Transcript
Intro script—spoken by Mariana Grohowski: In this interview we spoke with Dr. Katie Manthey. Dr. Manthey is an assistant professor of English and director of the Writing Center at Salem College. Her forthcoming book with the University of Nebraska Press looks at how fat fashion bloggers in different parts of the world challenge and reinforce beauty ideals in the context of global consumer capitalism. She was co-chair for the Fat Studies Interest Group for the National Women's Studies Association Conference, she's been published in Jezebel, and she created and curates Dress Profesh, a blog/social media campaign. We spoke with Dr. Manthey about growing up in Fargo, North Dakota—how it led her to become a writing center director and professor. Dr. Manthey talks about imposter syndrome and mentoring. She talks about fashion and pop culture. We think you'll enjoy this interview as much as we did.
Katie Manthey (KM) October 6, 2017 at the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference in Dayton, Ohio
Interviewed by Megan Adams (MA) and Mariana Grohowski (MG)
KM: So I'm Katie Manthey, I am, this is my third year—which is really weird—third year as an Assistant Professor and Director of the Writing Center at Salem College. It's a small women's college in North Carolina. I direct the Writing Center, did I say that? That's very important to who I am, even though I was resistant to that for a long time, and I can talk about that more as we keep going. I have been doing . . . a lot of my work comes out of what I do as a teacher and administrator.
So in the two years I've been there I developed a professional writing minor from kind of a Cultural Rhetorics lens. And then kind of grew the Writing Center from three people to a staff of 20. So I've been, I've been writing, researching, and talking about embodiment in all of the different places that I am. That was kind of something that came out of my dissertation. And so embodiment and writing centers, dress codes in the writing center, and working with students on that. And then kind of embodiment in terms of building the professional writing minor, how especially at a place like a women's college, we—and a women's college, which until recently didn't have a trans-polic—embodiment and bodies are really, really important and so talking about, like, it's not just what you make or how you make it, but how it's presented is a rhetorical kind of act. And helping students understand the larger context of the ways that they read and are read in the world.
MA: So we're going to back up a little bit
KM: Yeah. There's . . . [laughs]
MA: We want to know how you got here. So could you tell us first about where you’re from and then how it has or has not shaped who you are today.
KM: Oh man.
MA: This is the larger . . .
KM: How much time do we have?
MA: [laughs]
KM: Right?
MG: How much time do you have?
KM: [laughs]
KM: So I am from Fargo, North Dakota.
MG: Really?
KM: I know, right? And this is what I get from people.
MG: I had no idea, when's your accent gonna come out?
KM: When I drink.
MG: [laughs]
KM: Is that part of this? Is there like a liquor . . .
MG: In the bag.
KM: The “Os” come out occasionally. I lived in Tennessee for awhile when I did my master’s and yeah, I had it shamed out of me so I kind of adapted this no-accent accent. But no, I am from Fargo, I lived there for twenty-six years, and I lived there for twenty . . . and it’s a great place. A problematic place in a lot of its own ways but my—I grew up on a college campus—my parents both have their doctorates in agronomy. Back in the 80s when that was a thing, right? That was a big deal.
MA: Can we ask you what that means?
KM: [laughs] Yeah . . . It’s plants. Like crops.
MA: I was going to, like, agriculture.
KM: Agriculture, yep. Agronomy. So they moved. My mom's from North Carolina, my dad's from Indiana, and they both moved up there in the 80s to go to North Dakota State for, like, Crop and Weed Science. Andthat's where they met, and they were told that they were going to make big-time money in industry and then the ag-economy bottomed out. And my dad worked as a postdoc for twelve years. This is all important. It all ties back to who I am today. My dad worked as a postdoc for twelve years, family of six. And my mom stayed at home after the third kid. So I really admire that she got her PhD; she worked for three years and then she made the choice to stay at home and raise us. And her way of kind of, I think, working through that, because she spent like 13 years in college—to go from that to babysitting—she taught us everything. She taught us everything your fifth grader should know the summer before fifth grade. We had math classes, she did all these things and so for me, my mom was able to get away from all of us every Saturday morning. She would leave and she's like, "Okay, Frank, you have the kids, see you in like six hours." And she'd go shopping. She'd take herself out to breakfast and I mean it's how she survived, right?
And my dad would round us all up, so four kids in six years, we're all like two years apart, he'd round us all up, we always lived right by campus, and he'd walk us over to his lab. And his lab was like a greenhouse, so it had that greenhouse smell, and he'd let us water some of his plants that were already not part of the study, ya know, so we felt important and sometimes his grad students or colleagues would be there and we'd talk to them.
So I grew up at North Dakota State University, and it was always just kind of this thing, and this is something I came to learn later was a huge privilege, right? To not just grow up on a college campus, but around the dinner table when we would all eat together, which in and of itself is a huge privilege. My parents would talk about politics, academic politics, and so like, "Well, who is this person, and who is that person?" You hear all these stories about this person and this person and how they kind of navigated that and so I grew up listening to advice about grad students and working with grad students and working with colleagues and all of these things.
