The Grief of Thomas: A Sermon for Trans Day of Remembrance

“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands 

and put my finger where the nails were, 

and put my hand into his side,

I will not believe” ”

The Gospel of John 20:25

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At this is the time of the academic year, my students are turning in their second essays and revisions of their first; and before they submit their critiques, I repeat one of my axioms: write as though your audience is in pain, because most likely they are. I believe in this. Preparing my sermon for tonight, I was certain of it. Personally, I’ve felt triggered for months and every time I feel like I begin to catch my breath, another trigger goes off. It keeps happening and I can’t make it stop. For trans persons experiencing dysphoria, we exist in a constant hum of discomfort and pain, unable to settle in our bodies or environment. We have more bearable seasons, as well as seasons where its really unlivable. A year ago this time it got really bad for me. I remember 3 A.M. on election night weeping into my partner’s arm because I knew that my friends at the Trans Lifeline were overloaded with suicidal callers. November 2016 was the busiest month in the Lifeline’s existence, fielding 2,700 calls, most during the night and days following the election. Since then, a trans person has been killed every month in the United States. Then there are the perpetual government threats to exclude us from the military, bathrooms, schools, health care and civil rights protections. I think of the rash of sexual abuse and harassment claims. I think of all the trans people whose bodies are touched and investigated without cis people realizing that what they are doing is sexual harassment; how my partner, a pastor, gets asked questions about my genitals by community members. I think about the police stopping me while I was walking with my kids or sitting outside with my mom as half dozen police surrounded me with guns drawn. I think about all those who have not lived to tell such stories. I think about all the harassed, traumatized, abused, triggered, and even the dead must do to train others on how they should and should not touch our bodies. I think about all we do to reclaim these bodies. I think about the resurrected. I think about the sainted. I think about Lazarus’s tomb and Thomas’s doubts. I think about remembrance. I think about those in pain, as I write.

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Lazarus

For those who devote their lives to saving the life of others, especially those in the trans and non-binary community, the transgender day of remembrance is a testament to our failures. I feel a bit like Jesus of Nazareth when he arrived at the house of his friend Lazarus only to be told by those grieving that he had come too late. Jesus is told that if he had been there for his friend, then his friend would not have died. I can’t help but wonder if Jesus felt this too as he stood weeping on the road. But then Jesus does something miraculous. He tells them that Lazarus is not dead but only sleeping. Arriving at Lazarus’s tomb, he calls out, “Lazarus, come out.” Then from apparent death, Lazarus emerges from his tomb. On this day, I wish I had the power to bring back the dead. Each and every name listed today deserves that. We crave that. But none of us here have that power. Yet, I think about the famous movie line that goes, “there is a big different between all dead and mostly dead.” All dead, there is nothing we can do, but “mostly dead means partially alive and that we can work with.” In that case, I believe there is something we can do.

Because I do feel we have a Lazarus present here tonight; someone who feels like they are dead but may only be asleep, someone whose spirit wanders away from the body but who yet might live again, someone whose body may have become a tomb awaiting the call, “Lazarus come.” I dedicate this sermon to any Lazarus out there, someone who has come to the tomb today to be awakened from your death and slumber, to be resurrected and remember what it is to be alive. The work of resurrection is hard and will not be accomplished in one night but we may consider the ways in which our bodies are taken, the ways we may remember and return to those bodies, the ways we survive and embrace bodies that have been broken, and finally the ways that those who have passed beyond the vale and cannot be called back, those sainted dead, might still be speaking to us through their relics and stories to share the power in which they now rest.

I know there is at least one Lazarus here, because on the trans day of remembrance I often feel a sense of surprise and the thought, “I am not dead yet.” Whereas pride or shame would focus on the “not dead,” the emphasis in my own heart is on the “yet.” That terrible word, “yet,” is a weariness felt in the heart of many oppressed peoples. That word speaks of an expectation and a surprise at our own perseverance that is not our own but has found its way into our hearts. We learn this word, “yet,” from a world that expects this list of names each year. I hold back from saying that the world demands this list of names each year, like a quota. Because even if is true that in various ways the world DOES demand our non-existence, I cannot fully accept that reality out of a resistance to cynicism. What I can fully believe is that this list of names is something the world expects insofar as our deaths are accounted into the yearly breakage spreadsheets. Transgender death is part of the accepted cost of doing business, keeping this corporation of gender binaries, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and classism going.

This measurement of one’s own existence in relation to “not dead yet” is a sign of what is called slow-death. Slow-death describes populations that we actively or passively expect to die. Now, of course, we all die. But except for the more depressive or Goth among us, we don’t regularly expect most people to die. We know it but we don’t expect it. We don’t expect a white able-bodied cisgender child to die. We expect to varying degrees the elderly to die, even those who aren’t sick. We expect the sick to die. We expect the disabled to die, even those who aren’t sick. We expect the poor to die more than the sick. This doesn’t mean we want them to die, but we aren’t surprised when they do and may be surprised when they don’t. This is slow death. Death is only one of the worst outcomes of slow-death. The other danger is not death but unlife or undeath, the state of being the living dead. Slow death creates undead by killing the soul even while life persists, like Lazarus asleep in his pit, yearning for remembrance and resurrection.

