NOT A HETERO

Abstract

This essay explores the challenges of teaching as a queer professor in a conservative environment. In personal interactions on campus, with other faculty and with most students, the writer faces an environment that assumes a universal (and therefore ‘natural’ and ‘righteous’) heterosexuality. This assumption of the teacher's heterosexuality renders her ‘identity’ incoherent, yet, in complicity, she often appropriates the privileges that accompany this false assumption. Unfortunately, performing heterosexuality, being invisible, is not the worst of fears. Heterosexism's truly nasty side, homophobia, has an insidious way of permeating that seemingly accepting exterior. As uncomfortable as invisibility is, the teacher is also terrified of actually being seen, and accordingly reduced, erased or possibly rejected.

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