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Learning to fail

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“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

I first encountered these words in my first year as an undergraduate – scrawled on a desk in one of the carrels in Liverpool’s Sydney Jones library. Bruised by two deeply unpleasant years of failure and bullying from a teacher, I found something tender, something hopeful in these words that could help me reconceptualise my failure and turn it into something less painful.

I think about them often, and especially as a lecturer. This semester I’ve been officially responsible for the pastoral care of some students and have had even more reason to think about them.

The students I am responsible for are, largely, clever and hard-working and driven. They have learnt, very well, to put themselves under enormous pressure – a string of As and A*s at GCSE, As at AS and A-level, and then they find themselves at university where they are surrounded by similarly hard-working, driven young people. They find that they are challenged to think and write differently, and some of them find this transition very difficult.

I worry about them, these bright, driven students. The flipside to their ambition is anxiety, and fear of what happens if they do not get their desired mark.

I suspect that part of the problem is that they have not been allowed to fail before, and therefore haven’t developed the skill of failure. Failure, to them, is terrifying, overwhelming, something that will irrevocably mark their record and from which they cannot recover. One bad mark means that you are shunted off your track to an A, to a First, to certainty and stability in a world and job market that is marked by uncertainty. I am not sure that they know how to deal with failure, how to recover rather than be crushed by it.

The things I have found myself asking in my meetings with my advisees are: tell me about yourself, what are your hobbies, what are you doing outside your university work.

I’ve been surprised that many of them don’t have hobbies, things that they do for fun. To the most driven, this is alien to them – a part of their lives that they left behind along with after-school clubs – and I worry again.

I have asked them to find something to do for fun, whether that is swimming or sketching or baking or a musical instrument or dancing or hiking. I encourage them to find something that they don’t mind being mediocre at so that they can hopefully start to untangle “pleasure” from “skill” and “external measures of achievement”. I would very much like them to find something that they can be bad at – and to learn how to embrace that.

In the spirit of openness and sharing my own failures, I am an incredibly mediocre violinist. I had lessons as a child, never progressed past ABRSM Grade 4 and playing in a training orchestra, and am only a couple of stages beyond “horrible squalling sound”. However, I suspect that part of the reason I was so mediocre was because I didn’t enjoy it. Playing the violin was someone else’s ambition that had been foisted on me and I resented the weight of it. I hated exams, didn’t want to take them, and announced that I wasn’t going to take my Grade 4 exam a week before I was meant to do so. Instead of practising my set pieces, I fucked around trying to work out the Star Wars leitmotifs by ear and eventually stopped playing altogether because if I wasn’t doing exams, what was the point?

A few years ago, heartbroken in the wake of a bad breakup, I went to a violin shop and bought a violin. I dug up some choral scores and began to play again. It’s not become a great love or even something I do regularly – I much prefer singing – but I find it soothing to retune the violin, useful to play an unfamiliar piece rather than try to sightsing it, sometimes satisfying to play something by ear and to let my fingers find their place on the fingerboard rather than think consciously about the notes. I bought a book of folksongs and sometimes focus on one and learn it.

It’s made me reconfigure my relationship with the violin, on my own and free of other people or exam boards. It’s made me think about what it means to me, about a history of resentment and obligation and yet, how it has shaped me. For better or worse, I think in terms of violin finger positioning when imagining notes.

It’s made me think differently about failure: by most external standards I am a failure at this, but are these standards important? Who defines success and failure? I have become better at uncoupling a sense of achievement from external validation and, indeed, skill.

It’s made me practice being mediocre, to not give up because I lack the natural talent, to do something because I enjoy it rather than because I’m good at it. It’s encouraged me to redefine what I think of as an achievement.

It’s taught me about resistance: to resist the idea that we should devote our time to things that we are naturally good at, to grapple with my own sense of frustration that I am not better at something, to learn what it feels like when something is not easy.

It’s taught me to embrace “failures” and the quiet, stubborn pleasure at working at something until I can do it.

I am tired of success being measured in terms of exam results, awards, publications, grant capture. I want universities to be better at allowing both our students and ourselves to fuck up and more space to learn from our fuck-ups. I want there to be more space in the university for making mistakes, for failing, for things that don’t quite work, for stubbornness and persistence over the fireworks of natural talent. I want there to be space to learn and practice resilience, and for institutions to commit to encouraging that resilience rather than seeing failure as undesirable weakness that must be dropped.

Failure is difficult, but can be just as richly educational as success. Sadly I cannot change university culture on my own, but I can encourage my students to go out and practice failing at small things so they are better prepared should they fail at big things.

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Talking about desire, talking about fucking

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I’ve been thinking a lot about erotica recently.

Basically, Alon Lischinsky handed me 1.4 billion words of online erotica, and I am helpless to resist a big corpus. I presented some preliminary finding at Corpus Linguistics 2017 (slides available at this link; more stuff available on the project page) in which we try to see how different genres of erotica in our corpus relate to each other.

We’re interested in a few angles: there is a lot of work on the historical aspects of porn (for example, how it has been produced and disseminated, the development of genres, its the cultural context and so on), porn that is seen to be somehow transgressive (for example, a recent special issue of Porn Studies was devoted to gonzo porn) and lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer porn. As far as we’re aware – and we’d love to be corrected! – there isn’t a lot of material looking at really straightforward common-or-garden amateur erotica. The corpus is collected from a large, well-established online repository of erotica. We don’t have a huge amount of information on who is creating it as many people decline to state their gender and/or sexuality (and the information they do give may reflect an identity other than their offline identity), but “male” is the most frequent gender and “straight” is the most frequent sexuality associated with authors in the dataset.

Doing some kind of work with erotica is going to create a response. I think it’s hard not to have some kind of engagement with erotica (and porn, and the erotic more broadly) in the culture I live in, even if that response is to deliberately avoid it. There isn’t a lot of room for self-indulgent reflexivity in academic texts but, happily, a blog is all about self-indulgence and as these thoughts have been swirling around in my head and cluttering up my mental space, I thought I’d try to write about them here.

The first thing I’ve been thinking about is my own experience with erotica.