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Thomas

When we struggle with our bodies and remembrance, I think of the story of Thomas and his need to not just see the Risen Christ but to feel him. John recalls how Thomas, one of the Twelve, was not there when Christ first appears to the disciples after the resurrection. Thus when others tell him, “We have seen the Lord!” Thomas cannot process this. Thomas gets called the doubter, assuming him to be a sort of empiricist or materialist when he says, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” But maybe Thomas’s demand for touch is more than this. We are not told why he is not there. Maybe Thomas was like Lazarus, asleep in his grief, dysphoria, and slow death. He might have been physically present but not all there. When grief or dysphoria has taken us from our bodies, we may need positive touch to recall and remember our bodies.

Scientists have learned what victims of abuse and oppression, as well as those who’ve experienced systemic abuse, the inherited trauma of slavery, the horrors of the holocaust have long felt, that prior to our physical deaths, our brains shut down, our spirits leave, to avoid that hurt that would do more than kill us, it would obliterate our souls. These are incredibly hard moments to remember because there is a reason that our spirits fly away from it, there is a reason we feel like living ghosts, because the pain of those moments are so great that our minds shut down. In the face of these deaths and stolen bodies, when our friends say, “We have seen the Lord,” our hesitancy may be a refusal of platitudes. When we grieve, it may not be enough to say, “they are alive in heaven now.” Because more than wanting to be told, we want to feel them in our arms, to hold them again. Thomas is missing his friend Jesus and nothing short of embracing his friend again will do. Amidst grief, trauma and hurt, it is not enough that our minds recall events, our bodies must be retrained and the connection between body and soul reformed.

Like Thomas, touch as a form of remembrance is important to me, especially when I feel myself pulled out of my body. This feeling is called dysphoria. Dysphoria occurs the gender folk assign to me conflicts with my gender identity. My family has been trained to notice when something triggers my dysphoria. Someone at work keeps calling me “he,” and I may not correct them because mentally I may not even be in the room. My spirit has begun to wander somewhere else out of self-defense. It happens nearly every time I take a flight. It is a fact that the TSA as a collective party has touched my genitals more than most of my lovers. I don’t want them to touch me but others depend on my traveling for work. And so, they fondle my body while meanwhile my mind is floating somewhere outside the flesh. I don’t know how this looks from the outside. Do my eyes glaze over? Does my body sag without a spirit to hold it alert? I don’t know because I’m not there. Each time my soul wanders, it takes effort to pull it back into my body.

It took years of intentional and intense effort to begin to feel like my body was a home for my spirit. In this work, touch has great power for remembrance. Thus, I have a need to write, take photos, and collect little trinkets. When my brain can’t hold all the information, objects hold the burden of remembrance for me. What are the objects that recall you back to yourself when your spirit wanders? Is it a certain skirt or sweater? Is it a bath bomb or candle? Is it a teddy bear or a beloved pet? Is it your partner squeezing your hand or your child crawling into your lap? For many of us, the work of remembrance is done by an assortment of objects and people, images and practices. In times of crisis, many of these will no longer be enough. In times of death and dying, we may find ourselves driven to find new and greater kinds of touch to remember us to our bodies. For Thomas, this meant being able to touch the friend he grieved. Some call this being skeptical, I call this being hurt. I call this an expression of a need that may sound silly to others but to us is the difference between life and death, remembrance and oblivion.

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Posted by Leelah Alcorn 12/22/2014

Captioned: "Transitioning. I Love How Literal This Is 

and How You Get a Sense of the Pain It Takes"

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The Resurrected

What happens, however, when those who are hurting need help from those who are hurt? What about the trans persons working the Trans Lifeline? What about tonight? This is the model of love that Christ offers in response to Thomas. “Peace be with you!” says Jesus on his next return, and then to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side.” On the surface, this is an object lesson on the resurrection of the body. But when one considers grief and death, the act takes on an intimate tone. Christ has just suffered dying and death. Christ retains the material remembrance of hurt. When Christ approaches Thomas, he is not only making his life and resurrection known to him, he is making his death and pain known to him as well. Christ models for us what it means for those who have come out of the tomb to help others remember life by making ourselves available and vulnerable for one another, to let others touch our pain so we may overcome our dysphoria and divisions.

Why we need the resurrected to help us resurrect us, why Lazarus and Thomas needed the words and touch of Jesus, is evident to the trans community in these times of remembrance. I remember friends in the trans community walking away exhausted and raw from online and offline conversations after another name gets added to our list for remembrance. I remember how in our hurt we sought each other out and how in our hurt we sometimes hurt each other. This is what it means to be in a traumatized and abused community. We must be very tender with each other because we ourselves are very tender. I recall the trust and vulnerability we share. I think about “the Origin of Love” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch: “You had a way so familiar, / But I could not recognize, / Cause you had blood on your face; / I had blood in my eyes. / But I could swear by your expression / That the pain down in your soul / Was the same as the one down in mine. / That's the pain, / Cuts a straight line, / Down through the heart; / We called it love.”

