She told us she was a feminist.

She wore ripped jeans. I remember the first day she walked into class. As a closeted 20-year old, I dreamed in the margins of the Norton Anthology. She was the kind of woman who looked like she spent her life being called “too much.” She leaned against the desk — as young professors do, cool and careless bangs sweeping across her eyes, silver rings tapping the podium, her voice rising in chalk dust. I’ll tell you: not many English classes kept me that awake But I was young and trying to be someone. Full of Pride and Prejudice – That’s when I began to question, when rules could split at the seams, that language could bend and play. Every time she walked into that room I thought about the possibilities of living freely. – I do think she loved hearing the sound of her own voice. I sort of get that now. But, I was new to English Lit. To theory. To find desire in prose or iambic pentameter. I tried to participate, often saying the word “omniscience” wrong. But she let me mistake a little, with a smirk and a hand on her hips. I began to love the smell of old paperbacks. There were feminist buttons pinned to her bag, We started to read Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich – I wrote and taped quotes all over my notebooks. There were photocopied pages folded into her books, like little exchanges of power. – Yes, I know, I watched her too much. The way queer girls do observing who they like – who they want to be like – before they actually learn how to read the room. But she wasn’t actually gay. Maybe she was just one of those women who knew how to free herself fully. Because queerness arrived first as possibility, as dreamlike, as playful coyness as language would tongue-tie itself into promiscuity. So much room for interpretation. How to read a room with this woman as a woman who was told she took up too much space. I thought about all the women before us — women reading in locked bedrooms, women talking over shared cigarettes women kissing in parking lots after bars closed, women folding love letters into coat pockets, women teaching other women how not to disappear the kind who carry books under one arm a coffee cup with a lipstick stain in the other. “Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life, passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips.” I read those lines alone in my room. That’s when I started smoking. And suddenly my body made terrible, beautiful sense to me. Virginia Woolf reached out of the page and split me open. After that, I noticed women everywhere. On trains. In bookstores. Outside bars after midnight with Doc Martens scraping pavement. Women laughing too loudly. Women refusing to be told what to do. Women who looked like they knew permission was a ridiculous idea invented by men. So somewhere between lit class and cigarettes, and alcohol I bloomed . . . between creating my own “room of one’s own” between Sappho and Woolf, between the confusion of not knowing if I wanted her or wanted to be like her – But as time went on I learned that the patriarchy doesn’t always arrive wearing a man’s face. I saw her in department gatherings In hallways In the small economies of power That I started to learn what universities run on. To see her and learn her place in the story of the university. She holds onto her seat while clawing through other women who are still fighting to get inside. And suddenly the ripped jeans looked different. A feminist mistaken, it was not rebellion, Performance. Branding. Not resistance. You can’t call yourself a feminist if doing so requires another woman to shrink. Just a silhouette who banked on privilege and whiteness – Because now I know . . . the less impressive her vocabulary actually is. Today, when I stand in front of the classroom I remember how foolishly I idolized her the way young women do when they are starving for examples. But you can’t say you are here to break glass ceilings if you plan to keep all the power for yourself. Because the truth is, the real truth, is that language is easy – Especially when you find your own.