Baby queer

I grew up in a religious environment and went to a single-sex Catholic school in the 1990s (that bit is important). We did recieve some sex ed in Year 7 – it vacilliated between the strictly biological (calculating ovulation dates and some “insert Tab A into Slot B” style diagrams) and “cut out pictures of families from magazines and stick them to a bit of A3 paper” – said couples were all heterosexual and monogamous, what a surprise. At no point were we taught that sex was not simply biological and not performed solely for reproductive purposes; there was some discussion of the rhythm method but absolutely nothing about contraception. At an adult, it grieves me how badly we were failed by this “education”. It meant that we tried to seek out information from other sources, chiefly Just 17 and More! magazines – and ended up learning a lot of sexist crap about gendered relationships as well as what a condom was.

Predictably, as teenagers, we rebelled. We smuggled in copies of women’s magazines and read the sex advice with avid curiosity, devouring information both about birth control and how to please your man and 10 sexy tricks he’ll never forget. In sixth form, we had a section of a noticeboard in our common room devoted to condom receipts and, at Christmas time, someone pinned up photos of naked men wearing strategically placed Santa hats. The local nickname for pupils included the word “sluts” and there was a persistant rumour that while our school had the higher conception rate, the other all-girls school had the higher birth rate. As far as I know, no evidence was ever produced to substantiate this claim but nevertheless, it refused to die.

For me, it was complicated by the fact I was not heterosexual or, it turned out, cisgender. A single-sex Catholic school under Section 28 was not a kind or nurturing or, indeed, safe for a young queer. Section 28 made it illegal for the school to promote homosexual relationships and being a Catholic school, they weren’t going to anyway. I initially thought I was asexual because I was aggressively uninterested in the heterosexualities on offer: either reproduction in the context of the nuclear heterosexual family or a lot of what seemed like fairly unpleasant recreational sex with unpleasant, pushy men. I noped out of that pretty quickly and at one point, my plan was to become a monk and, I don’t know, look after bees.

Queer lessons from fic

However, the queers and weirdos and outsiders also found Stuff To Read About Sex, and our salvation came in the form of fanfiction.net. There was a thriving exchange of fic, printed out over a very rationed dial-up connection and hidden in A4 ringbinders amoungst the Biology notes and English annotated poems. I found this much more interesting, especially when I hit upon a rich seam of genderfuck Placebo fic which I proceeded to mine for weeks. It was a secret rebellion – literally underground because our common room was in a basement which we made a bold attempt to tunnel out of.

In a way, fanfiction educated me. It taught me that there were sexualities other than heterosexual ones, and genders that didn’t easily map onto “man” and “woman”, and people could (in theory at least) have genders were fluid and shifted between these, and people (again, in theory) were attracted to them and wanted to have sex with them. It spoke of people who loved people of their gender, people who accepted their lover in whatever gender they presented, people who negotiated sex and boundaries and consent, people who didn’t have happily-ever-afters but who had to talk and argue and reconfigure their friendship and relationship. The screen did not coyly fade to black and the story often did not end with sex; instead, there were morning-afters and misunderstandings and confusion that had to be resolved. The people had agency and were active participants, and sex did not fundamentally change them. Fic gave me some words to start describing who I loved and who I was, and although they weren’t necessarily the right words and sat uneasily on me, they felt a lot better than “straight” or “heterosexual”.

It wasn’t perfect – while I commend whoever thought up of the lube spell for having the awareness that yes, lube is generally a good idea for anal sex, I could quite happily go without reading about it again – but it was a different discourse, one that pitted itself against that I learnt in school and that I learnt through women’s magazines, and it was a quiet and hopeful voice that said, “this is not the way things have to be; create something better”.

I am not good at writing these stories, but I like to think that that message stayed with me. It led me across gender identities and sexualities, into places where no labels exist, into places where things collide in interesting and apparently impossible ways. These stories could express things I didn’t know I wanted, didn’t know existed. There’s something really hopeful about that.

Sex educator

In my teens and early twenties I made Quite A Lot of bad relationship decisions (turns out having very little concept of boundaries or consent is not exactly great for happy, loving, supportive relationships!) and eventually staggered my way into coming out and, eventually, made much better relationship decisions. Along the way I realised that I did not know nearly enough about sex as I should and researched the hell out of it to the extent that, as an LGBT Welfare Officer, I could plan and give workshops on sexual health. I spent a lot of time with queer activists who were doing a lot of talking and thinking about things like boundaries, negotiation and consent: what they meant, what they looked like in practice, how to model them in our friendships and relationships (not written by someone I know, but this is indicative of the conversations we were having). I went into weird, deep internet dives about all sorts of things.

I ended up reading detailed posts about lube (lots of posts about lube!), toxic sex toys, the campaign for non-toxic sex toys, descriptions of vibrations and comics about sex toys and sex, identities, fantasy and relationships. I learnt about Safe, Sane and Consensual and RACK (Risk-Aware Consensual Kink) and the differences between them – basically, that some activities will never be totally safe but there’s a lot you can do to mitigate that risk. I learnt about safewords and what negotiating a scene might look like. I learnt about different models of relationships and different dynamics within relationships. I learnt how to approach, learn about and not judge what kinds of sex people were having, even if it was not something I was into myself.

I also learnt and thought a lot about negotiating consent and how I could apply what I’d learnt to non-sexual contexts. I think a lot about what it looks like when I teach challenging material or when I interact with my parrot companion. I want to be having conversations in which “no” is something that can be said knowing it will be respected, making a “yes” more meaningful.

As such, I find it quite difficult to read some of the erotica texts in the corpus. If I read them with a sex educator hat on, there’s a lot to side-eye. A lot of acts are simply anatomically impossible and/or certainly anatomically inadvisable. Some of the stuff about anal sex is pretty hair-raising (ramming it in and hoping for the best is probably not a good idea! neither is switching from anal to vaginal sex without changing condom!), the pill is not a barrier method and pretty much everyone is in need of more lube. However, as I’ll discuss in the next section, that’s not necessarily how the texts are meant to be read.

A lot of these texts are written by people who identify themselves as heterosexual (cis) men, who aren’t a group I’m generally attracted to and with whom (with notable exceptions!) I don’t interact much outside family and colleagues. I find them pretty baffling. There is material in this corpus that I find troubling about women, trans people, Black and minority ethnic people, about relationships and sex between women and men. As someone who has been racially fetishised before and for whom it is a hard “no”, it’s difficult to be confronted with that and to remain detached.