Love is dangerous and love is powerful. Love is a risk that may bring resurrection or death. Christianity has learned this lesson. Christianity is full of traditions that involve materially and spiritually of the broken and dying communing with the broken and dead: drinking the blood and eating the body of a dead and resurrected God, touching the bones of saints, washing in the waters of baptism as a sign of our collective death and rebirth, holding hands as we say millennia old prayers. Christianity is a religion of touch. This is why abusive touch in the Church is such a crisis. Because if we cannot trust to touch, then we lose a critical point of access in our faith. By touch we might resurrect the dead, but by abusive touch we might pluck souls from the flesh as we steal their bodies. Those who are wounded may not be in a place where they can help heal others, indeed, we who are hurting may hurt others. But there is a saying in ethics, “anything with power is dangerous.” Touch has the power to steal souls and resurrect them.

Our need and offers for material remembrance must be made with greatest care and love. We must appreciate what we ask of one another, when we ask for vulnerability. We must write and speak as though our audience is in pain, because most likely they are. We must also appreciate what we ask of one another, when we make ourselves vulnerable. The instruction, “put your finger here; see my hands,” or “reach out your hand and put it into my side” may be a gift which brings about resurrection and remembrance. Such demands might also cause further harassment and trigger our traumas. Love is a dangerous game that can mean the difference between life and death. This is the game Christ plays again and again. This is the game Christians are asked to imitate. When someone asks for healing touch like Thomas or someone asks on their behalf, such as Lazarus, this makes themselves vulnerable. This offer may be a form of consent but that position of power may quickly be abused. In this work, remembering our deaths may make us more compassionate and careful as we help others remember their life.

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The Sainted

To conclude, I return to those I started discussing when I referred to the difference between the mostly dead and the all dead. I ask, is there really nothing we can do for those who are all dead? What about those who don’t walk out of Lazarus’s tomb or into Thomas’s upper room? How might we care for and remember our dead? In my work on death and dying in the trans community, I’ve seen many ways that people respond to the death of our trans siblings. I see people cut the hair of trans girls and bury them in a men’s suit. I see people put a trans boy to rest under a stone engraved with their deadname. I’ve also seen people tell the life story of the deceased, using names and pronouns they demanded in life. I’ve also seen people make icons of the deceased, decorated with wings and halos, emblazoned with inscriptions like “His Name Was Zander” and “Rest in Power.” What is the difference between “resting in peace” and “resting in power,” I wonder? I think of these icons and how as a medievalist I can’t help but imagine saints.

People often misunderstand and misuse the word saint. I think about the powerful but misleading lyric from Hamilton, “death does not discriminate between the sinners and the saints, it just takes and it takes, and it takes. But we keep living anyway. We rise and we fall and we make our mistakes. And if there is a reason [we] are still alive, then I’m willing to wait for it.” This sentiment that saints are somehow opposed to sinners I think is wrong. Saints were human with human faults. The word saint does not signify those without sin. The word saint means to set apart. One does not become a saint by choice, one becomes sainted by others. A saint is someone set apart by a marginalized society, targeted, alienated, isolated, even killed. A saint is someone who was discarded by the world but has been remembered and reclaimed. Death does discriminate against a saint like it discriminated against Mesha Caldwell from Canton, Mississippi on January 4th, 2017 or Jojo Striker from Toledo, Ohio, on February 8th, 2017.

Death does discriminate and saints teach us that remembrance can discriminate as well. According to reports, Ally Lee Steinfeld is one trans sister whose death on September 21st 2017, in Licking, Missouri, makes clear the connection between our murders and our erasure. Her killer took such pains to make the world forget her that I cannot but help but remember her: “Ally was stabbed, including wounds to the genitals. Her eyes were also gouged out. Her body was burned in an attempt to conceal evidence of the crime, and some of Ally’s bones were put into a garbage bag placed in a chicken coop near the residence.” Some people try to forget our trans family by taking away the means for awakening and material remembrance. Death and oblivion does discriminate and so life and remembrance must as well. We must remember those who are told to forget, including people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, the aged, and those victims from other countries or parts of our country marked by isolation and poverty.

Death does take and take and take, and that’s why we can’t just keep living anyway. Life and love has to keep taking and taking, reclaiming and resurrecting the dead and forgotten. We cannot merely wait for a reason that we are still alive, by remembering our fallen trans siblings, we begin to feel the difference between resting in peace and resting in power. As Hamilton also says, we may, “have no control, who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” But we may have control whose stories we tell, whose lives we tell, whose deaths we tell. Because even now, I know what it means for someone else to tell my story, describe my body, imagine my life and death, in ways I cannot control. I know what it means to trust someone else with my body, my hurt, my memory, and my story. Remembering means re-membering our community as we lose our members to dying and death. We reach into death and oblivion to reclaim our saints. Re-membering means taking up the membership and flag of those who have fallen. Remembering means sharing each other’s pain and so also remembering and sharing each other’s power.

