It had barely begun to chill, the way that October in the northeast does, but I had, knowing it was likely still too warm, nonetheless worn a pair of boots to campus––heavy black ones, with thick lug soles. Christina must have spotted them jutting impetuously out from below the seminar table and made a point to compliment me over lunch. How delighted I was by those two words (“nice boots”), unduly pleased to have impressed her sartorially, precisely because I knew I’d never impress her intellectually. How could I? 

A foolish thought, as I would later come to understand, because despite her indomitable intellect, of which there was and is such renown, Christina was extraordinarily generous––open to being impressed, enchanted, and taught by the thinking of both her junior colleagues and, crucially, also her students. I always suspected she could see conclusions in my work that would elude my grasp for months or even years, but appreciated how seriously she would take my babbling in whatever its inchoate form. It was truly a lesson, always, to see the way she never failed to take seriously the ideas of others, by which I mean, affording them the greatest respect and care, and not, of course, abstaining from a sly, winking comment or double entendre, of which she was both fond and peerless. So many have already stated their appreciation for these qualities: her genius, her humor, her particular way of close reading a person. I feel lucky to have known her enough to echo that sense of awe. 

In her last email to me, Christina wrote, “I imagine the time of my coming retirement as hours when I can read whatever I want to read, and look at whatever I want to look at.” When I heard that she had died, I felt not only bereft, but also angry that she did not get that time, was robbed of many such hours, and especially of those with her beloved Janet and Moxie the dog. The magic of intergenerational friendships is that they not only fill, but also elasticate our hours, giving them an unexpected stretch and pleasant snap. I imagine the time of my coming years as filled with much striving to live up to Christina’s example: to teach with her commitment or think with her dexterity. I imagine this effort requiring many hours, enormous heaps of them, due to my own limited capacities, and so, for the time being, I have mostly sated myself by trying to write much longer sentences than I used to, and imagining Christina, arms open wide, wrists dancing, as if fingers alighting on each word, syllables syncopated for emphasis, grinning as she described, as she once did in conversation with me, the kinds of sentences that gave her so much pleasure, those long Jamesian sentences which, like life, are prone to linger and swerve, those “with perfectly subordinated clauses.” 

I met Christina in 1988, my senior year at Wesleyan, when I took her feminist theory course, along with my housemates Mia Fineman, Dan Rosenberg, and Steven Stern. In my memory of the class Christina is at the front of the room wearing a silk shirt, sitting in a student chair like the rest of us, the desk-arm piled with notes. While about 25 of us sit around her in a semicircle, she leads us through an exhaustive interrogation of Simone de Beauvoir. Ideas fly back-and-forth across the room. It feels as if the class had transformed into a giant shared mind. Under her careful guidance, what was opaque and frustrating becomes lucid and exhilarating.

My housemates and I knew this class was special. Nervously, we invited Christina over for dinner. She ate our fried chicken. Eventually, we were having regular martini gatherings with her and our other favorite professors, Dick Ohmann and Kach Tololyan. The summer after graduation, she invited us to visit her in Rhode Island and tried to teach us to windsurf. We continued to stay in touch as we all applied to graduate programs in the humanities. 

When I chose an academic career it was because I wanted to teach the way Christina did. As a professor of literature and film, I’ve made discussion the focus of my pedagogy, and in the classroom I’ve tried to tried to channel Christina. There are so many qualities her teaching combined: rigor, generosity, textuality, clarity, complexity, respect, openness, transparency, playfulness. To me, the key was the way she would welcome any contribution to the conversation and, by putting it into her own words, find a way to make it useful and collective. 

I feel proud of and satisfied with my own teaching, and I believe she has been a living force in whatever good it has done. I hope she would feel the same.

Christina was our housemate when she was in Graduate School at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.  We all lived in a brown-shingled house that had two halves. Purchased by Ed and Sue Benson in 1970, it became a communal house with two sides, each with kitchen, dining room and living room on the first floor and three bed rooms/studies on the 2nd and 3rd floor. Its address was on Hope Street—we were all living on Hope— but a long way from “Power” another East Side street, nearer the Brown campus. Between 1972 and 1986 (when Peter Evans and I finally sold it, having bought out Ed and Sue Benson’s half), it housed a rotating groups of graduate students and faculty at Brown, University of Rhode Island, and Bristol Community College. On each side we shared household chores and the whole house came together for dinners several times a week (cooked by those who signed up each week).