Erotic complexities

However, it’s also important to think about the complexities of online erotica. In critical discourse analysis, we are trained to think about texts as representing and creating a reality. For example, whether I talk about a group of people as “activists” or “protesters” or “a mob” or “rioters” matters: I might be talking about the same people doing the same things, but how I conceptualise them and communicate my conceptualisation of them is important. How I write about them creates and sustains my worldview, and I can persuade people to share my way of looking at things and interpreting events.

It is important to understand that erotica does not have a simple relationship with reality. The world constructed in an erotica text is a world that does not necessarily map onto real-world desires, but, at the same time, it does reflect the cultural context in which it is produced. Alon has explored agency roles in a subset of the erotica corpus and found that male characters are presented as active participants while female participants are presented as passive. This cannot be read in isolation, and we have to think about how it reflects a sexist power dynamic and heterosexist assumptions of the roles women and men have in sex.

There are straightforwardly fantastical elements in these texts. While establishing the ontological reality of vampires, werewolves and aliens is beyond the scope of this project, if people were having sex with vampires, werewolves and/or aliens as often in real life as they are in this corpus, I think there would be much fewer trashy documentaries speculating about their existence (n.b. I love these trashy documentaries, don’t judge).

However, there are also things happening in these texts that are more complicated. As an example, authors create a persona when they upload their stories. It’s impossible (within the constraints of our dataset) to work out to what extent these map onto their offline identities. I use the term “offline” rather than “real” because these identities can be very real; for example, someone may be able to explore a sexual identity through erotica long before they’re ready to come out (if they decide to come out at all). The writing identity itself may be erotically charged and someone might find it arousing to inhabit a different identity when writing or reading erotica.

People imagine sexual activities that they would not neccesarily find erotic or desirable if they happened in reality. These may be experiences or dynamics; for example, scenes of humiliation, kidnap and/or forced sex. This is not unique to erotica; people in the BDSM have written about staging sex by force fantasies (link NSFW, CN for rape and sexual assault) in a consensual way, so the desirable, erotically charged elements that make it appealing can be experienced.

People also write physical acts, such as types of genital stimulation, that they have either not experienced or would actively not like to experience in reality but in the world of the text it becomes something desirable. Sometimes people write about physical acts in a way that doesn’t reflect real life. There are extremely ambitious refractory periods, anal sex without any kind of warm-up or preparation, sex without a barrier method, insufficient lube, and lots and lots of unnegotiated sex and assumptions about the kind of sex the participants are going to have. On one hand, this is fine in the world of text – in the text world that is being created, these things may have an internal logic.

However, this again has a complex relationship with reality. As I discussed earlier, sometimes erotica is someone’s first encounter with sexual acts or types of sexuality – that was certainly true for me. I think there are different issues here: what does it mean to depict unrealistic sex if readers understand that this takes place in a text world where the rules (of anatomy, of behaviour, of consent, of sex) are different versus what does it mean to depict unrealistic sex if readers are not aware that there is this distance between the text world and the real world? There are interesting conversations to be had about the presence of erotica, and porn more generally, in people’s lives and how it informs their sexualities.

Conclusion

Erotica gives me a lot to think about, and often forces me to challenge my ways of thinking. The erotic texts in this corpus offer different challenges than what I’m used to – they’re very much not coming from my queer feminist consent-aware bubble, and contain material that is distressing and difficult. However, I think it’s important to investigate texts like these: through examining fantasies, I hope that we can discover something about how people write about and think about and imagine sex and sexuality.

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Decentring love

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[content notes: discussion of sex and relationships including consensual kink and non-monogamy. Some discussion of homophobia and transphobia. Non-detailed discussion of sex acts]

I was surprised to find myself so annoyed by Pride in London’s 2017 slogan, “Love Happens Here”. I admit that I am an unromantic grouch, but surely this slogan was harmless? The way in which people engaged with this at a museum LGBT Late during Pride month was rather charming – a map of London with rainbow sticky notes on which they’d written memories of their first kiss, where they met their partner and so on. It was a lovely piece of queer remembering and storytelling. But something troubled, and continues to trouble, me about it.

My problem lies with the word “love”. I’ve recently been thinking about Gayle Rubin’s discussion of social values afforded to different kinds of sexual relationships. She identifies types of relationships that are typically viewed as good/natural/desirable, and other kinds of relationships that are typically viewed as bad/unnatural/undesirable. It is important to note that these labels reflect social values and views rather than Rubin herself labelling them as good or bad.

These dynamics are binaries: so for example, relationships can be monogamous (good/natural/desirable) or non-monogamous (bad/unnatural/undesirable), or they can involve human bodies only (good/natural/desirable) or involve manufactured objects (bad/unnatural/undesirable). Rubin described the good/natural/desirable components as within a Charmed Circle, and the bad/unnatural/undesirable components as beyond the limits of socially acceptable sex. So we have

Charmed circle Outer limits
heterosexual homosexual
married unmarried
monogamous non-monogamous
procreative non-procreative
non-monetised monetised
in pairs alone or in groups
in a relationship casual
same-generation cross-generational
in private in public
no pornography with pornography
with bodies only with manufactured objects
vanilla BDSM

Homosexual sex, therefore, is out of this charmed circle simply by virtue of being homosexual. However, there are other things that we might associate with sexual practices among LGBTQ people: the use of manufactured objects in the form of sex toys; non-monogamy in the form of polyamory, open relationships and other forms of ethical non-monogamy; sex in public through cruising and cottaging; casual sex; non-vanilla sex (which also may include manufactured objects); sex and relationships between people with an age gap.

At the same time, these things are not static. Over time, some practices and types of relationships may become more socially acceptable. Rubin argues that there is an area of contest, a grey area of potentially acceptable kinds of “bad” sex: unmarried heterosexual couples, promiscuous heterosexuals, masturbation, and long-term, stable lesbian and gay male couples (note that this excludes bisexual, trans and queer people). Therefore, homosexuality might be acceptable in some cases – if, in other words, it ticks the boxes for the rest of the charmed circle.

In order to be acceptable to wider, heterosexual society, LG(btq) people must become very, very good at mirroring relationships within this established charmed circle. The charmed circle focuses on stability and love. How should non-heterosexual couples make their relationships demonstrate stability and love? Same sex marriage equality, the ability of same sex couples to adopt and issues of reproductive technology have been areas of public debate, fulfilling the charmed circle needs of “marriage” and “procreation”. There are tensions about assimilation, heteronormativity and homonormativity – issues of how much LGBTQ people should want the same things as heterosexual people, how similar LGBTQ lives should look to heterosexual lives, and what becomes “normal” (and what is excluded from this new normality).

