith where you might have spent your entire life. It's not just the English major that can make us feel like imposters; too often, communities of faith do the same, as they create roles they expect us to play, and they don't like it when we go out of character. If it's challenging to feel like you're not a good English major, it can be devastating to feel like you're a bad Christian simply because you want to be a different kind of Christian. And that’s if you want to be a Christian at all.
When I first thought about this talk and where I thought it might go, I got this far in my thinking. Essentially, I've laid out a problem, but that's it. That's not much good unless I try to provide some way of dealing with the problem, and, honestly, as I admitted above, this is a problem I still struggle with on a regular basis, and it's not one I expect will go away. Thus, one supposed solution I had was to provide you with a bit of comfort by explaining you're not alone if you feel that way. In fact, once I started thinking about this talk, I started experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. If you're unfamiliar with that, it's where you begin seeing a term everywhere once you've become aware of that term. In this case, once I started thinking about imposter syndrome and performativity, I found it everywhere.
I was also reading an interview with Anthony Doerr before I read his latest novel (Cloud Cuckoo Land, which is amazing, by the way), in which the interviewer says this about Doerr who's last novel won the Pulitzer Prize, “There’s little evidence of a writer’s tortured soul besides what he admits is an 'impostor complex' that has him work himself hard, never quite able to process his own success.” I was even reading a book for a faculty group at my school, Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach, and I found this quote in the opening chapter: "The students in my first section were silent as monks. Despite my shameless pleading, I could not buy a response from them, and I soon found myself sinking into one of my oldest phobias: I must be very boring to anesthetize, so quickly, these young people who only moments earlier had been alive with hallway chatter" (10).
Palmer later goes on to reference Jane Tompkins's essay "Pedagogy of the Distressed": "Then she asks, 'How did it come to be that our main goal as academicians turned out to be performance?' Her answer rings true to me—fear: 'Fear of being shown up for what you are: a fraud, stupid, ignorant, a clod, a dolt, a sap, a weakling, someone who can't cut the mustard.' That is how it sometimes is for me. Driven by fear that my back-stage ineptitude will be exposed, I strive to make my on-stage performance slicker and smoother—and in the process, make it less and less likely that my students will learn anything other than how to cover up and show off. I conceal my own heart and am unable to weave the fabric of connectedness that teaching and learning requires" (30). So we have a graphic writer who has received the MacArthur "Genius" Grant, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, and an expert teacher, all of whom doubt themselves and whether they belong in the fields where everyone else seems to celebrate them. No, you're not alone if you've ever felt this way.
There's a Buddhist koan (their version of a parable, more or less) that goes like this:
Two celibate monks were travelling from one monastery to another. After a long walk, they came to a river, which they had to cross. The river was flooded and there was no way that they would get across without getting wet. One lady was also at the banks of the river, wanting to cross; she was weeping because she was afraid to cross on her own.
The monks decided to cross the river by walking through the relatively shallow part. Since the lady also needed to get to the other bank, the older monk, without much ado, carried her on his shoulders, and soon they reached the other bank, where he set her down. The lady went her way and the two monks continued their walk in silence. The younger monk was really upset, finding the other monk’s act disturbing.
After a few hours the younger monk couldn’t stand the thought of what had happened which kept filling his mind, and so he began to berate the other monk, saying, “We are not allowed to look at women, but you carried that woman!”
“Which woman?” replied the older monk.
“The woman you carried on your shoulders across the river!”
The other monk paused and with a smile on his lips, said, “I put her down when I crossed the river. Why are you still carrying her?”
Thus, one suggestion I have is not to worry about the fact that you feel like an imposter. I also realize this suggestion sounds a good deal like I'm telling somebody who worries not to worry, but I think I'm trying to be a bit more nuanced than that. What I'm trying to say is that there's nothing wrong with feeling like an imposter and that what you should set down is feeling bad that you feel like an imposter. Instead, perhaps, embrace that feeling and own it. Too often, in the Western world, we believe that the way to deal with a problem is to try to get rid of it, to destroy it, in some way; perhaps the better approach, the more Eastern approach, is simply to acknowledge, accept, and live with it. You feel like an imposter sometimes. So do I. So do Alison Bechdel, Anthony Doerr, and Parker Palmer.
In her book Gender Trouble, Butler talks about the idea of drag. Not surprisingly, given that term, she's drawing on drag queens, as they definitely highlight and subvert society's expectations of women and men. Thus, she uses drag as an example of how to counteract the dominant narrative of heteronormativity as it relates to gender expectations: “Drag is an example that is meant to establish that ‘reality’ is not fixed as we generally assume it to be. The purpose of the example is to expose the tenuousness of gender ‘reality’ in order to counter the violence performed by gender norms” (Gender Trouble). Similarly, in the article I referenced earlier, Butler ultimately says, "As a consequence, gender cannot be understood as a role which either expresses or disguises an interior ‘self,’ whether that ‘self’ is conceived as sexed or not. As performance which is performative, gender is an ‘act,’ broadly construed, which constructs the social fiction of its own psychological interiority" ("Performative"). If gender is an "act," not a "self," then we can change it.