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This sermon was delivered by Dr. Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski

from Case Western Reserve University

as part of the Transgender Day of Remembrance 

at the Connecticut Conference Center of the United Church of Christ 

on 20 November, 2017.

#TransLivesMatter

The Trans Lifeline
877.565.8860

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America's Racism Translator: A Lesson Plan in Code-Switching

“Part of what he talked about was a 'war on crime' 
but that was one of those code-words... 
which really was referring to the black political movements of the day...
the anti-war movement, 
the movements for women's liberation and gay liberation”

James Kilgore
Ava DuVernay dir., 13th

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The Presentations

Scenario: 

You are pitching a sketch based on the popularity of Obama's Anger Translator and adapted to address the way in which media as well as politicians often speak in code on issues that reflect or deepen racial inequalities in order to make them more palatable to an audience sensitive to overt racism. Your overall premise has been approved but the producers need a pilot that demonstrates how the new show "Racial Translations" would work. Together, you and your teach of four will research, write, and perform the short sketch for a test audience.

Task:

For this pilot sketch, in 6-8 minutes, your team of four will present a back and forth between two sides, one using language and rhetoric that strategically de-emphasizes racist components of the programs and one side translating that language to demonstrate how the message and systems presented participate in racial divides and inequality. While the inspiration, "Obama's Anger Translator," is intentionally comedic, this program may choose to move in a more measured and serious tone. In any case, avoid yelling racist language even for comedic effect.

Requirements:

In order to communicate the translation clearly, the translation should be broken down into two main points. Point 1 will be presented in code and then the same point will be code-switched by another presenter. Then Point 2 will be presented in code, followed likewise by a translation. All the points should connect in some way to the code-switching exemplified in the documentary, 13th, which the audience will all be familiar with and which will serve as a common point of comparison. Because this is a test audience and pilot, it is important that viewers can understand the sketch and its purpose. To make the connections and goals clear, bring in print out with names, time stamps where the points relate to the film 13th, and a script or list of main points. In response, the test audience will provide feedback at the rate of at least one comment from each of the other teams presenting pilots on the same day.

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The Example

In the film, 13th, directed by Ava DuVernay in 2016, offers numerous examples of how media and politicians make statements as well as laws that avoid language connected with overt racial inequalities but could be translated to demonstrate how they drive wedges between peoples to the seeming benefit of white communities but at the expense of people of color. Being able to translate such code-speech is critical to see through the ways in which racism has been enacted covertly, avoiding specific terms that signal the intent and effects that come into making such laws.

A key example of this code-switching occurs in a scene that samples President Nixon's former aid, John Ehrlichman, admitting to Dan Baum from Harper's Magazine how they employed "Law and Order" or "Anti-Drug" language and laws aimed at isolating and undermining progressive movements and people of color.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

In this interview, the campaign director effectively acts of his own racial translator. He demonstrates how code-switching racist laws and prejudiced practices into "law and order" language would bring communities on board without having to admit to the racial inequalities being enacted.

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The Outcome

Overall the code-switching exercise was a success across numerous pedagogical lines. Because students were modeling their translations off of the information presented in the film 13th, student's work demonstrated a higher level of engagement and close-reading. While there was some overlap, with some more startling or easy to translate points being picked up by multiple grounds, each group had to do their own digging beneath the surface and research. The result was more of the film 13th was covered than would have been possible within a single collective series of close-readings.

Second, the project forced students to apply critical thinking when close-reading. Because code-switching is as much about what is NOT being said as it is about what words are being used, students had to think creatively and critically to logically fill in the blanks. The ability to understand the multiple meanings of words and rhetorical moves is key to any close-reading exercise whether the text is a poem, a film, or a piece of legislation.

Third, to fill in the blanks students were forced to do additional research beyond what was explicitly presented in the film 13th. Students looked into specific laws as well as the different ways they have been interpreted by lawyers, politicians, and civil rights groups. The ability to transfer the knowledge in class and bring these insights to the outside world is an essential part of any seminar but especially one concerned with critiquing racism and white supremacy. Such massive and long standing networks exist beyond what can be covered in one semester, so students need to become skilled at doing research and seeing the code-switching going on all around them.

Finally, it may seem like a very particular element of the wider lesson but forcing students to deal with the problems in claiming or seeking to be "color-blind" and unable to see race or racism. Just because explicit racial and/or racist thought may not be used does not mean that various assumptions and systematic inequities are not still being enacted. By the end of the exercise, students came to appreciate the need to be able to identify and translate racism even in instances where there has been an intention effort to obfuscate issues of race in the classroom or government.

