Compulsory affect

I'm not one for bumper stickers or slogans. As a child of the '80s I did once have a number of buttons festooning jacket and backpack, but they were never a means of aligning myself with this cause or that. In fact, the one bumper sticker I really wanted to put on the family automobile, circa 1992, was a vintage one reading "The Nation Needs Nixon." That probably tells you everything you need to know about how I felt then, and still do feel, about people who think their politics need to be legible to every person they meet.

For this reason, I tend to stay away from social media on days like today. The constant demand for--and policing of--expressions of joy, outrage, or mourning is my least favorite thing about Facebook and Twitter. I mean, yeah: I may be shocked and saddened about something that happened, but if all I have to say is "oh no" or "can't believe the news," how is that useful? And though I do re-post opinion pieces that I find interesting or well-expressed, I try to stay away from mere venting or emoting ("how can people take this seriously??" or "SO HAPPY about the Supreme Court decision!").

Partly it's that I wish to avoid banality, and partly it's that I don't want to be reducible to a position or a set of beliefs. But it's also that I'm uncomfortable with the idea that I might be seen as performing my politics in a self-congratulatory way or in order to get credit for thinking the right thoughts. Most of my friends know my politics, more or less, and most share them. It's neither interesting nor brave for me to declare on Facebook how personally outraged I am by Donald Trump's latest racist remarks.

This is a long way of saying that I never thought I'd be the kind of professor with little stickers on her office door identifying her as down with this cause or that group. But here we are: a couple of weeks ago I found myself adding to my collage of images--portraits of John Donne and Queen Elizabeth, snapshots of the Globe, and images of Renaissance tapestries--a rainbow flag with "safe space" written on it and a #blacklivesmatter decal.

Because if my support for members of the LGBT community and people of color is something I can take for granted among my peers--to such a degree that sporting a button or bumper sticker would strike me as asking for a pat on my straight, white, head--this is not the case with my students. Moreover, my students do not necessarily themselves belong to networks where those positions are taken for granted.

I'm not sure whether I'd display such decals if I taught at a lefty liberal arts college, but I don't. I teach at an urban university whose population is overwhelmingly first-generation, 27% of whom are minorities (a number that does not include our many students of Middle Eastern descent). Like Dean Dad's students, a lot of them don't have the time to be political. Most of them have never heard the term "trigger warning" or know what people mean when they talk about "preferred gender pronouns." This doesn't mean that they're tougher than other students--less likely to find certain kinds of content upsetting or to be questioning their gender or sexuality--just that they're not in a place where they regularly encounter those debates.

And while for some people my being a humanities professor makes my liberalism axiomatic, what my students probably see is a middle-aged, married white lady who teaches really old poems. Why would they assume that I have any interest in the experiences of racial minorities or any familiarity with queer or transgender people? In that context, it seems possible those stickers might signal something a few students would value knowing.

I'm still not sure how comfortable I feel about this, and I have some concerns about misinterpretation. But for now I'm going with it. I'm also going to try to feel more generous about those who relentlessly perform their politics on Facebook. After all, I don't know their motives or audience any more than they know mine.