My dad ultimately got a tenure-track job at North Dakota State, so they realized that they didn't want to leave, ‘cause it was a good place to raise a family and he recently was promoted to full. Yay, Frank, ya know. And my mom works for Pioneer, the seed company, and she goes out into the fields and collects corn, and she does it because that's what drew her to agronomy in the beginning was she liked to be outside. And they found out she has a PhD, and they were like, "Well, you're with all of the seasonal workers, you have a PhD, would you like to do this other thing." And she's like, "No." [laughs] "Absolutely not. I just want to do the thing that I love."
And so I kind of, growing up with that as sort of the model, the definition of success for me has always looked different than I think it's looked to some of my peers. And at the same time, I grew up with a lot of resentment because we were very poor. My dad being a postdoc and my mom staying home and having—ya know, there being six of us. So I was teased a lot as a kid because all of my clothes were secondhand, and I'd wear the same thing twice in a week. I went to Catholic school in the beginning and while in many ways I had this class privilege around academia and being exposed to knowledge and all of these . . . Not having a lot of material wealth was hugely impactful for me and ever since I was a kid I have thought about power through material objects and through appearance.
I mean when I was ten, ya know, this has been the thing that has always been part of my life. I got married young, I got married at twenty, but I met my now ex when I was like sixteen? And he was a way out. He was a way to make more money and be independent and buy all the things I wanted to buy because my parents were very against debt.
And they didn't want to sign, they didn't want to sign the FAFSA papers—ya know, for me to take out student loans—because my dad worked there and we got a discount and he's like, “Well, if you work enough you can just pay for it,” which at the time was becoming not true. It was still incredibly expensive, not like when he was a student and could just work in the summer and pay for it.
So I grew up really angry at them for not having money and didn't realize what a gift they were giving me with the education and the way that they really encourage that. So I knew that I wanted to be a professor when I was a sophomore in college. I thought I wanted to be a chemist before then and that's because that's what my parents, you know, in the lab and all these . . . And I thought, I thought that that would be sexier. Because it's hard. And I know that writing in English and teaching is hard, too, for some people, but it wasn't for me and that didn't seem like a valid thing to do because it wasn't a struggle the same way that chemistry was.
So I was a chem major, and I got a C, and I'm like, “No, I can't do this.” ‘Cause I'm also a perfectionist. And then I wanted to be a Classics teacher, I wanted to teach Latin, but there are fewer jobs doing that then there are doing this so I had an advisor during my undergrad who said, “Hey, I can see that you really love people, and while you are very good at Latin verbs, you are very bad at Greek verbs. I recommend that you double major in classical studies and English.” So I added English as kind of a backup plan, ‘cause like I said, by the time I was a sophomore I knew I wanted to be some sort of teacher-professor. So I took the . . . I took the English. I did all Brit-lit classes ‘cause that's where my friends were . . .
And I was in a sorority. I got married so I was married at twenty, joined a sorority when I was twenty-one, twenty-two? And for me that was a way to access a level of class privilege that I had felt denied because this was really tied to money. But I had money now because I was married and he had an income and I could be independent when I applied for loans and credit cards—I went into a lot of debt, which I think is really important to talk about. ‘Cause it's so real. It's so real. So remind me to get back to that in terms of being a faculty member versus a graduate student.
So yeah I joined a sorority, and it both was and wasn't what I thought it would be. It was the ra-ra sisterhood, “we're prettier than everyone else” kind of thing, but also sort of like, there is this activist spirit to it that I know is kind of an excuse . . .like if you're looking at it critically, if you're looking at it critically—because yes, sororities and fraternities are very problematic— they come out of these moments though where I was in Kappa Alpha Theta, I guess I still am.
They were the first Greek Letter fraternity for women. So they say, right? They say they were “the first” because women were not going to college and it was like the 1800s and then this woman went and then she found one friend and then together they were like, “We're gonna do this,” and that's how Theta was born, right? It was like women helping women get through college, and I loved that and I became the scholarship chair, which meant that my job was to make sure that everyone kept their grades up so I saw the sorority as an Honor Society that drank on the weekends. [laughs] Right?
So at all these meetings, we had weekly meetings, I would get up and give a scholarship presentation about study skills and tips and all of this and that's when I realized that I really like public speaking because I can make my sister's laugh. The meetings got long, the meetings got boring—I could make them laugh when I talked about ten ways to take notes in class and I kind of fell in love with that and I'm like "Oh this is!" I want to be, I want to be able to perform. I want to make it engaging.
And I'm a Sagittarius with Leo rising and I know a lot of people roll their eyes, but I am ruled by Jupiter in a search for truth, right? And I'm really really desiring people to see me a certain way. Like this reading of the signs like really resonates with me. The outward and the inward kind of selves. So I can see it starting there. That was one of my favorite parts of being an undergrad; I took all these classes. For my master’s I applied to University of Tennessee in Chattanooga because my ex, now ex, his family lived there and he wanted to move home.