Heterosexual people are increasingly happier about accepting LGBTQ relationships as long as our love is visible and intelligible to them. As long as they can see that our relationships are centred around love (and it is a love which they can identify and understand), they don’t have to think about sex.

I’m uncomfortable with this emphasis on LG(btq) love.

Firstly, homosexuality was only decriminalised 50 years ago. Section 28 effectively banned any teaching of LGBTQ issues in schools for fear it would be perceived as promoting homosexuality; it was only repealed in 2003. So many of us grew up scared and alone – scared of arrest, scared that we were going to catch AIDS because we were told that’s what happened to people like us, scared because we didn’t feel the things we were meant to feel and there was a huge, cavernous silence around what we could be. Section 28 is no more but the Stonewall Schools Report shows that LGBT children continue to be bullied in schools, and that trans students are particularly targeted. LGBTQ people from ethnic minorities and religious communities can face huge pressure to act straight, including being forced into heterosexual marriages.

For too many of us, love is a luxury – instead, our relationships are furtive and fleeting, on hook-up apps or with an expiry date of hours, not recognised by our families or communities, dangerous for us to be in. We are not allowed to love, to luxuriate in settled, loving, married partnership. To be told that your desires are unacceptable but might be tolerated only in the context of a long-term, loving partnership that you are not remotely equipped to build is a cruel catch-22.

Secondly, being on the outer limits of acceptability means that LGBTQ people have had contact with other groups at the limits (or, indeed, are part of these other groups) and have had the freedom to reimagine relationships. Not all LGBTQ people are going to be engaging in non-monogamy, sex work, kink, casual sex, public sex or cross-generational relationships, but I think it’s important that we do acknowledge the hard-won wisdom of people who have experienced these kinds of sex and relationships. We may have learnt to talk about communication and to critique the relationship escalator from poly and non-monogamy practitioners, learnt about consent (and being safe and risk aware) and the importance of communicating our desires and our limits from people into BDSM and kink, experienced non-nuclear families of choice, known or experienced child-rearing through being a single parent by choice, part of a poly group, or as donors of gametes, learnt about boundaries and self-care from sex workers, learnt about sexual health from people who practice casual sex. We may have been able to pass on our knowledge and teach other people.

We may be able to use this awareness to reimagine a binary of good and bad relationships that, as M-J Barker does here, places sex and relationships which are not consensual, not informed, and which insist on strict, non-negotiable gendered roles within sex at the outer limits. They place consent, fluidity, diversity and being critically informed within the charmed circle – something that I think is valuable for all sex and relationships, no matter how long-term, monogamous, vanilla or romantic they are.

We may value love – but also be able to recognise that it doesn’t describe all the queer experiences (histories, relationships, desires) out there.

So here’s to munches and dungeons. Here’s to cottaging and cruising. Here’s to fumbles in gay club toilets and fucking by the bins in the alley. Here’s to kissing on the bus. Here’s to caring, tender casual sex. Here’s to safewords and using them. Here’s to that look, the look that says “I’m sorry about my homophobic relatives” and “I’m sorry they’re calling you my friend instead of my girlfriend” and “let’s get out of this place”. Here’s to Grindr and when it crashes due to the sheer density of gay people in a room. Here’s to whipmarks that say “I love you”. Here’s to love without sex that is every bit as important and life-changing and life-shaping. Here’s to fuck buddies and hookups. Here’s to sex without love because you’re all into it and everyone knows that this is casual and meant to be fun.

Here’s to love that doesn’t have to be visible.

Here’s to love that is expressed strangely and queerly.

Here’s to kindness and communication and consent and community, without which love couldn’t exist.

Here’s to decentring love.

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Learning and teaching consent with a parrot

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There is a new creature living in my house. She communicates through raised and sleek feathers, eye-pinning, a whole range of chuckles, beeps and squawks (at the moment she’s sounding weirdly like R2-D2). She has a beak capable of biting off chunks of wood. Sometimes I jokingly call her a dinosaur or an alien as a way of making sense of her strangeness, but she is a creature of earth and sky and the present day and I feel uncomfortable suggesting that she is of a different time or space. The problem lies with me and with my lack of familiarity.

So, a bit about her: she’s a parrot, a Bronze Wing Pionus to be precise. She’s approaching her first birthday and I’ve had her for three months. Before I got her, she was kept with other young Bronze Wings so hopefully she knows she’s a bird rather than being so imprinted on humans it will cause her problems when she hits sexual maturity.

It’s a very different experience from dealing with dogs or rats or cats or horses or pretty much any other animal I’ve looked after. I am used to soft fur and touch as comfort. I am used to space-invading snuggles, sleepy mammals piled up on top of each other so you can barely tell where each animal ends and another begins. I am used to being able to pick up and/or easily handle most of these animals. Leia will not tolerate these casual liberties. She’s fully flighted, has never been clipped, and can easily choose to avoid me if she wishes. I am trying to show her that I will listen to her and respect her wishes so she can tell me if she’s unhappy or doesn’t want to do something without resorting to biting. Her ancestors have not been selectively bred for tameness and compliance. She is not hardwired to accept dominance or hierarchy; instead there is flock, and careful, subtle, shifting negotiations within the flock.

We have spent much of the past three months learning about each other and how to understand what the other is trying to communicate. In a way it is an experiment, but only in the same way that all my relationships are experiments. I’ve found a lot of my understanding about consent to be applicable to this wild and clever creature.

My feelings do not override her feelings
I loved Leia before I ever met her. Her breeder sent me regular photos and updates about her. I saw her as a tiny, naked baby; as a downy youngster growing her wing feathers; at weaning; with her parents and clutchmates. I learnt what toys she liked and made sure I got her some. I scoured the internet for a suitable cage and, dismayed at how small and high the majority are, ended up ordered a custom made cage. I went into this knowing the commitment I was making to a bird that might hate me, try to attack me and who I may never touch. I was enchanted anyway.

Leia stepped out of the box she was transported in and erupted into flight. I am much smaller than her breeder. I have darker skin and my voice is different and my movements are different and, horrors, I wear glasses. I am a stranger to her and she needed time to work out if she was willing to trust me. I might have loved her but she had no idea who I was and whether I was an acceptable flock member. I had to let her learn about me on her terms. I couldn’t let my feelings override her autonomy. Forcing my presence on her would have been counterproductive, making me into a thing to be feared and avoided.