Christina lived on our third floor along with Kathy Lewis and of course with her beloved Hussy—who was a great addition to the household. She was only with us a couple of years before she finished her dissertation and took the job at Wesleyan. Those were some of the years she was partnered with Elizabeth Weed who was often at our house to share a meal or attend a party. Christina had a warm, magnetic personality, and a keen mind. One could already see the engaging scholar, teacher, friend and colleague she would become at Wesleyan. Feminism was an important bond in those years in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And I always admired how she could live out a feminist life and convey her point of view vividly in any conversation.

I only saw her a couple of times at Brown events after her accident , but when she died I went back to read her memoir again, sensing her personality come through on every page, especially in the chapters where she describes her relationship with her brother, whose painful illness and health were so vividly described. Her own descriptions of pain, immobility and coping with a body that was a stranger make the memoir “one of a kind.”

All of our housemates remember her fondly and miss her presence in this world greatly. She made an important mark on our lives (as she has on the lives of her colleagues, students, and friends) and we all mourn her passing.

During the summer of 2020, Christina Crosby was the first person to read the final version of my book manuscript. And she wrote the most exquisite blurb. As Janet writes in the dedication to her book, The Sexual Obsession, “One would do a lot for her words.” 

Her words are the back cover of my book, The Objects that Remain, a book that would never have been written without her. 

And all of this in what we now know were to be the last months of her life.

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These photos are from time spent in Alstead, NH with a group of friends from Brown that hung out together. The photo on the beach is on Cape Cod where my then husband and I hosted the collective from Hope Street that Christina lived in (and where I met her). I knew her best when she was in graduate school–young, strong, full of life and a great influence on me. I saw less of her once she moved to Wesleyan but loved her company, her intellect and her critical support (I mean critical in a good way) when we did meet to discuss an amazing mix of the personal, political and academic that constituted our lives.

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I remember so much of Christina from faculty meetings — beginning in 1994, when I started at Wesleyan in the English Department and as chair of African American Studies. Christina’s presence in English department meetings — her political savvy and her deep caring for what we, as a department, could do for the development and expertise of our students — was vital and amazing in our gatherings. Her commitment to the integrity and depth of what our students deserved from their engagement with the field was endless, probing and inspiring. I loved to hear her begin to speak, because what would follow was always emblematic of her constancy, her integrity and her grit.

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Oddly, although Christina and I spent tons of time together for a while, we never shared a classroom, not once. We were in different departments, even different divisions. But for a short time, we were very, very, good friends.

So here’s what I’ve got for you: what no one should forget about Christina, ever, is how much she loved parties. She loved big parties, small parties, cocktail parties, dinner parties, and parties that ran so late that I wonder today how we managed to put one word after the other the next day (answer: we were very young.) And Christina particularly loved  entertaining in her home.

I first met Christina at a party. I had just begun my appointment as an assistant professor in the history department. I saw a talk advertised at the Center for Humanities, and I thought: well, here is an opportunity to make some friends.

And I did. After the talk Dick Ohmann, who was the Director, invited me to the canonical post-talk party. Christina strode up and introduced herself. In her distinctive, Christina-like way, she was soon interrogating me about where I stood as a historian. I did not really believe in facts, did I? Was I a Foucauldian? And surely, I did not believe that archives were somehow the path to a historical truth of some kind? I was clear, was I not, that all knowledge was constructed? Was I familiar with the work of Joan Scott? (I did get the last question right.)

In any case, this terrifying encounter led to a dinner invitation at Christina’s little shoe box of a university rental house, where I can honestly say I spent some of my happiest evenings at Wesleyan University.

It made sense that we would eat together often. We were both in commuting relationships. We both took off each weekend, she to Providence and I to New York City. For those of us who had two homes in those years the other option was to eat alone, and making dinner for one is dreary. In addition, Christina and I each had an unspoken evening deadline: a phone call home. It was before cell phones, and Southern Connecticut Bell charged for long distance, so getting to one’s own handset before bedtime was imperative.