And so we moved—the first time I had not lived in Fargo—moved to Tennessee. We were there for about six months and it sort of fell apart, and I called the chair of the English Department at North Dakota State, who had been my advisor through my undergrad thesis and said, "Hey Dr. Sullivan, can I come back?" And he’s like, "Yeah, we would love to have you back. We don't have a lot of money"—since this will be spring semester that I'd be starting you know, I missed the whole cohort thing—"but we have a place in The Writing Center. Would you be interested in that?" and I'm like I'll take anything because we have to come back to Fargo. So we moved back and I didn't even know what a Writing Center was—I think I had been once as an undergrad but I’m like, “I'm an English major, I don't need this,” you know?— and then suddenly I was working there. And the whole time I was both, like, enchanted by it and really turned off. Because you can see how this work is not valued it is so important and it is not valued at the same time. So that was my assistantship for like the first semester or maybe even the first year and then I started teaching.
And I had the best mentor, Amy Rupiper Taggart, who recently passed away from cancer. And actually I went to my first Fem Rhet with her, and I roomed with her and Kelly Sassi and Becca Hayes in this tiny little room and so every time I come to this conference now I think of her and it actually makes me . . . it's interesting though because she's still here. Because of the way she taught me to teach, she taught the graduate pedagogy class and we had to do so much work. We did all the assignments the students did, we read all of this theory, we met like three times a week and then we had met in the summer before things began too. And she taught us to be very critical, reflexive feminist teachers—whether we knew it or not. And my time in the writing center made me a different kind of teacher than kind of what I saw . . . I approached things differently than I saw some of my peers do in these groups because I came at it as a student first. I spent all this time listening to the students talk about "I don't understand what my professor wants." And you're their ally first and then to be the crafter of the assignment sheet, ya know, you're like, “Okay, I know this person's not gonna understand regardless of what I say so how can I make this the most clear?”
So I taught at North Dakota State and loved it. Loved it. When I was doing my master’s I wanted to, I did classical rhetoric because that had been my bachelor’s degree, right? And then I had, then I found feminism, and it sounds weird to say. You don't just find it but it finds you, especially when you're a white girl in a sorority with quite a bit of privilege and at that point I had amassed the material, the materiality that I wanted to represent myself, like I had like $15,000 in credit card debt but I felt so good about myself because [hand hitting the table] I had these things. And that was how I marked success. And it was what I wore when I taught. I worked at The Limited for like two weeks. Maxed out my credit card with the 40% discount though and bought all my teaching clothes and was like totally dressed up to teach these classes as a grad student and then I realized [pen clicking] no one else dresses this way [laughs] in humanities departments, and I loved watching T.V., I still do, I'm a pop-culture consumer. You have to live in the culture you critique, right? And I loved to watch "What Not to Wear." And Stacy and Clinton would bring in people who were Humanities professors and they'd say, "Professors don't dress like this." And they'd give them a makeover and they'd be wearing a suit and I'm like—literally no one wears that. Like that is not even remotely, even on the job market people don't wear that, Stacy and Clinton. And in that moment, in that moment, I'm just like, “I need to know more about this.” And so I went to Betsy Birmingham, who's another one of my foremothers—I guess you could say—and I'm like, "Betsy, I don't understand this."
And she's like, "Katie, that's a very feminist question to ask." And I'm like, "Eww, I don't want to have anything to do with that." Because I was also still very like inculcated in this, like, conservative kind of like what success was and my ex, my now ex, was in the military and so bodies and appearance and size and beauty and traditional femininity were all very, very important. And I'm like, “I don't want to go into this”—what he would call—“dirty liberal hippy rabbit hole.” Like I don't want anything to do with this. But she gave me some stuff to read, and I read it. And I'm just like, “Oh I got to know more about this.” And she's like, "Well this could be your master’s thesis."
So I actually sent a survey to the people at Fem Rhet when it was at Michigan State University and asked them to take this survey that had been done by some dress studies scholars that had been done about business-professional attire and had them take it about what they wore when they taught. What do academic feminists wear? And I had someone in the stats department help me and I wrote this master's thesis and Betsy, bless her heart, basically gave me a crash course in Feminism 101 as I was learning how to do this.
So for me, the visible self, the dressed body, and the way that materiality and appearance are shown, is deeply tied to how I've come to understand feminism. And I was still very, very, very . . . I found a lot of solace and power in looking a certain way, right? So even as I studied this and listen to people talk about how they could reject these cultural norms as a way to feel empowered, I’m like that is not for me.
