back to school again

Back to school. The courses will be full, on paper and in Zoom rooms, but the halls are going to echo. No buzz, no footsteps. Just locked doors, quiet screens, and the lingering absence of what once made this place feel alive. Meanwhile, the program I owe everything to is being quietly dismantled.

Gender and Sexuality Studies made me, then handed me the keys to teach inside its walls. Now, those walls are starting to crack, and the foundation is being pulled apart in slow motion.

This next series of posts is about that slow undoing. But it also lives elsewhere: in the strange, parallel world where my art has always unfolded.

Fantastic! Uncanny! Dys/utopic!

For years, I’ve made art inside the very theories I teach … feminist and queer theory rendered in the round, as world, as texture, as haunt. I’ve collaborated with feminist and queer theory, made images, objects, and community from feminist/queer method and affect. My comics unfold in a third, uncanny realm: weird, frightening, a little broken, and stitched together with citations, feelings, and ghosts. The classroom spills into the page, and the page loops back.

This is where the story happens.

You’ll see. Maybe not what others see, but something deeper. The kind of layered seeing institutions fail to notice or overlook, right before they decide to erase it.