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White Supremacy and Medieval Studies: A Lesson Plan

“This is a watershed moment that, if used productively, 

will make medieval studies home to an intellectual environment 

that is sustainable and innovative, promotes risk-taking, 

and leverages an ever greater number of experiences 

and scholarly lenses in order to build the most comprehensive body 

of knowledge about the Middle Ages possible”

Collective Statement by the Medievalists of Color

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The Presentations

Scenario:

You work at the University of Virginia. Over the weekend, a collection of white supremacist groups (including the KKK, Neo-Nazis, and White Nationalists) hold a large scale demonstration at which various medieval symbols, weapons and armor, chivalric romances, slogans, stories and histories are presented in support of the claims of the demonstration. Significant public outcry, including investors and alumni of the university, demand a public response from the university. Key members of the university administration invite you and your cohort of scholars in as experts to advise them, specifically on the role of medieval history, literature, religion, and art in issues of race and white supremacy.

Task:

The head of your department has charged you to give a 15-minute presentation to the classroom of administrators in which you articulate an argument that answers the question, “what is the role of medieval studies in regards to white supremacy?” They have made it clear that “no role” is not an answer the university can give to the public or its big donors.

Requirements:

To make your point clear, you are advised to use every member of your group, each speaking for 2 minutes; although different experts may focus on a different part of the presentation.

Together you will present a clear argument which states what the problem is, how medieval studies may be used to answer the problem, and a clear rationale for how this may be done.

Resources and Course Engagement:

To legitimize and illustrate your position, you will use a total offour quotations taken from a stack of books your department head believes will be useful. As a fan of John Mandeville, the department head insists you use two quotations from his book of travels. The other two quotations must then be taken from one of the remaining books (The King of Tars: Introduction, The Aryan Myth, or selections from Arthurian Romances). While the administrators are educated and well read, you are told that they would benefit from these passages being clearly explained and their context in the text given. You have been warned that there may be skeptics and people unfamiliar with the issue, so your department head has insisted that you spend 5-7 minutes of your allotted time to engage the room of administrators in a wider discussion. The goal is to get people to think critically and passionately about the issue on the table and the proposed role of medieval studies in dealing with the stated problem. While you may take a variety of methods to spur discussion, you are advised to prompt dialog about how personal experiences affirm and inform the argument at hand or perhaps engage the room in a game or task which will make them think more critically about the topic at hand and see the value of the proposed position.

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The Readings 

In preparation for the lesson, students will have read a variety of texts, drawn from historical, literary, and pedagogical studies, related to the long history of white supremacy. Uniting all of these divergent readings was the statement by the Medievalists of Color in response to how simmering white supremacist trends in Medieval Studies have been flaring up in recent months amidst a national rash of overt calls for white nationalism and historicism. This statement situated the importance of the exercise and seminar by relating course discussions to current and real conflicts in the professional world. While scholarship by medievalists of color informed the readings of the other texts on the syllabus, the statement presented a key example of the important perspectives and contributions of medievalists of color in the work of medieval studies and debates on/with white supremacy.

Some of these texts demonstrate how history has been constructed in ways that present a white supremacist narrative about how European/Aryan/Frank communities formed in response to threats from people that became marked by color (especially blackness). Framing these texts, an overview of the Crusades demonstrates the myriad of ways that a unified identity (white, Christian, Latin, Frankish) emerged out of a discordant collective of national and class interests in response to propaganda that identified the various Muslim states in the Middle East as a single "enemy" that demands a unified response in order to keep at bay and push back. Individual local accounts of alliances and peaceful relations between and within diverse religious communities before, during, and after the Crusades further complicates the problematic belief that the Crusades represent a single monolithic white Christianity in opposition to a single monolithic black Muslim force. Within the context of the Crusades, students begin to see how dialectic forces of conflict work to construct identity through the division and manipulation of history.

The King of Tars

Selections of medieval literature, including the King of Tars and Arthurian Chivalric Romances featuring the Knight Sir Palamedes, show how the construction of white Christian identity against the "black knights" of Islam in the late era of the Crusades was frought with contradictions and patterns of arbitrary and problematic associations. Students were struck by how the King of Tars tells the story of a growing non-Christian neighbor seeking to claim white Christian women and land but who are turned back and transformed by a conversion from black to white and Muslim to Christian. By close reading the text and the useful Introduction, students immediately began commenting how attributes that are overtly associated with blackness (non-Christian identity, deception, madness, hyper-sexuality, greed, violence and changeability) are all attributes that the white Christians exhibit throughout the Tale. They wondered if the text intentionally told one narrative through overt statements and another contradictory narrative through the subtle details, or if the text unintentionally tries to assert a racial and religious identity by arbitrarily dividing attributes which are otherwise ubiquitous across these supposedly essential differences. 