I applied to PhD . . . Nope I was still married, I applied to PhD programs, I applied to eleven PhD programs. Talking about my master's thesis and talking about my writing center work, because I stayed at the writing center in some . . . You never leave writing centers. You try. You try. But they don't let you ever, ever leave, which is good. But I'm like, “Okay I'm done with writing centers, I want to do this, like, cool professor theory thing.” Like, that's gonna be me, that's what I'm gonna do, but I had the writing center in my back pocket. I applied all over and I applied to Michigan State because Becca Hayes had told me about it. It was on her list—she's someone you should talk to. She's in Missouri, she's at Mizzou now. She was, she was another one of those mentors. Someone who drastically shaped how I see things ‘cause we were officemates and we hated each other when we first met. She was this, like, she was this feminist, like what I thought . . .I mean, she was very . . . And I was the sorority girl and we looked at each other and we're like, “This is going to be awkward.” It was like an office of four people and we ended . . . And I think she'll tell you the same story . . . We ended up realizing that we were very similar but we just came from two very different orientations and I have told her this. I feel like—she's maybe four or five years older than me—s I become the age that she was when we first met, I find myself saying a lot of the same things I heard her say and it makes me wonder about the trajectory of activism and feminism with age and with . . . If I hadn't met her, and Amy and Betsy like all at the same time I would be a very different person. But they were the people who kind of like who called me on my bullshit, right? Who were like, “Yeah okay but why?” you know. And made me feel uncomfortable but also were there for me to let me figure out why I was uncomfortable and try to do better.
So, oh I applied because it has been Becca’s list of PhD programs—she talked about it like it was this great place—and I said okay. So I wrote stuff about my master's thesis, applied there, and I was asked to come for recruitment weekend. And it was amazing. It was like third on my list out of eleven but when I got there I was just like, “Oh, holy crap.”Bill Hart-Davidson had lined up someone in apparel and textile design for me to work with. And she was actually on my committee the whole way through. I worked more closely with her than anyone else my first year there. And it was really, really important to me. I felt like they saw me and all the weirdness. Because the dissertation—er, the master's thesis was not a traditional rhet-comp, and the program—North Dakota State at the time was more comp than rhetoric. More traditional kind of, like, comp pedagogy, so this was like, “Oh, this is odd.” But Michigan State was like, “We like odd. This is cultural rhetorics, this is weird.” and Malea Powell saw something in the work that I was doing. The whole committee, of course. But her and Trixie Smith really helped me realize that the weird things that I like to do were inherently cultural rhetorics and valuable scholarship.
And so these questions that I had wrestled with—with trying to be okay with myself and my body and my appearance and materiality and it's all tied up into size too because that's part of beauty and everything. That this could be something that is my life’s work. And I'm just like, “Oh, holy crap.” When I went to Michigan State for recruitment, Bill Hart-Davidson was the grad chair, grad director. He pulled me aside, "Okay we invited twelve people. I just wanted to let you know you're not at the top of our list and you're not at the bottom of our list. You’re somewhere in the middle for funding." And I'm like, "Holy shit." [laughs]
MG: Right.
KM: “Oh my god, why are you telling me this?” But that kind of transparency was really important. And one of the things that ended up, he was like, “We have a whole bunch of things in the works for funding; we will let you know. One of the options is a writing center assistantship; would you be interested in that?” well, here are these fucking writing centers following me everywhere I go so of course I'm like, “Yes I'd love to” because I want to get into the program. [sigh] And it ended up being the best thing that's ever happened to me [laughs.]. And it keeps coming up right? This is this resistance. I think I'm resistant to things that are good for me and this actually—we won't go into this in detail—relationships, personal life, you know, I'm just like no this could be a healthy relationship, let me sabotage this. Let me run away. I don't want to actually be happy.
So I came in with five years of funding, two years in the writing center. That was the plan. And I started working at the writing center and found my people and found my place and was able to just, like, be an administrator. I took over the schedule. We had like ninety people working there and I'm like, “Let me make these spreadsheets.” And take these classes about cultural rhetorics specifically. I got divorced my first year of my PhD and at the time my weight had—size was always important in my marriage because it’s tied to beauty, and my ex had told me if I was ever more than two hundred pounds he wouldn't love me anymore. And I'm like, “Well, you're kidding, right?” But he wasn't kidding. And surprise, surprise we ended up getting divorced. Like maybe that's weird in retrospect. It's totally not. At the time I'm just like, “ What's going on.” But that happened my first year and then I took queer rhetorics and learned about how marginalized identity categories can be—how to embody an identity category that is, that makes you feel like shit, and how that can be empowering. And I started to see fat as something that was kind of fit this queering idea of what health and success and love-ability and . . . I mean it's all tied into capitalism too. So I started investigating fat and size from a queer rhetoric sort of lens and at the time I wasn't out to myself at all but that was the beginning. Of everything.
And the work I did in that class and the connections I made and the people I worked with are still the people I work with today. And Trixie has just been incredibly influential and kind of, not just picking up where Betsy and Amy and Becca kind of left off, but like taking it in even more of a direction. Trixie modeled how to be queer, and an administrator, and a teacher, and a human. Like you keep, as a Writing Center Director now, I keep those Kleenex in my office, and I keep contact solution, and I keep tampons, and I keep candy because these are the things—that's really what this work is—it's about people. And my idea of the professor who just did theory, right, was not about people. So I started doing more work around that. I found fat activism, fat studies, kind of like almost like fringe sociology, although that's kind of a problematic way to think about it too. But it's this interdisciplinary kind of way to look at size as an identity. And just kind of kept germinating, right? I did my dissertation about fat fashion bloggers because that for me was how I became okay with my body. I found other people who looked like me and saw them be beautiful and I’m like, “Oh my god I can do this too. These are magical people.” So the dissertation was a way for me to talk to them and learn from them and then also kind of bring in cultural rhetorics, which is always already there, but kind of make it more clear.
