Tales of an Academic Interloper

Today, in true academic form, I presented a paper at the Nexus Interdisciplinary Conference here at UT entitled "Doing Difference: Embodied Emotion in Composition Pedagogy," complete with big, possibly misused words like academe, performativity, and rhetorics of emotion. Like most of my academic endeavors, I was selected as a panelist completely on accident, as one of the over-worked doctoral students arranging the event kind of jokingly asked me in a moment of exasperation if I would present a paper on composition pedagogy. Unbeknownst to her, I had one rip, roaring, and ready to go. So I presented, and I loved it. I loved feeling like an academic, schmoozing with the other privileged white people like myself over wine from plastic cups and crudite as we discussed important things like embodied texts, collective identities, and the best non-corporate, locally owned place to grab a cheeseburger in our respective cities. I felt I'd toed my way a little bit father through the sacred gates of the academy.

And that scares me. Honestly, one day someone is going to figure out what an imposter I really am. Me an academic? Not in a million years. It ain't in my blood, I swear it. I am perpetually shocked when I reflect on the fact that 1.) I have a college degree and 2.) I'm pursuing another, more advanced degree. I really expect the Gate Keepers of Academe to discover the mistake some registrar or English department secretary has made along the way, descend from the tower, and unceremoniously revoke my admittance into the academic country club then send me to live out the rest of my life making sandwiches at the Subway.

I'm not supposed to be doing what I'm doing. Education, much less graduate work: I have no model of this type of life, at least not in my direct bloodline. My momma and daddy didn't go to college. My brother wasted a few thousand dollars and a couple semesters at the community college back home before he realized he wasn't cut out for the academy. Aunts, uncles, cousins (except for James, who has an art degree and works at Walmart): none of these kinfolks have set foot in a college classroom, much less know what "a performative framework for composition pedagogy" is. Come to think of it, I might not either, though I pretend like I do.

But they're the smartest people I know, and I'll go fisticuffs with anyone who says they aren't. They've got life experiences that make some of the things I get riled up about seem like specks of snot on the salad bar's sneeze guard. Talk to my mother about love and money, and you'll hear the wisdom of a woman who has worked her whole life to get both, has trouble holding onto as much of each as she'd like to be happy, but still laughs through it all, gets her bills paid, and manages to eat out a few times a week. That takes sense you don't learn in the college classroom--to deal with disappointment gracefully and be truly thankful for what you have instead of bitter about what you don't.

I hope I don't sound bitter. I'm exceedingly thankful for my education opportunities. If God exists as a loving creator, she's spent more than the usual amount of love on me. Despite my gratitude, though, I still feel like an academic interloper, like I'm just playing the smarty pants game until I turn around one day and realize that this isn't my environment, this isn't my language, these aren't my people. I'm not from researchers and conference presenters, critical theorists and academic intelligentsia. I'm from men and women who smoke off brand cigarettes because that's what they can afford working 12-hour days laying tile and cleaning up puke. And I love those people. Hell, I long to be like them, to have their wherewithal and wit. They're who make America run.

But it's still fun playing the academic game sometimes.