Sir Palamedes

By reading the earliest account of Sir Palamedes, students begin to see how the "Saracen" is defined as a point of contrast for the white Christian knight, Sir Tristan. Not only do the two knights find themselves often in literal battle, but Palamedes primarily functions in the early texts as competition in the pursuit of Lady Iseult. As such, white identity becomes defined as a defense of white Christian women from the over-sexualized threat by black men. Interestingly, almost immediately after the creation of Sir Palamedes as a non-Christian character in the Arthurian mythos, a storyteller develops a tale of Palamedes conversion to Christianity. Despite this anxiety about Palamede's faith identity, later authors tended to focus on the Saracen knight as a non-Christian. An example of how Palamedes was more interesting to medieval authors as a foil to the white Christian knight, Tristan, occurs in the Death of Arthur, where the white and black knights engage in a game of exchanging clothing. Throughout a tournament, Tristan and Palamedes change the colors of their armors, therefore swapping identities several times, confusing expectations. The effect of these exchanges is that readers have their associations between color, race, and faith identity undermined. Like the drag ball performances we would later watch in Paris is Burning, this shell-game of clothing demonstrate how the associations that contribute to racial and faith identities are culture constructs with contradicting histories and trajectories.

The Aryan Myth by Leon Poliakov

The Aryan Myth is one such historical investigation that demonstrates the many successive attempts by historians to locate an origin for white nationalism, often competing with other cultures and histories for who get to claim authentic "whiteness," contrasting the Franks and the Gallic people, the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans. The author, Leon Poliakov, demonstrates through the waves of historicism how the writing of history changed alongside political and national identities currently under construction in ascendant politics. At certain moments, the Frankish identity was hailed as the root of white civilization amidst a savage Gaul. Other years, Gallic identity rose as a rallying point for nativistic nationalism that resisted Roman and later Frankish foreign conquest. The meta-narrative of these "Myths of Origin" goes further than mere play of thesis and antithesis to push towards a synthesis that discredits the goal of discovering a single white national heritage by acknowledging the arbitrariness of the features identified as constituting these peoples as racially distinct as well as the inability to full distinguish one people from another amidst a region that was always already intermixed and interconnected.

The Book of John Mandeville

Trying all these texts together, because students were also reading the Book of John Mandeville during the week of presentations, the travels of this imagined pilgrim seemed to respond to and weave together many of their themes. Overall, students seemed to interpret Mandeville either as a positive counter-example, citing the many places that the author seems to praise non-Christians, or as a synthetic compromise, focusing on sections where the author insists on his Christian construction of identity yet also acknowledges that these peoples he visits may also have perspectives of their own that undermine the stability that either position is the absolute objective truth. In particular, students tended to quote the selection of the Book where Mandeville observes that for these non-Christians, blackness is not evil but good because as people of color they do not regard their comparatively dark complexion as a negative. Indeed, Mandeville notes, from such a perspective angels would be black and devils would be white. Of course, what does not occur to Mandeville in this section is that non-Christians might not be engaging in the same racializing rhetoric as them that emphasizes color in order to assert divisions. He assumes the game of color and racial difference are a common agreed upon conflict.

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The Outcomes

Every class has its own dynamics, leading to a variety of outcomes from this lesson plan. Following recent white supremacist events, students began the semester shaken and less than confident in their ability to discuss issues of racism. Questions posed in class would frequently be responded to with equivocation, as epitomized by the statement, "I don't want to say the wrong thing." Over time, students became more comfortable talking with me as the mediator in a conversation which would pop-corn/ping-pong back and forth. Yet they remained taciturn towards each other. Even in small groups, there was a tension between randomly assigned sets. Going into this lesson plan, a central goal was to get the students comfortable with teaching each other and listening to each other. Overall, the lesson plan follows the "reverse-classroom" format of teaching that does just this. The stated outcomes of the lesson was then focused on engagement: everyone's voice being heard, argumentative stances being taken, active listening to and responding to other groups, and an evidentiary approach to the topic which grounds these encounters within the wider parameters of the course and the specific section on the role of medieval studies in dealing with the new and old traditions of white supremacy.

In the case of my seminar, the lesson plan was effective at prompting engagement. Voices were given center stage that had been silent for most the semester. In a seminar on race and white supremacy, there can be tensions in the classroom between students that can lead to white men doing more of the talking and women of color doing more of the listening. For our class, the lesson shook up many of the class's dynamics. Furthermore, students were pushed to take an ethical stance and get over their instinct to "not say anything wrong." This reflected on how students had grown more connected to the subject, breaking some out of an expressed apathy on the subject matter. When challenged to find a way to feel invested in the subject, participants in the reverse-classroom rose to the occasion. Students built their confidence and cases by close reading the texts in interesting and sometimes surprising ways. The diverse ways people read John Mandeville as proto-colonial, post-Crusader, or as a compromise between extreme positions sparked discussions between groups. While tensions in the class remain, the dynamics have shifted. Not everyone in the class is yet comfortable speaking up to everyone else but everyone is now doing more of the talking as well as the listening. Overall, a sense of "responsibility" and the "role" of participants in academic discussions has moved from a background frame to function more as an active ethos of the seminar.