Went on the job market, I still worked in the writing center, I don't think I was ever not in the writing center cause again you don't leave. And I'm like, at first I'm like , “I’m gonna get an R1 job. That's me. I’m gonna be R1.” ‘Cause I was at an R1, right? And I really appreciate Danielle DeVoss, like I see her work and I'm just like, “hat's it.” She is amazing; she is so inspirational. But I don't think that I can run that fast.
I went on the job market, I applied to like a hundred and forty jobs. I had, what, thirty, Skype interviews, fifteen follow-ups, like second interviews, you know, like on the phone? Something like that. And then the campus visits. I think I had, like, four campus visits and one offer. And it was Salem College. And at the time I was interviewing at other places too. Places that were arguably more prestigious. And I always sort of wondered what would have happened if I had gone that other route. But this one was tenure-track. And it was a writing center director tenure-track position in English and I'm like, “Oh, holy crap. These are all of the things . . .look, I'm going to end up in a fucking writing center.” [aughs.]. ‘Cause of course I am.
All the other jobs, even the ones at the more prestigious places, were fixed-term. Or a lecturer. So they were not tenure-track. And the pay probably would have been about the same. This at least comes with that sort of like clout that comes with the tenure-track line and I was really—I've told them this—I was really impressed with the ad that they put together so it was like a 2-0-2 because we have a January term, and the classes are capped at like fourteen. And like the writing center when I got there had three people. The expectations for research, right, were so much radically different than an R1. I came in with something like "Dress Profesh" and said ya know, I do this work, and the Dean was like, "Okay, yeah. Alright, I could see this in your tenure file. Like this makes sense." And I'm like, “Okay.” Because they don't have the same kind of yardstick, there's so much freedom to do whatever I want and I feel, I know that it wouldn't be like that everywhere. And they also are the kind of place where—my first year I showed up in the summer ‘cause it's 2-0-2, right? That's Jan term, there's no summer teaching, they don't really have a lot of summer classes. Showed up in the summer for a meeting and the Dean saw me on campus and she was like, "What are you doing here? You are not on contract. You need to go home."
And I'm like, "Danielle comes in everyday" [laughs].
She’s like, “No, you need to go home. You need to go to the pool."
And I'm like, "Okay." ‘Cause the pay isn't great at all. But there is something to be said about the quality of life both in the flexibility of doing whatever you want with research and with the inherently kind of feminist, white feminist, like, ideology on a women's college campus. But like it, it's a very . . . I don't like the word “fertile,” but it's a very fertile place. So they let me do whatever I wanted with the writing center and they're like, "Well what do you want to teach?" And I'm like, "What do you mean?" And they're like—‘cause I'm in an English department and everyone is literature. English and creative writing. So there is . . . but I don't do creative writing either. So the main bulk of the department are literature faculty and they are all senior faculty and then there's me. And then they're like, "Okay, you can't teach Oscar Wilde, you can't teach Brit lit, American lit, what do you want to do?" And I'm like, “Well, have you guys heard of professional writing?" [laughs]
Which was something when I was on the job market I was told that I probably wouldn't be able to do because my work was cultural rhetorics. I wasn't professional writing [the specialization]. People see, we're all about boxes, right? And at Michigan State they problematize that in some really productive ways but still how you get read on the job market can be so black and white and they're like, "No, you do weird cultural work, you do writing center work, this is not professional writing in the way we understand capital P capital W." Because I hadn't taught that before. But at Salem I'm like, "Hey, have you heard of this thing? Let's try this." And they're like, "Okay." So we put together a minor and got it passed it in the first year, and the first cohort of minor students are going to graduate this year.
MA: Yeah!
KM: And they are amazing. So everything that I wanted to do with my research has been shaped by the time and space that a small liberal arts college has allowed and the way that . . . the ethical way that I feel that their job ad was put together. I mean it really, it's, not everyone there has a position that is I think as ethical as mine. But yeah?
So I've grown the writing center like I said from about three to nineteen. Twelve are work-study; the rest are interns from across campus. And they see it as a way to professionalize. So if you're a math major and you work at the writing center you're gonna leave with a certain set of skills and then I tell them, "It is my job to make sure you know how to talk about that in a way that will help you when you’re in a job interview."
