Dear, dear Christina Crosby passed away on January 5th, 2021. I count myself among the many, many people who are devastated by her loss.  I have been thinking of her constantly since she entered the hospital, and wanted to write down some memories of her towards whatever collective mourning process begins today.  I was not sure whether to post anything, but was given the go ahead by Janet, her beloved.  I have not seen a relationship make any two people happier than they made each other.

I first knew Christina as the professor everyone wanted to take a class with at Wesleyan in the early 90s.  She used to ride her old orange Schwinn around campus in a black suede bomber jacket.  It was always an event to see her hammer past on her bike.  She was extremely cool.  It was very hard to believe that we could be so lucky as to be taught by such a person as this.  She had very straight blonde hair that she kept in a classic men’s cut – longer on top, neat on the sides, and tidy in the back without being buzzed close.  It is a look that men are only able to perfect in the first two decades of life before their follicles give way to various arrangements of frizz and fronds.  Christina’s hair was impossibly thick and unyielding to time or age – although what her age might be, we students could only guess.  30?  35?  40?  We had no idea.  She was older than us but we couldn’t have said how much older.  She seemed suspended in time, untouched by aging and yet effloresced into a powerful maturity.  She was butch and she was magnificent.

In class, she was on the one hand a vortex of gravitas – her bright, cloudless blue eyes gleamed out over the room, her chest ballooned with breath, her voice gonged out of her, deeply resonant as she led us through the particulars of dialectical thought, or Wittig, or Lacan; I think now that Christina’s oratorical style may have been a spawn of a kind of sermonizing she had learned from her Mennonite childhood, at least it felt so to be taught by her – and a deeply embodied conviviality: when she taught, her cheeks would redden with what seemed the thrill of pedagogy and of being in a room, thinking together.  A blotch of magenta would floresce in her cheeks and, in the low light of northeastern afternoons, as she led us further into a text, *making* us understand what had previously seemed impenetrable, the blush would deepen and scorch.   It seemed a manifestation of her intensity of thought and capacity for exchange, or of how she put her entire self into dialogue.

Before I took a class with her, Christina somehow was generous enough to agree to do an independent study with me on Marx’s Capital.  We read 100 (ish) pages of Capital every week for nine weeks.  I wrote a ten page summary of each 100 pages, and Christina would mark them up within an inch of their life.  We would meet and talk about Capital each week for two hours.  She was the most committed pedagogue I have ever met.  She was absolutely convinced that a person could have no idea how to approach a text, a discourse, a field of study, and that nonetheless this person could be taught how to speak that language.  She used the word “fluent” with me a lot back then.  She said I could become fluent in the language of Marxism.  I do not know if I did but what I know is that there are few gifts in life as meaningful to me as Christina’s faith that people can learn how to analyze that for which they otherwise have no words.  That the world can open to analysis, to thought, and most importantly, to a revolutionary and ruthless critique.  It was specifically and singularly Christina who taught me Marx, and it is important to me that it was she who taught me this.  A butch lesbian and a peerless pedagogue taught me – and so many other people – Marx, and so much else.   She understood Marx because she was living with, wrestling with, engaging so strenuously and completely with this text, and she believed that we students – and some of us (me, at the time included), lesbians – could be Marxists too. It is hard to communicate now just how amazing this was to me.

Also, that we could be scholars.  And she didn’t just believe this in theory; she helped us to do this materially.  It is not at all an understatement to say that I owe the happiness of scholarship and of whatever literacy in the Marxist lexicon that I have, to Christina and to her incredible, generous, resplendently eloquent, committed, and forceful pedagogy.  Christina was completely unselfish about knowledge and ideas.  She had no fetishization of individual genius.  She had no attachment to her ideas being hers.  I think this is part of what made her such an incredible teacher.  She gave every thought she had to as broad an audience as she could.  And she gave it to us as if it was our thought, or could be.  

Christina’s pedagogical gifts and sensibility also made it so that when she had her bicycle accident that left her paralyzed, she taught me, too, how to be an ally and support.  She suffered I don’t know how many stumbles on my part, learning how to love her through her injury, making mistakes that ranged from how to hug her in a wheelchair, to assumptions I made, or questions I asked that I should not have asked.   She should not have had to teach me how to know her through the injury and beyond, but she did.  We had become friends after I graduated,  and we stayed very close ever since, in part due to her amazing ability to stay present with her loved ones – and she did this, too, after her accident,  giving us time to learn new terrains together. Ours has been one of the longest and dearest friendships I have had – thirty years now – and Christina is one of the few people I have trusted entirely in my life; I believe everyone who has had the honor of being her friend probably feels this way.  She was unfaltering in her love and she was a person of great and profound integrity. 

I have too many memories of her to even begin to recount here, but I will say that she had the best and most *Christina* response when I had the “I’m transitioning” talk with her. I share this so others may smile, remembering her wit.  “What should I call you now?” she asked.  I didn’t really know, so I muttered some possibilities.  To which she said – a 19th-centuryist to her very core! – with her totally unique combination of gravitas and levity, of profundity and conviviality, of the weight of the stakes of the world and of the fun and pleasure in it too: “I will call you Ishmael.”  

It is so moving to see how many people Christina touched.  She was a force beyond compare.  She was a person of true integrity and trustworthiness and warmth.  She loved the dialectic and Benjaminian allegory, and she could make you love these things too.  She was the least arid and most thunderous of scholars and thinkers.  She was a stalwart friend, and I was lucky to know her for thirty years.  Christina I miss you too much already, but you are always here, in those you’ve taught and touched and befriended and cared for.  Presente! Presente! Presente!

Edit: This morning I reread her recent piece on mourning and militancy in Guernica, and am linking it here.

I remember talking to her about this piece, sitting by the water near her apartment in New York.  She was explaining Freud to me, again – probably for the umpteenth time – and so much else.  I was still learning from her, every time we spoke.  There are a lot of very choice formulations here, including this, which will and should probably be cited a lot –  “The radical claim of militancy and mourning is that you are not required to set aside the messy, dark, grieving, perverse, incapacitated, angry, or shameful parts of yourself to be admitted to the public world” – but I also really love this: “Perhaps this is a perverse labor that offends good sense. I hope so. I had been so happy because Janet and I were together committed to the perverse pleasures of a queer life, which you make with other people. It’s a community thing. The wildness of undomesticated sex lets in light and air.”