In the end, this lesson plan may just be a jumping off point for other classes. Your seminars may have different dynamics and challenges. Certainly, other course readings and discussions would change the content of the discussions. Likewise, contexts other than those of Fall 2017 would prompt other questions and places of emphasis. Yet overall, I hope these lesson notes prove helpful as you organize your own classroom discussions on white supremacy and medieval studies!

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The Reverend and Doctor Are Getting Married: All are Welcome! Save the Date 18 February 2018

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Save the Date

The Marriage Ceremony 

of the Reverend Rachel J. Bahr

and Dr. Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski

will occur on 

18 February 2018

at First Congregation Church

in Southington, CT

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Love is not something that occurs in isolation but grows out of the light and life in the community. You are a critical part of our life story. That is why we are excited to invite you to our wedding ceremony on 18 February 2018 (easy to remember: it's 2/18 of 2-18) at the First Congregational Church of Southington, CT. The marriage ceremony will be an interfaith service that reflects the spiritual roots of our family, combining the influences of Roman Catholicism and the United Church of Christ. The service will also acknowledge that our families and communities extend beyond the church, including people from many traditions as well as those who find meaning outside of religion. Please feel welcome to attend as we bless our marriage and our diverse communities.

The ceremony is open to everyone. An open reception will follow immediately afterwards in Memorial Hall for members of the church community.

Guests from out of town will receive invitations for a reception later in the evening, although all are welcome to come prior and meet our wonderful church family!

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More information can be found

on our wedding website:

www.theRevAndDr.com

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Pedagogies of Survival: Teaching Trauma in Traumatizing Times

“Here begynnyth a schort tretys and a comfortabyl 

for synful wrecchys, wherin

thei may have gret solas and comfort”

The Book of Margery Kempe

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Compassion and Comfort

I ask only that we feel together for a time. I cannot tell you to imitate my method. I cannot tell you to imitate my feelings. I cannot fix this, these traumas new and old. I ask only that you listen for a time to my feelings and you feel your feelings alongside mine. If something I feel resonates with you, perhaps the sympathies will better us and strengthen us. I blush to say that our compassions, our feeling-together, may comfort us. By comfort I mean that fortification that being-together can give to those it connects. Comfort embiggens us so that we might together face the traumas which might crush us alone. Somehow, the comfort of feeling-together makes us a one that is more than two, yet bigger than one alone. I seek comfort that I might offer comfort, something I do not have on my own. I ask that we feel together because the feelings come without my asking, because I cannot ignore or avoid the feelings and so they must be faced. The seminar must go on, students and teachers must go on. Yet, how do we do this, yet remember as Edutopia does, "When Students Are Traumatized, Teachers Are Too." Many of us need more than a "pedagogy of trauma" but also "a pedagogy of survival" that will not only instruct our students but assist in a collective reclamation of life, power, and self.

This past week has been a representative embodiment of much of the work I struggle with this semester and other times in my work as a scholar, mother, and activist. This past week I have been tasked to teach trauma in a traumatic time to traumatized students. I take one this task as someone who has also struggled with trauma. How do I teach a seminar, "Beyond Male and Female: Histories of Transgender and Non-Binary Gender," discussing how bodies are stolen, imprisoned in mental hospitals, subjected to abusive conversion therapy, and pressed towards suicide in Dylan Scholinski's memoir, The Last Time I Wore a Dress? Can you possibly engage pain that students in the class not only understand but have experienced, and still feel? How do I teach my seminar, "Racism and Human Diversity: Medieval Narratives of Blackness," discussing how the trauma of slavery meets the horror of sexism in the stealing of bodies in Beloved by subjugation, rape, and torture? If each lesson plan has an arc, a beginning, middle, and end, where is it that I can bring my students? Certainly we do not live in a world without the ghosts and illness of white supremacy, racism, sexism, and their thieveries. And the text does not offer any such wholesale escape or escapism. There is liberation, there is hope, there is exorcism, but the scars and pain remains. I cannot tell the students how to fix trauma, where they might run to flee racism, how they might undo the knots of sexism and rape. I can offer them what teachers (including Dylan Scholinski and Toni Morrison) have taught me: how to survive, how to leave, and how to reclaim what has been taken, broken, killed. Yet this requires us to feel where and when we are, to feel where we and others have been, to feel together and find some strength which we might call comfort.

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Trigger Warnings

My students are tired, so tired, and the trauma we must discuss and share is triggering of wounds that have not scabbed. The rape, suicide, torture, death, and abuse of racism, gender, and disability that our texts ask us to feel-with is so heavy and our students are already carrying so much. The hope is that, even if the texts cannot lighten our loads, at least they can give strength through a shared affect and struggle. Yet these connects are hard and demand what Morrison calls a thick sort of love. These are connections that happen at the point of wounds and scars. When students ask to leave the room, I commend their self-preservation and self-care. When they return, I am grateful for their compassion. These are the skills that students have learned to survive trauma. These are good skills. These are lessons we need to share and on which we are trying to build. Comfort may help us survive but it is no guarantee. Some of us may break under the strain. These are the stakes of our learning about trauma and survival, these are the costs, and these are our hopes. Some view "trigger warnings" as extraneous to teaching, even antithetical to teaching because it seems to offer our students an "out" from dealing with difficult learning. I don't see warnings that way. I see the warning a part of the lesson. I see the warning as part of thinking about trauma. I see the warning as part of survival. I see the lesson as part of this survival. This is the lesson Denver learns in Beloved: if one can leave, sometimes one must leave. Students do not leave class because they are experiencing the lesson on trauma any less but because they are experiencing the trauma and the lesson that much more.