The professional writing minor has been over the cap for the intro class, like I think I had twenty-five last year and that's a lot when your cap’s a lot lower. So . . . and then the ones who continue are less, I think there's about thirteen students but we have, we only have eight hundred traditional students. About a thousand total with adult students. About sixty to sixty-three full-time faculty. We all sit in a room for our faculty meetings and we just talk about our shit. And sometimes it's really painful and sometimes it's really ugly, but the politics of the institution live in that room with the people who are there and we actually have a chance, for me at least, I can see people talking to each other, whereas at a larger institution you never get facetime.
I met Luanna the President of Michigan State once when I won an award. I have had lunch with the President of Salem College more times than, I mean, ‘cause she's just there. The smaller version scales down to this feminist, what I see is really a feminist model of education. It's my job to give a shit. ‘Cause I only have thirty students total each semester and many of them are my staff and they all live there and—so I don't live there but my office is in the writing center so—I live with them in many ways and I've always been arguably too transparent. And so I came out my first spring that I was there as pansexual and came out as polyamorous like the following fall and I'm more out to my students than I am to my parents, so if my mom ever hears this she is going to be like, "Well, what is that. Let me google it." And then she's gonna call me. But that's fine. I'm going to talk about it tomorrow in one of my talks about how I bring these identities with me into everything that I do but especially with teaching.
At Salem, the last class that came in this first-year class was 48% students of color, 60% first-generation college students. It is really, really important to show them that you don't have to be that white dude to make it. And that you don't even have to be that white lady to make it. That you can be queer, you can be fat, you can be polyamorous, I have OCD and it is so bad at the beginning of the semesters I have physical tics, things that makes me feel better. Usually it's something small like my fingers moving together, but I tell my students usually each semester at the beginning, “I have obsessive compulsive disorder. This is a way that my body kind of copes.” This year it was my face scrunching like this, like I'm mad. And it made for a lot of uncomfortable conversations with people, and I had to keep coming out over and over and over and say, “I'm not mad at you, I promise I'm not, I can't . . .I really can't help this.” But I feel like being that kind of transparent and vulnerable with the students humanizes me in some really good ways and also makes space for the students to be okay with their own . . . their own issues, not “issues,” but their own shit.
MG: Have you had any negative consequences from being too transparent with your identification?
KM: Not yet, but I am waiting.
MG: [laughs]
KM: Right?
MG: Waiting for the shoe to drop or something?
KM: Right.
MG: Okay.
KM: I've felt that it is safe to be that transparent at a place like Salem for those students. And I've told the students, “If this were not”—what was I saying—oh we did the privilege walk in my first-year sem class and I told them, I'm like, “Part of the reason why I'm comfortable doing this with you all is because it's a women's college.” And that might be shitty of me and problematic but if this were co-ed institution I would be really uncomfortable because men can be way more challenging with these things. But the atmosphere at Salem is, I feel like it's everything that Amy, Betsy, Becca, Trixie, and Malea have tried to create in different pockets, but it's there as a place. nd not to oversell it because it has its problems but like, but like I said, you can kind of see ways to work in and around that. I would love to be a dean someday. And watching that modeled at an institution as small as Salem, I feel like has been really, really valuable ‘cause you can, it's just, "Oh hey, Susan."
Yeah, I'm sure it's coming. I’m sure. I get paranoid, you know?
MA: That was something we were especially interested to talk to you about and, youknow, both of us, well we follow you on social media and you are really transparent. Not only about those things but also about your writing processes . . .
KM: Yeah.
MA: . . . and imposter syndrome and so we, that's part of the reason we're putting this together . . .
KM: Yeah.
MA: ‘cause we do want to make people in our field who are new—maybe not new, right?—that are grappling with, all of us, I think, grapple with things like imposter syndrome and how much, how transparent am I?
KM: Yes.
MA: ‘Cause there is a risk every time you reveal something about yourself. And so I'm just curious if you have any advice to people in the field who might be feeling that way because, and I'm gonna like—this is such a long question—but the—and you can totally disagree with this . . .
KM: [laughs]
MA: . . . but I think what you said about visibility is also so incredibly important.
KM: If you don't have representation available to you, you don't know what you can become. And so I have, ya know, I joke, "Oh, I want to be the next Danielle, I want to be the next Trixie, I want to be the next Malea." And I have had students say, "I want to be the next Katie." And I'm like, “Holy fuck, you don't mean that.” [Laughs.] Here are all the reasons . . . And them I'm like . . .
MA: But you're taking that risk. Does that make sense?
KM: But to be there. Exactly.
MA: So could you give advice to people who are maybe not as naturally outspoken or transparent as you who may be feeling like, “I don't”—this is a selfish question—“I don't have a voice or maybe my voice isn't as important or maybe it's scary to say this about myself in these very public spaces.”
KM: Yeah, I think for me, and I haven't articulated this before so it might come out weird. But in the moments when you find yourself in a position of power, that's the moment to be transparent in ways that are rhetorically savvy. So I feel like I get—I don't want to make it sound like it's a ploy—but I think I feel like I get different buy-in from the students when I address mental illness. Because that's something that they connect with because this is also them. And then and really at the heart of everything I do is troubling capitalism, right. Because capitalism, and I write about this in my book, I'm writing a book by the way!