She was interested in me and wanted to watch what I was doing. She wanted to sit on her stand on my desk and watch me. She was happy to accept treats and toys from my hands. I had to take things at her pace. It took her about three weeks to accept a headscratch from me.

A “yes” is only as meaningful as a “no”
I ask Leia is she wants a headscratch by making a scratch motion with my fingers above her head, within her sight and crucially, not touching her. If she doesn’t want a headscratch, she’ll either beak my fingers or move away. If she does want a headscratch, she’ll bow her head and fluff up her head feathers. I’m trying to show her that I’ll respect her “no” – that she can tell me “no” and I won’t ignore it and do the thing anyway. I hope to teach her that she doesn’t have to reinforce her “no” with a bite or, worse, feel she has to go straight for the bite as that’s the only thing I’ll understand.

However, Leia sometimes beaks my fingers while I’m scratching her and these seem to have a variety of meanings. I’m now trying to work out if her grabbing my fingers with her beak is a “no, not now”, a “yes, and I’m going to direct you to a particularly itchy spot”, a “stop, I’ve had enough”, a “stop, that was the wrong spot” or her preening me in return. We’re still working out the complexities of that bit of communication. She’s usually pretty gentle even when telling me to stop, and I think that’s because she doesn’t feel the need to go harder. She trusts that I’ll listen.

Consent is everyday
Consent isn’t just about the big things like medical interventions or sex. Asking for, receiving or being denied consent is present in so many of our interactions. I do it when I check with a student if it’s alright to forward information on to someone else, check with a child whether they’d prefer a hug, handshake or something else, and give my students the information they need to make an informed choice about how they engage with difficult, upsetting material. Living with Leia is a masterclass in making these negotiations explicit and visible.

Leia now sits on my knee while I work, and increasingly often hauls herself up my sleeve so she can sit on my shoulder. She has begun to step up onto my arm when she feels like it, but as she steps up nicely onto a rope perch I see no reason to push it. I’ve taught her to target a (chop)stick. We have several headscratching sessions a day, and she preens my hair and has tried to preen my eyelashes with extraordinary gentleness. We are working out how to have contact calls so she knows I’m around even if she can’t see me. She appears to have taught me to retrieve by throwing her foot toys off my desk and looking expectantly at me. Last night I lay on the floor to read, and for part of this I had a small parrot wandering around on my back.

It’s challenging trying to communicate across such a species barrier. She can probably see in UV, and probably uses her feathers and light to communicate in ways I am literally blind to. I am probably just as challenging for her to read, with my mammal ways and glasses covering my eyes and fabric coverings. We are muddling our way through, and beginning to make sense of each other.

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we are here (even when we’re not)

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Last month I spoke at GENOVATE’s international conference on diversity within research and universities. I am not thrilled about the term “diversity” and find a lot of the discourse around it really problematic, but I do think it’s important to talk about the phenomenon it describes. It’s what happens when reading lists are full of dead white men and the images on the slides never show people like you. It’s what happens when you’re never taught by someone who looks a little like you, when your mentors don’t experience the things that you do and cannot advise you on dealing with it, when you look at the entity that is the university and cannot see yourself reflected back. From my own experiences and from what others have discussed with me, there’s a lurch as you realise that you’re less welcome in this space that you thought you were, or that your fears are confirmed and that this place isn’t meant for people like you.

I drew on Nathaniel Adam Tobias C—‘s “Diversity is a dirty word” to trouble and reject easy ideas about diversity. C— argues that there are four key strands to challenge in diversity: the “what”, the “how”, the “who” and the “where”.

  • The “what” is the Syllabus: the choice of topics, resources, examples or case studies
  • The “how” is the Process: the teaching methods and learning activities
  • The “who” are the Participants: the students, the tutors, and the epistemic authorities on the programme
  • The “where” is the Environment: the rooms and buildings, the signs and statues, and the local area, taking into consideration the accessibility of these spaces, both physically and socially

After my talk, someone asked me a question focusing on the “who”: what if you’re teaching, but your students don’t seem to be “diverse” (meaning, I would argue, that they do not appear to deviate from the straight, white, cis, able-bodied student that we might imagine. The word “appear” is important). I said then that I would teach as if such diverse students were in the room: after all, we cannot assume that they’re not. Here is why.

Students are not obliged to out themselves

Not all identities or experiences are immediately visible. I might be able to guess at some of my students’ LGBTQ, disabled, ethnic or religious identities if my students make them visible. Sometimes, these things are made visible to me by and through university systems; namely, information about disability that affects how a student learns and is assessed. Sometimes, my students have revealed things to me: their mental health issues, a physical disability that is not apparent to an onlooker, their gender identity, their sexual assault. I have then tried to be extra careful about how I talk about these things, extra aware of how the class discussion moves and where it goes.

However, I have certainly taught students who didn’t feel the need to tell me. Given that the NUS has identified that 37% of female students have experienced unwanted sexual advances and the gender makeup of the courses I teach, I am confident that I’m teaching a few women who have had such experiences. They shouldn’t have to explicitly tell me so. Their presence in the room, and my sensitivity to these unspoken experiences should not be contingent in knowing that such students are here.

It sounds obvious, but students should never have to out themselves to be taught in a non-hurtful way. I have heard enough horror stories about lecturers making crass jokes about mental health, disability, sexual assault, gender and sexuality that have had to be confronted by a student saying “look, I’m ____ and that’s really inappropriate” – an especially fraught interaction. I’ve had to challenge a colleague who would always joke before IELTS tests: “fill in the box for male or female – it’s the easiest question you’ll face today!”; for some people (including me), that’s not an easy question.

However, the onus shouldn’t be on students to reveal something that they may consider personal and private in order to challenge us. The onus should be on us to make sure that we aren’t excluding some of our students.

Students are not isolated

Students have families, friends, colleagues, communities. I cannot know whether one of my students’ parents uses a wheelchair, whether one of my students’ brother is gay and their parents have been unsupportive, whether one of my students’ housemates recently came out as transgender, whether one of my students’ step-family is Black, whether one of my students’ friends has autism.

Our students do not shed their relationships at the lecture hall’s door. We never, ever teach people as isolated individuals, plucked out of their community. Our students bring with them their loyalty and their friendships, their sometimes desperate concern and their love with them. I think it’s important to recognise that. For example, teaching that is aware of LGBTQ issues and acknowledges heteronormativity in teaching materials can signal to the student with a queer or trans sibling that this space is an expansive, welcoming one. I would rather create spaces that create room than spaces that exclude.