Performativity is a neutral term and action, not one that is inherently bad or wrong or harmful. We're always performing, but the question then becomes how we perform. While society (however broadly or narrowly we want to define that, whether American society or Lee society or English major society) can and does use norms to define us in a variety of ways, we can use Butler's idea of drag to push back against those expectations. If the expectation of an English major is that they name drop people you've never heard of, then highlight that expectation through exaggeration. Openly acknowledge the expectations, and use the tools of rhetoric and writing and teaching you're learning to deconstruct the identities your various societies hope to shape you into. Act in the ways you need to act to shape your identity, your self, and you can construct who you want to be. Sometimes that even means you’ll try on roles that don't ultimately fit.
Though none of those identities stuck, one did, as I also began writing poetry because that's what I thought English majors did. For some reason, I didn't imagine that English majors wrote anything else, as if the plays and novels of the world simply sprang into existence from some mythological source, so I went with poems. Or maybe because poems were short. Like many young people who begin writing poetry for no good reason, mine was awful. I would go to our church's fellowship hall where I could be alone, play music, read Whitman (see Dead Poets Society again), and try to write poetry that was nothing like Whitman. While the writing was quite bad, the identity stuck around, as I kept writing on and off over the years until I worked myself into becoming an actual writer, one who works at their craft and continues to improve.
I became a writer because I performed the role of a writer. I experimented with various identities until I found one (among many) that ultimately fit. So another suggestion I have is to be willing to experiment with who you are and what you believe. Try on identities and ideologies, keeping what works and discarding what doesn't. I'll give you three brief examples of people who have taken this approach. Let's start with Gandhi, as it's difficult to argue with him.
“But it is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography. I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography. But I shall not mind, if every page of it speaks only of my experiments. . . . Far be it from me to claim any degree of perfection for these experiments. I claim for them nothing more than does a scientist who, though he conducts his experiments with the utmost accuracy, forethought and minuteness, never claims any finality about his conclusions, but keeps an open mind regarding them.”
Gandhi understands that who he is and what he believes is changing, even in his fifties, when he wrote the first volume of that autobiography. He's still willing to experiment with ideas and identities. Parker Palmer takes the same approach to teaching when he writes, “Experimentation is risky. We rarely know in advance what will give us life and what will sap life away. But if we want to deepen our understanding of our own integrity, experiment we must—and then be willing to make choices as we view the experimental results” (17). Pedagogy isn't set in stone; students continue to change, content continues to change, and teachers (one hopes) continue to change. The only way to know who one is as a teacher is to remain open to other identities and ideas.
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”
At some point in the Bs, I hit a story that I thought was both boring and too long. I really wish I could find a copy of that anthology and try to figure out what that story was, as it helped change the way I saw literature. Rather than simply skipping the story and continuing on alphabetically, I flipped to the end of the book and began reading in reverse alphabetical order. My math background clearly still wanted some type of order, and I'm glad it did. Just a few stories into the end of the alphabet, I came across Kurt Vonnegut's "A Report on the Barnhouse Effect."
It's his first published story, and, like most of his early work, it's not terribly difficult to understand, as his point is clear. Here's a very quick summary: Professor Barnhouse has learned how to control objects with his mind, so he starts destroying weapons countries own to create peace. Rather than building up arms, countries compete by spying on each other, reporting any arms manufacturing in the news, as Barnhouse then destroys them. The author of the "report" is a student of Barnhouse, and he admits that Barnhouse is old and will probably die soon, but the author has learned Barnhouse's secret, so he'll be carrying on the work. And he's young and in good health.
Again, it's not a great story, as it's heavily didactic, but it was unlike any story I had read before. I didn't know I was a pacifist, as I hadn't given such ideas much thought, but, when I read the story, I thought, "Oh, that's what I believe." Growing up in rural Northeast Tennessee, I didn't encounter many people who would have voiced such a thought, so I needed to find it somewhere else. As Vonnegut writes in his final novel Timequake, “Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.’” That's what literature can do; that's what writing can do; that's what teaching can do.
Perhaps your moment came in a similar manner, or maybe it was when you wrote your first (or fiftieth or five hundredth) poem or play, or maybe it was when a teacher assigned something or said something, and you thought, "I want to do that for somebody else." You have your own reason for being an English major, and you have your own reason for being here today, an English major at Lee. Remember that whenever you feel like an imposter.
You have the chance to experiment, to put on all kinds of roles as a reader, writer, teacher, thinker. Some of them will fit, but many of them will make you feel like you don't belong. Some of them you'll grow into, while some of them you'll discard. Set those aside like the woman who needed across the river, as you don't need to continue carrying them. Performativity doesn't have to be coercive; it can be generative and creative, as it's an act you can use to shape your life and your self, whether you've read Judith Butler or you haven't. Whether you're in your early fifties or, more likely, somewhere around twenty, you can continue to grow and change because, as Thoreau said, you may have many more lives to live.
Thank you.