MA: Yeah, we're going to talk about that.
KM: [laughs]
MG: I was going to ask about that.
KM: Do you want to talk about imposter syndrome? And failure? Oh my god.
MG: Actually we do. [laughs]
KM: Oh my god, this is the worst thing I have, I just, I . . . There is . . . So I talk about this in the book. Like, capitalism works because things look easy. It is very anti-capitalist, it is very feminist, right, to show the shit. To show the failure, to show the hard, and I feel very grateful that I have had mentors who have shown me the ugly side of what it, the transparent side of what it looks like to make something. This class doesn't just happen, this class happens because I have all of these conversations with people, because I get my feelings hurt here, and this person gets their feelings hurt there, and oops I didn't use my privilege here and oops this person, ya know, overstepped there. It's all messy and all people see is the end result. Students see us at what is arguably our best professional self. If you have control over your curriculum, if you have control over your agenda, over your classroom, over the jokes you tell. They get to see that performance. I want them to know that that performance comes from a human being who is so insecure at the same time and is very socially anxious but takes Zoloft every day and this is why I am still here today.
Like, I guess to answer your question, like . . . It's about being rhetorically savvy about the moment, right? When . . . measuring when, if I disclose this thing about myself that I am queer or that I am an imposter, I feel like an imposter, or any of these things—if I disclose that here, what is the risk versus reward? And in many cases, it feels like a risk but the reward is way more than you would anticipate because it connects other people to you. When you see someone open up it's easier to open up, at least to them. And then the more you tell your story, the easier it is to tell. And then it becomes just a story, it feels like it's less a part of you and then you have space for something different.
Someone posted something on Facebook today that I didn't get a chance to read but the title was that professors are the new therapists. And for me transparency is both a product of that and the reason, the reason that I think a lot of students come to me to talk about things that are not related to class. And also kind of the reason that I keep doing it, because we have to keep each other alive. And even at a small school, if you don't have that community or that person or that connection, especially with mental illness . . . I've had twenty percent of my first, of the staff my first semester had to be hospitalized because they were suicidal. Like two out of ten. That's a lot of people. That's more people than we should have. I just, to be a point person for something like that makes me feel like being transparent is important.
Yeah, I guess, I don't know. I think also the transparency is a result of privilege because for all intents and purposes, I am almost a white dude. Ya know? [laughs]
MG: Well, no I disagree with that . . . So talk to us about your book.
MA: Yeah we want to hear about it.
KM: You want to know about failure? [laughs]
So no, I say it because the yardstick. The param . . .okay. I've been going to NWSA, the National Women's Studies Association Conference, for quite awhile now because they have a Fat Studies Interest Group, and I'm now the co-chair of that.
MA: Oh yeah.
KM: Yeah! So helped kind of like connect people and I like that it's interdisciplinary in many ways because at Salem, women's studies is kind of something that's kind of cobbled together by different people with interests; it's not its own set department. And I like that something like size can kind of be in all of these places at once, so. I went to NWSA, and I was talking about my dissertation, and an acquisitions editor from the University of Nebraska Press—who is lovely, right? Everything I'm going to say I just want you to know that Alicia Christensen is a lovely human being. She saw my proposal or my abstract or whatever and sent me a message and said, "Hey, this sounds like something we might want to publish in our upcoming series. Would you be interested?" So we talked and talked and talked. I'm like, "Yes, of course." And I was still finishing my dissertation. I didn't have anything really yet. But I ended up submitting sample chapters and a proposal. I had an advanced contract by the fall of my first year.
MA: Congratulations, that's amazing.
KM: And my Dean was like, "This is the golden goose."
MG: Yeah
KM: She's like, “This is great!” because I mean there aren't these very stringent, strict, rigid, structured . . . you don't need a book for tenure but this is great.
When I signed that contract they wanted the manuscript in nine months. And this is a lesson. I had been told both “never say ‘no’” and then the feminist told me, ya know, “guard your time.” But I cannot get away from the “never say ‘no.’” And so ya know I did not critically engage my community and my mentors and I said, “Yes, of course. I will get this to you in nine months.” I'm gonna have a fuckin' book. And so I went in and I redid replace all "dissertation" with "book" and sent a draft to Alicia and, “What the fuck, Katie, you know better than this. This is a completely different genre!” But I just wanted to see if maybe it was good enough! The same way, too, I did not pass any of my graduate exams on the first try. I am a very resistant student. It's great that you're telling me what to do and giving me advice; it is the opposite of what I'm going to do now. Like, that kind of thing . . . but I realize that tendency in me and I'm, I try to be more kind when people, when I have students who do the same thing. I'm like, "Well let's, let's talk about why you might feel that way." Case in point, my concentration exam, you had to do forty to seventy sources for your annotated bib; I did thirty-eight. I'm like, “They're not going to count.” What's the first thing they do? They count.
MA: [laughs]
KM: “Dear Katie, this is very disrespectful. You need to do at least the minimum amount of work for this exam. Love, the strong women on your committee.” [laughs]
MA: They're looking out for you.