Students have emerging identities

Inclusive teaching means that there’s space for students to change. I wasn’t even a baby gay when I went to university; I was tentatively working out what “bisexual” meant and whether I was one but I was a very uncertain young queer. Turns out that Catholic schools really don’t give you a lot of help if you aren’t totally heteronormative! I ended up discovering things like non-binary identities and queerness and gender performance and gender fluidity from linguistics. I can point to the exact book in which I first found it, and it was a sort of star to steer by.

I try to remember that sometimes, I’m teaching my students’ future selves. Perhaps my class is filled with the opposite of ghosts, shifting glimmers of lives that could be lived. I’m lucky enough to teach in areas that often explicitly involve identity, and I often wonder what seeds I nourish and what lives my students might be leading in ten or twenty or forty years time.

Some of my students may not be queer or trans or disabled now – but who knows what will happen in the future? I would not want to be the lecturer who contributes to these students’ anticipation of hostility. Instead, I imagine spaces without fear; spaces in which students with diverse backgrounds and experiences are not continuously preparing to flinch; spaces that speak to the uncertain and scared and oppressed.

Ultimately, I am interested in creating and expanding spaces. I don’t shy away from tough issues – my research has examined police brutality, nuclear weapons and violent transphobia – and I expect my students to be able to engage with difficult issues too. I just don’t see the point of shutting out students with diverse backgrounds and experiences, and instead aim to create spaces where these students can fully contribute.

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Stylistics and grief

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[content note: death, especially of loved ones. Descriptions of guts, blood and assorted viscera)

Last term I was teaching a literary linguistics module. Literary linguistics, or Stylistics, basically uses concepts and frameworks drawn from linguistics – so stuff about everything from phonology (sounds) to grammar to lexicology to pragmatics – to make sense of (usually, but not always) literary texts. I went to the Dark Side of linguistics pretty early in my undergraduate career because I adored nerding out over language being used to do stuff and create relationships and manipulate people and summon ideas into being. However, I’ve been an avid reader since I was a small child – I once fell down an entire flight of stairs in an ill-fated attempt to combine reading and walking, and was more cross at losing my place than worried about the potential for injury – and it’s rare that I don’t have at least one book on the go. Stylistics is appealing because it’s very text and evidence based, and ultimately I was on the Dark Side of empiricism before I even got to university.

Teaching Stylistics was also a superb opportunity to immerse myself in something new. Both my PhD supervisor and partner work with corpus approaches to literary texts so I’ve come across a lot of it by osmosis even if I don’t research it myself. It was also a joy to learn alongside my very engaged and interested students. One session introduced students to cloze procedure texts which are basically a way of testing people’s mental associations of words – their internal sense of what words go with which. We might consider these their lexical primings or their internal sense of collocations, and for that reason I like contrasting this approach with corpus linguistics.

One of the poems we used was an extract of W H Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ with the following gaps:

He ________ in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the ________ almost deserted.
And snow _________ the public statues;
The _______ sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What _______ we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The _______ ran on through evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the ________quays;
By mourning tongues
The _______ of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and ________;
The provinces of his mind revolted,
The ______ of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the _______,
The current of his feeling failed; he _______ his admirers.

Now he is _______ among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of _______
And be punished under a foreign code of ________.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the _____ of the living

This was a multiple choice cloze procedure text so they had four word options for each slot, they spent some time choosing which word they thought fit best into the gaps, then I showed them the whole poem and we discussed it.

Their choices included things like “An afternoon of nurses and doctors“, “a foreign code of conduct” and “The words of a dead man/ Are modified in the souls of the living”. They were quite surprised when I showed them the actual poem and the weird, unexpected things it does with words.

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) suggests that nurses and should occur with words like doctors, physicians, midwives, patients, orderlies, pharmacists and therapists – people working in medicine or who we may expect to see in a hospital or GP surgery. There are also a few occurrences of other professions, such as teachers and engineers. My students clearly had an internal sense of this collocation and their choice reflected their expectations. However, the poem doesn’t give us what we expect. “An afternoon of nurses and rumours” juxtaposes the concrete noun “nurses” with the abstract noun “rumours”. Reading it is a bit of a jolt, a bit of wrongness.

Again, the “guts of the living” doesn’t give us what we’d expect. The poem is contemplating the afterlife of the poet and where his words live on. We would probably expect this gap to say something about existence beyond the body; perhaps, as my students predicted, “The words of a dead man/ Are modified in the souls of the living”. We expect the missing word to reflect the language of something metaphysical and elevated. Instead, the poem gives us this very earthy noun guts, derived from the Anglo-Saxon guttas.

Gut can be used both metaphorically and literally. Its metaphorical uses describe emotions, particularly bravery and intuition: “they had the guts to put up a sign”, “We just followed our guts” or “he had the nerve and guts and discipline”. When it’s used literally, it’s used to describe a really immediate physicality of intestines and viscera: “The fly and the smell of guts and urine made me want to puke”, “Its guts had been pulled out and strewn across the dirt, no longer wet and glistening”, “these bacteria thrive (or don’t) in our guts” (again, all examples are taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English). The rest of the poem doesn’t really talk about the actual process of death but instead slightly dodges it; it’s in this line that we are confronted with bodies and physicality and vulnerability.

I think there’s a tension in this poem between our expectations of what to think and feel and say in the event of death, and the sense of bewilderment and confusion and being wrong-footed. We know what we ought to be able to expect: nurses and doctors, codes of conduct, souls. We may try to find solace in that ritual. And yet we feel loss and lost: the rules and knowledge we could predict are no longer there. Someone dear to us is no longer there. The words we expect to come do not come, and something strange and unfamiliar and disconcerting are in their place.

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haunting texts

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Winchester cathedral graffiti from 1632

Graffiti from 1632 carved into a pillar of Winchester cathedral

Last semester I was teaching a History of English module. With little in the way of previous teaching materials, I had considerable scope to develop my own – and woah, did I have fun with that.

I grew up in a medieval city, its Anglo-Saxon quarters still somewhat in evidence and traces of its inhabitants and their trades and their prejudices echoed still in the street names. The city itself is a palimpsest, post-war layered on Victorian layered on Georgian layered on Tudor layered on medieval layered on Anglo-Saxon and, crouching in alcoves, the city’s old Roman walls. It’s impossible to live there and not let that somehow soak into your bones, just a quiet awareness that your life is one breath against the city’s dreaming stones.