A dilemma in teaching about trauma is that trauma rarely exists within a discreet period of time or along a linear temporal frame. Trauma is less like a line than an organic vine with recursive bends back toward the points of unresolved hurt, away from points of pain, and run all through with a twisting anxiety. As instructors, we teach our students to be ever conscious about context, and so we must also be. This is another way that "trigger warnings" may serve as more than a deterrent or excuse. Trigger warnings is a way of acknowledging that traumas we have experienced may not be over simply because we have been able to show up to class. This week, as we discuss the KKK, slavery, the persistence of racism and its damage, white supremacists are once again marching. This week, as we discuss transphobia, the systematic isolation and exclusion of transgender, and the despair unto death felt by trans and other non-binary persons, the federal government works to take away job protections for non-cisgender persons. This week, as we discuss rape and the abuse of women, the same federal government makes it harder for such women (all women) to reclaim agency over their bodies and sexualities. This week, as we discuss violence and the hate that will not die, a mass shooting kills several dozens and harms countless. Do we offer our students escape and refuge? Or do we offer them a place to rally and resist? What if some students desperately need the former and other students are eager for the latter? What if we, the instructors, are feeling crushed under the weight our times? Our times can be poignant reminders of the lingering significance of texts and histories that may be decades or centuries old. Our times can also leave us speechless, unable to think or argue because we feel so much. Some lessons are meant to transport us somewhere, lead us to some conclusion. Some lessons are meant to help us sit exactly where we are, when we are, and help us to exist and survive together. Sometimes, a lesson is successful not because of what students walked away with but because students (and ourselves) were able to walk away.

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The Lessons that Don't Happen

This sum of trauma may be that the best lesson plan is sometimes the lesson that does not happen. There is power is being able to consider the people in the room, consider the time and context of the room, to consider the instructor in the room, and then change the lesson. What are some of these changes? What lessons emerge when we let go of the classes that won't happen? (Lesson 1) Students have more power than they may know. I have had classes where I've worked to help my students understand trauma in a text. Other times students understand this trauma uneasily well and the lesson becomes learning with them how to survive. Showing our students that we can change, change our directions, change our locations, change our plans, is a way of teaching them the lesson that things don't have to be this way. We have the power to adapt, evolve, respond to our environments. By listening to the students in the room, we teach (or remind) them about their own power. (Lesson 2) Remind students its okay to think with their feelings. At the start of my seminars, I tell my students that nearly all my classes teach the same three lessons but in importantly distinct forms, embodiments, and contexts: how to perceive power dynamics, how to affect/effect power, and how to wrestle with the ethics of power. Understanding that emotions are key to how social power functions and is manipulated, and affective well being is essential to ethical considerations, is a lesson students do not get enough. By acknowledging the struggle of working through pain and fear as well as the ethical role of compassion and comfort, we place our student's experiences in the center of a class, not somehow outside them at an impossible objective and amoral distance. (Lesson 3) The classroom is not the only place where learning and growth can happen. Again, sometimes the best lesson is the lesson not given, when we teach our students about the power to turn a class day into a mental health day: to get sleep, to take a long lunch, to lighten a crushing work load, to find comfort in their own way. As Edutopia succinctly writes, "Brains in Pain Cannot Learn." This may feel like giving up, giving students the day off, but in our humility we are reminding students of their own power to survive, enact self-care, and learn. 

In the end, a pedagogy of survival is not a lesson plan I can set in advance or summarize for those looking to imitate it. Trauma is like a cancer, a form of life that grows and changes. Likewise, survival requires adaptability and transformation in response to classroom environments and the lives that populate them. The lesson is to be able to let go of our lesson plans when our students and circumstances change. This does not mean that there are no ways forward. There are many ways forward. Which ways is best for you and your students greatly depends on who you are, where you are, when you are teaching, and what we all bring to the classroom. On each of my seminars, I ended the last class of the week by compiling lists of ways in which we can reclaim our power, our lives, and survive. We drew from their experiences and the text's offerings. Among the list was the comfort of writing, the comfort of reading, the comfort of sharing one's feelings with another. In its own way, this is a function or hope of www.ThingsTransform.com. This is a corner of the internet where we may share a corner of our minds and hearts. For that, I thank you. Thank you for feeling-together with me for a time. I do not know what it is you felt but knowing you are there gives me some comfort. Sitting alongside my self, I am not sure what lesson I walk away with, but I am grateful that tonight I can walk away from my work, leave it here, and go engage with the things that transform me.

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