KM: At the time I'm just like, “Ahhh, come on, you guys, non-gender specific use of the term ‘guys,’ come on.” But I, ya know. But you need to do at least forty at least, otherwise you don't have a deep enough understanding of the things you are talking about, and it all scaffolds and makes sense. So I have been, I am both—I don't say “no” but I also don't do the work. And I think that's part of the reason why I've been successful, which is really shitty. The same way that they talk about like—this is probably problematic and want to take this out—but like how dudes just do stuff first and think about it second. And that's how they don't overanalyze, this is very essentialized with gender right? But how men are more likely to just try something, and women will try to perfect it or overthink it before they submit anything.
I'm definitely more of the dude in this case and it makes me look flaky and it makes me look lazy and I know that [laughs] for some reason I take it really personally when I get the feedback that says, “This is absolutely terrible,” ‘cause of course it's fucking terrible. All I did was copy and replace or find and replace. But at the same time I'm also not giving myself any credit for the actual work. I didn't just find and replace; it was more than that. But I, my first year, when I said nine months, I'm like, “Okay, I'll get it to you by August at the latest,” right. And I didn't work on it at all my first year because I couldn't because you sink and you swim at the same time. You just have to get through your first year, you can't, you can't, I couldn't.
So I tried to work on it in the summer, and it was very overwhelming and I realized what my dissertation was and what this book is are two very different things. It is not even that the dissertation could be adapted into a book. It's that the dissertation was the impetus for a book. The dissertation is about rhetoric and dress. The book is about transnational feminism and how dressing and the visible self can be radical and reactionary. And how it's tied to women all across the world, right? And so it's, so it takes much more of a, of a . . . it's just different and I had to do a lot of reading and the hardest thing was figuring out what I was writing. And that takes a lot of time.
I teach this for a living. I know this, but I can't do it myself. I don't honor the process that I demand other people recognize. I demand my students recognize their writing processes. We make maps, we journal about it, we cry about it, they come to the writing center, we have candy, we just complain. ‘Cause it's a process. but when I sit down to do it with something like a book, I don't take any of that advice, and so my first summer I did the best I could. Sent fifteen thousand words to my editor and she's like, “Okay” [laughs]. “Well this is not a book yet, but here are some things. Keep working on it.”
I did more reading over my second year, and then this last summer, I hired a writing coach, and it changed my entire life. Do you know what I did? I found a writing consultant. This is, writing center pedagogy comes back; it will not leave me alone! And this is on campus now, this is what I say. At our first faculty meeting, or retreat, I'm like, “Let me tell you all why your students and you need the writing center. I do this for a living. I paid seven hundred dollars for a writing center coach.”
MG: It changed your life.
KM: It changed my life. I got more done with Julie from Ideas on Fire in seven weeks than I have done in the past two years because she talked to me about it. She's like, "What are your hold-ups? Where are you trying to do with it?" This is feminist, collaborative mentoring moment. She was not a co-author, she was not getting any sort of credit for this, but she was basically a therapist, which is what writing consultants do and what professors do and what advisors do and what feminists do, right? We listen to each other and she listened to me and we're friends now. But she . . . My life changed because I spent seven hours talking to this woman about the project and about how the project was part of me and about why it was hard for me to write it because it's overwhelming to write a sixty-thousandword book. So I ended up sending—the manuscript needs to be between forty thousand words and, like, fifty thousand words. I sent twenty thousand words to my editor but with annotations, with five hundred words here, a thousand words there that add up to forty thousand, and she saw it and she's like, “This is really exciting. Fill it in; let's get this done.” So that's . . . but I used this story because it is an inherent failure. I did not make the nine-month mark; I severely limited my ability to do this in a way that was healthy or realistic or productive, not just for myself but the people around me because of the intense guilt that I had around this. And the lessons that I learned to try to get through writing it are the things that I see my students struggle with all the time and that sort of transparency, I feel, is really useful so I can be like, “I literally know how you are feeling right now. Trust me. Don't let it cost you seven hundred dollars”the university gave me summer money and they helped pay for it or they paid for it but ya know. Like, “You have this on campus, use it. When I tell you it's a process and you have to throw everything away and start over, I mean it.” And that's . . . [sigh]. I never feel like more of an imposter than I do when I write.
MG: Mmhmm.
MA: Yeah, I would totally agree with that.
KM: Yeah.
MA: Mmhmm.
KM: I can get up here and tell you jokes and I can put on a show and most people seem to respond positively to that, but if you asked me to write down what I'm doing, everything that I know goes away, and it's because writing is so intensely personal. Even if it is something that is not about your identity or your embodied experiences, it is so personal. And that's why I like it, but it's also, I mean, yeah. I don't think the imposter syndrome will ever go away, but being able to name it—being able to name it and then to tell other people that it exists and have them see it and have that revelatory moment, and call it what it is, is like—I mean if you can't exorcise the demon, you can at least call it what it is and know that it's there and there's power in that.