And yet, all of this history is just part of your life. When you grow up playing on castle ruins (destroyed in the English Civil War and never rebuilt) and running around a medieval great hall and there are Roman coins on a table in your primary school because they were dug up in someone’s dad’s field, and you spend your teenage years perched on tombs and ruining tourists’ photos by sprawling messily on the market cross, it’s impossible to be too reverent about the history that surrounds you. As a child, I was enchanted by illuminated manuscripts – and also by the graffiti carved into the cathedral stones. History is real people, real lives – not just stuff to distantly admire.

I hope that this came across in my teaching as I offered them historical context along with linguistics, information about Anglo-Saxon farming methods taught alongside the case system. I wanted them to understand where these texts came from – the fact that manuscripts were heavily used, the physicality of operating a heavy printing press.

Freshly printed Caxton

Freshly printed Caxton

Happily, the university has a massive school of art and one of their specialities is various forms of printing, so off we went to operate a letterpress. Our guide to the process, Naomi Midgley, showed us around the typecase, how to set up a composing stick and had prepared a forme of a text for us to print. Because I couldn’t resist trolling my students a little bit, I chose a extract of Caxton. Then we got to place the forme in the press, ink it, carefully place a sheet of paper over it, place the tympan and frisket over it, roll the coffin into place, pull the bar towards us to lower the platen then push it to raise it, then roll the coffin back out, lift the tympan and frisket and finally lift the sheet of paper to view the new print. It was an important insight into the physical nature of producing a print and what can go wrong as our inexpert hands applied too much ink, not enough ink, applied too much pressre from the platen, not enough pressure, nudged the paper as we lifted it off and smudged the wet ink. It was one thing to read about the process of producing a printed text; quite another to actually do the labour myself. If I could, I would love to apprentice myself to a printer, to learn how to reach into the the typecase without having to look, to assemble formes, to allow the process of operating a press mark my body with ink and callouses and changed musculature.

As a corpus linguist, one of the things I struggle with is the way that materiality is both present and absent in the texts I use. I use large collections of machine-readable texts, stored on my computer or a server and manipulated using a computer program. I don’t go into archives, rarely physically come into contact with my texts. However, they are scanned using Optical Character Recognition and through this, the early twentieth century newspaper texts I use with constantly remind me of their physicality.

Newspaper text (left) and the OCRed version (right)

Newspaper text (left) and the OCRed version (right)

In these texts, flecks of dirt or ink, smudges, imperfections in the paper and so on are interpreted as salient by the OCR program: spots of dirt or ink become full stops or commas or dashes or part of a colon or semi-colon, flecks of ink mean that o acquires a tail and becomes a p or q or b or d, smudges turn a c into an o or an e and so on. In corpus linguistics the text is both isolated from the way it was physically produced, yet the method of production haunts the text, is a ghost (or perhaps a poltergeist) in my analysis. I often had to return to images of the newspaper text to interpret my concordance lines or manually correct texts for detailed analysis.

I don’t have an easy answer or, indeed, a conclusion. Perhaps all I can do is suggest what I had to do so many times when the smudges and blobs became too much: return to the text with human senses.

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Publication Day!

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Me with my author copies

Me with my author copies

I am beyond delighted to announce that Representation of the British Suffrage Movement is now available from Bloomsbury Academic. A preview of the book is available through Google Books if you’re interested in reading it.

It’s the culmination of many years of hard work, yelling/swearing at my data, yelling/swearing at my computer, being a constant trial to my loved ones and possibly a plantation’s worth of tea, but it’s finally here! It seems a very long time ago that I drafted a thesis proposal with a sleeping puppy on my lap; indeed, the puppy in question is now eight years old. I don’t think I could have imagined where that thesis proposal would take me. Researching the thesis and then turning it into a book has been an adventure, truly expanding my intellectual horizons, challenging my ideas and assumptions (and patience), and bringing me into contact with some of the smartest and most generous people I could have hoped to meet.

I recieved my author copies a couple of weeks ago. They are incredibly handsome and some have already found new homes with some of the people who have supported and inspired me the most: my parents, my sister and my partner.

So if the suffrage movement, women’s history, politics, protest, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, newspaper representation, gender and/or direct action sounds interesting, do have a look at the preview. I would love to know what you think of it!

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five thoughts (plus one) on same sex marriage

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This has been brewing for a while now, but with recent same sex marriage victories in the US and the Republic of Ireland, I think I want to jot down some of these thoughts.

1.
Honestly, I am probably not the best person to talk about getting married. As a child I couldn’t even feign interest in my primary school classmates’ breaktime ceremonies held in the playground. As a teenager, one of my favourite rants was about marriage being an institution of patriarchal oppression trading women’s bodies among men for economic and social gain. Emotional and physical abuse, rape, forced reproduction and murder all happen within marriage. Marriage doesn’t guarantee love and security.

I think LBGTQ critics of the institution of marriage are right to be ambivalent about its heavy history. I worry that same sex marriage buys into the more problematic aspects of marriage in a capitalist society. Now we, too, can have an eye-wateringly expensive wedding and have articles about our spending power written about us! Hooray! Brands, including Proctor & Gamble, Starbucks, Budweiser and Coca-Cola promptly tweeted rainbow images. It feels like a carefully managed publicity stunt; do brands really care about human rights, or is this a ploy to make them seem a bit more human and appeal to us (and our money)? It seems to be a similar issue to corporate presences at Pride marches. HowUpsetting observes that “being seen to be ‘LGBT-friendly’ attracts a progressive sheen which is viewed as separate from the social activities your corporation or government may engage in; indeed, it can serve to largely obscure these for certain audiences”.

2.
I think there’s a temptation for queer activists to see their relationships as inherently radical. If the relationship escalator ending in State-recognised marriage and children is not open to us, how else do we conduct, recognise and honour our relationships? Dean Spade writes on how “interrogating the limits of monogamy fits into […] queer, trans, feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-oppression politics” by examining relationships, capitalism, and the romance myth’s connections with scarcity. Such queer critiques view marriage as assimilationist and inherently conservative.

