Incongruent Bodies: Teaching While Leaking

by Lisa Jean Moore


Coming of age intellectually in the explosive queer worlds of the 1990s San Francisco Bay area, I found my early academic training and experiences astonishing. New vocabularies, identities, morphologies, and possibilities constantly emerged and abated. My doctoral and postdoctoral education, as well as my adjunct teaching, were so all-encompassing that I took for granted my ongoing consciousness-raising. I came to believe the entirety of "the academy" (colleagues, students, scholars, researchers) also underwent profound internal transformation of consciousness about queerness, bodies, gender, and positionality. And I could not have been more pleased to be hired seven years ago by a CUNY school, The College of Staten Island (CSI). My entire family delighted in the move to New York City—a place, I felt, that would also support the intellectual and political work of interdisciplinary LGBTQ studies. However, I soon discovered that Staten Island was somewhat of an anomaly among the New York City boroughs—a homogenous, provincial, conservative, secessionist island in a vibrant, diverse, progressive metropolis. And forget about postmodernity, intersectionality, and postcoloniality. I still wonder if modernity has actually arrived on Staten Island, as there are many vestiges of the pre-modern. For example, when the Pope died, the flags on my public and secular campus were at half mast for two weeks.