Reflection on Christina Crosby for FGSS Weiss Lecture
Feb. 8, 2021
I’m grateful for and cannot describe how much I already miss Christina’s excitement for all things gender and sexuality, perhaps especially the mischievous grin and tone with which she’d ask brilliant questions of thinkers whose work she found sexy—the scholarly equivalent of her famed leather pants, I suppose.
Christina was a faculty fellow at the Center for the Humanities my first semester there. In a sense, my introduction to the Fall theme, “Corporeal Techniques and Technologies,” was by way of a building tour that summer, during which I learned that contractors were making a first-floor office and bathroom “wheelchair accessible.” That this was happening in 2018 and that my second-floor office would remain “inaccessible” to my colleague was not lost on me. It was a striking reminder of academia’s ableism and something I pointed out to my students on the first day of class.
When I showed up for the CFH welcome dinner at Natasha’s, nervous and nervously (over-?) dressed in a button-down with a gold sequined collar, Christina complimented me on the garment and joked that I was prepared for the next semester’s theme, “Hyperbole.” Just like that, she made a place for me in the present, gestured toward a future among friends, and assigned me a conspiratorial-sartorial project.
The last communication I have from Christina is a text that includes the word “happymaking.” It’s the kind of animate language that does work in the world and radiates the delight with which she celebrated and loved on those around her. Christina was so very happymaking for so many, including those she mentored, those she surrounded with unwavering support and sincerest care. While I only knew her for a short time compared to many of my other colleague-friends, I felt the long-term commitment with which she approached her relationships, including ours, in every exchange. I cherished the confidence she tacitly communicated that we would be in one another’s lives, regardless of where the coming years took us.
In FGSS 200 this Spring, I’ll teach her memoir A Body, Undone: Living On after Great Pain. I’ll highlight the chapter “Masculine, Feminine, or Fourth of July,” titled after a “choice” of icings her beloved partner Janet was offered when purchasing a birthday cake for Babe the Dog. Christina writes, “I have […] many times used the line ‘masculine, feminine, or Fourth of July’ to teach both the absurdity and the normative power of gender. There in a list of choices are its two wholly naturalized categories and a comically out-of-place national holiday, but the seemingly misplaced Fourth of July serves to remind us that a laughably simple and punishingly binary notion of gender is enforced by the powers that be, including the state. Gender, which is a state of mind and embodied attitude, is a site of volatile power, pleasure, and subtle coercion, often used to discipline our thoughts and bodily affects” (53-54).
It touches me that the teachable text I’ve gone to as an introduction to “gender” came from an exchange between Christina and another colleague-friend, in an elevator ride to Natasha’s for dinner: “I like your loafers—but tassels?” she lovingly teased. “Loafers with tassels are my gender!” our friend replied.