However, Yasmin Nair rightly points out that sex – queer sex, poly sex, BDSM sex – is not inherently radical. Instead she argues that “the revolution will not come on the tidal wave of your next multiple orgasm had with your seven partners on the floor of your communal living space. It will only happen if you have an actual plan for destroying systems of oppression and exploitation”. She urges us to “think and agitate collectively around how sex is deployed against the most vulnerable bodies” such as those in prison and sex workers. And she concludes that “Your sex is not radical. Your politics can and should be. Consider the difference, and act upon it”.

3.
Amongst the celebrations, it is impossible to not notice that some parts of our community get less attention than others. There’s a particular poignancy to seeing photos and hearing stories of devoted elderly LGBT couples – this seems to be the only time when we do see them, and hear their stories of determination and resilience. Elderly LGBT people face erasure at best and abuse at worst in care homes, may have been ostracised by their family, and may live with the physical and emotional legacy of violent repression and the AIDS crisis.

Same sex marriage often gets referred to as “gay marriage”. This renders invisible the lesbians who do not identify as gay, bisexual people in same sex relationships, and transgender people (including non-binary people) in relationships that are same sex only in terms of legal documents. Each of these groups face different – often complicated and damaging – issues to the white cis gay men that are so often the face of same sex marriage campaigns and celebrations.

4.
It’s essential that people pay attention to the nuts and bolts of legislation and are prepared to critique it. The UK Marriage (Same Sex) Act 2013 introduced some especially transphobic legislation, as well as further codifying binary genders in law. There are alternatives – Canada, for example, defines marriage for civil purposes as the “lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others”. It’s my hope that any same sex marriage bill passed in the US doesn’t further marginalise people, especially transgender people (including non-binary people) and bisexual people. It’s critical that LGBTQ activists examine – and challenge if necessary – the specifics of any legislation instead of simply accepting whatever’s offered.

5.
This is only the beginning. It varies by state, but many LGBT people in the US are not federally offered protection in terms of employment, recognition of hate crimes on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, discrimination in schools and discrimination in housing programmes. LGBQ people who are also women, of colour, disabled, of faith, immigrants, elders and/or transgender often face intersecting issues that same sex marriage cannot fix. Trans lives and trans rights cannot be forgotten. Since January, ten trans women have been murdered in the US. Others will take their own lives. Others will be denied vital healthcare. LGBTQ undocumented migrants will be detained, deported and die. LGBTQ people in poverty will suffer. Young LGBTQ people will be made homeless. For a lot of people, being able to marry their same-sex partner won’t change a lot.

+1.
However, and despite all my misgivings, I am pleased that the US Supreme Court have made this decision – the alternative would have been worse. Legal recognition of relationships is essential for so many things: immigration purposes, healthcare, rights as next of kin, parental rights, pensions and other survivor benefits. As someone in a long-term relationship with an American, I am pleased that we could marry, move there and that I would be recognised as her partner for immigration purposes – just as she would be recognised as mine in the UK.

I have heard of too many people whose partners were denied space at their hospital bedsides, too many trans people whose partners were shoved aside and who were buried with a dead name on their gravestone. Ideally, these dignities wouldn’t be contingent on marriage, but until that fight is won, I suppose this is the legal framework we have to work with. Let’s see this as a beginning, not the end point, and fight for human rights and human dignity to be afforded to all LGBTQ people.

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why I won’t tweet my students’ exam howlers

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Another summer marking season, another article in Times Higher Education soliciting student “exam howlers”. This is predictable and wearying and I can’t help but feel that we keep having this exact same conversation about why it’s bad to publicly mock and shame our students. Kirsty Rolfe wrote about talking teaching and making mistakes and I wrote about being someone’s worst student a couple of years ago, but apparently it bears repeating.

There was one respect alone in which Philip was recognized as a man of distinction, though only within the confines of his own Department. He was a superlative examiner of undergraduates: scrupulous, painstaking, stern yet just. No one could award a delicate mark like B+/B+?+ with such confident aim, or justify it with such cogency and conviction.

David Lodge, Changing Places: a tale of two campuses

Like Philip, I try to mark carefully and, being a perfectionist, probably spend far too much time thinking about whether a piece of work should be awarded a 62 or a 64 (let alone a 68 or a 70). Marking can be a joyless task but there’s only one paper that I’ve genuinely been annoyed at marking – one in which the student, in some kind of act of teenage bravado-slash-poor judgement, declared that he wrote the whole thing while hungover and didn’t care. After a week of solid marking, I have to confess that I, in turn, found it difficult to care about this student’s work. But that was a very rare case.

Most of the “exam howlers” seem to be inexpert attempts to apply frameworks and terminology, and while frustrating to see, it’s not something I think should be publicly mocked. I don’t think I have it in me to fault someone for trying – I try to only get irritated when someone truly doesn’t try. And it’s not like the people marking student work have never dropped a stinker themselves. I’ve really liked the #myownexamhowlers hashtag on twitter (storify here).

I don’t remember any specific exam howlers I made – I think I’ve blanked out the entire experience of exams with some degree of success – but a tutor did note that an essay took “a curiously scattergun approach”. I consistently left sweary, abusive messages (e.g. [LOOK UP THE FUCKING DEFINITION YOU FUCKING IDIOT]) to myself in draft chapters I sent to my supervisor (pro tip: use unusual punctuation marks around these to make it easier to use ctrl+f to locate and delete them later). Finally, when I was printing my ~350 page thesis, I dropped the entire thing, hurriedly tried to shove the papers in the right order, failed miserably, and duly presented one of my examiners with a thesis containing a wodge of pages in the wrong order. A true case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!

Talking about our own exam (and otherwise) howlers opens up a far more interesting conversation. I don’t want to be an unassailable figure of perfection for my students, doing something they can never hope to aspire to. Instead I want to say that I, too, find some things difficult, have fumbled around trying to use the right terminology, have clumsily applied a framework or model, have missed something glaringly obvious. These days I have the luxury of sending my work to knowledgeable colleagues and friends, and my work will be peer-reviewed before publication. Students, especially those working under closed book exam conditions, don’t have that option.

So let’s think a bit more kindly of our students. How many of us working under those conditions, grappling with complex, unfamiliar terminology and ideas that we’d perhaps encountered for the first time only weeks ago, panicky and underslept and stressed, would turn out polished, publishable work? We’ve had years – decades – to hone our academic thinking and writing. They haven’t. If we can’t be kinder, let us at least be more discreet in our unkindness.