Dinner often followed a squash game, which I always won because I was a very good squash player and Christina, while an outstanding athlete, was not. As a result we almost always ate at Christina’s house: while she never beat me at squash, she always won, hands down, at making dinner.

Christina was one of the best cooks, and most generous hosts, I have ever known. So my contribution to our evening entertainments was thumping her at squash, going home to shower and bringing a decent bottle of wine to Christina’s house where she would already be embarked on making a marvelous dinner. After the death of the sweet and elderly Shameless Hussy, who I only knew in her final golden year, I brought my lab mix, Daisy as well. Daisy would entertain Christina’s relentless and undisciplined puppy, Babe, by pinning her to the ground and barking in her face. This taught Babe nothing, but Christina and I thought it was hilarious.

Having said that Christina was an amazing cook, I cannot remember anything she made except one item: pie. Christina’s pies will be vivid in my memory forever, because the only person who made a better one was my grandmother. They were never too sweet, and Christina’s crust (the hardest part, if you are familiar with pie) was as good as any crust I have ever had, and she didn’t cheat by using vodka instead of water like I do. She made it look incredibly easy, and between late spring and early fall the pies contained various fruits that she bought at farm stands on the drive from Providence.

While the dogs slammed around the house, Christina would cook something simple but marvelous. She would roll out a crust, and bake that pie, easy as you please. Often other people would come over, and they would bring bottles too. We would talk about everything, and laugh, and yell, and argue. And we drank. We drank far more than was good for us, I am sure, but in the end, it didn’t do any harm. We were young, happy, healthy and pretty resilient. We slept well under all circumstances. Around 10:00 or 11:00, I would drive home very carefully and finish up my lecture for the next day.

And then, a few days later, we would do it all over again. I think it was exactly the life that—at the time–we both wanted to live. And the fact that we got to do it together, and be young together, was a gift.

From page 74 of my dear Aunt Crosby Christina’s memoir, A Body, Undone:
“On (Tuesday) January 5, 2010, my brother, Jeff, died.  He was fifty-seven and almost completely paralyzed from multiple sclerosis…”

From me:
On Tuesday January 5, 2021, my aunt, Tina, died.  She was sixty-seven and almost completely paralyzed from a bicycling accident 17 years earlier.  

At 1:30 am, Christina transitioned from this life, thereby completing some sort of uncanny, ironic, and strange connection that she and my dad shared.  Their lives both ended with a sudden turn on New Year’s Eve (a Thursday in both 2010 and 2021) and quickly declined over the next 5 days, but not before loved ones had time, though not enough, never enough time, to say goodbye.  For my dad, we gathered for 5 days singing hymns, sharing stories, crying and laughing.  It was a collective grief, in person.  Because of stupid Covid, Janet- the warrior that she is- held the phone so that loved ones could share stories, say goodbyes, and cry “together.”

I am now picturing my dad driving a VW van, with the 6ft sun roof wide open, him relishing shifting through the gears and my aunt hunched down in racing position on a bicycle that can morph into and out of a motorcycle.  And they’re going FAST. They loved speed.  But even with this happy image, this loss is monumental.  Tina was my last connection directly to my dad.  In the 11 years that he has been gone, she has served to piece together stories, confirm family facts, and generally offer incredible amounts of peace to me by simply being in her presence or talking with her on the phone.  She was so incredibly special.  While this is all overwhelmingly sad and tragic, I am finding comfort in the hauntingly beautiful way that Christina’s last days mirrored my dad’s. 

Also from me: my Grandmommy fell on Monday morning and broke her hip.  On January 5, 2021, she made it through that surgery at age 96 1/2 no doubt having decided that this day was for Tina and my dad.  

Also also from me: On January 5, 2021, dear Verna, a wise and strong woman I had the pleasure of knowing my entire life through church and who once came over to teach Justin how to make my nana & great aunts’ wet-bottom shoo fly pie, died.  She and her husband, Rodney Moseman, who died in December, bicycled all over the world, often on a tandem bike that Rodney built.  They are, for sure, riding in heaven and loving every minute of it.  

 It seems true that extra bright lights die on January 5th. 

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.

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.”