When Creative Writing Goes Weird

You may already know, gentle reader, about the scandal at the University of New Mexico in which writer Lisa D. Chávez, whose work I admire, came under scrutiny for engaging in sex work at the same company where some of her department's graduate students were also employed.  Chávez was "discovered moonlighting as the phone-sex dominatrix 'Mistress Jade,' and posing in promotional pictures sexually dominating one of her own graduate students."  (The Chronicle of Higher Ed reported the story back in September, which seems half a lifetime ago already.) 

Since childhood, I've had the socially undesirable habit of remaining stupidly oblivious to gossipy or scandalous things.  (You know that expression, "If you can't say something nice, come sit next to me"?  Well, I usually have only the most tediously nice things to say.  It's a weakness.  Cocktail party suicide.)  So anyway, I'd let the whole thing glide past my consciousness--until today, when it came up as a curveball question from another faculty member in a mock interview.  (Our graduate student, I'm proud to say, handled it beautifully.) 

After the mock interview, I checked out the story, and I was interested to read this commentary about it by one of the graduate students involved.  I liked the way she talked about the fear and vulnerability of students from the working poor who try to acclimate to the strange norms of graduate school:

I was afraid every day that I was in grad school, not because I was incapable of the intellectual work or lacked ambition, but because I kept making small social gaffes.

I connected with that; I could identify.  She then suggests, however, that this vulnerability made her subject to Chávez's manipulation, since she saw Chávez as a role model, as someone whose own class markers suggested that she'd succeeded in academia despite not being originally from a financially comfortable background.  Ergo, if she's doing sex work, then I should do sex work. 

Really?

I'm sympathetic to a great deal of what she writes, yet I'm also a little tired.  Thank goodness, for example, that no one in my graduate department ever pushed students--to my knowledge--into sex work, for heaven's sake, or organ harvesting or intellectual property theft.  Moreover, one likes to think one would have made one's own choices based on one's own ethics, whatever the pressures may have been.  And that if one made errors in judgment--decisions one later regretted--one would, as an adult, take responsibility for those.  (In fact, it seems to me like that's what half of adulthood consists of.  Sigh.) 

Which (turning now and arguing with myself) I suppose the graduate student has done, and I wish her well.  She has taken responsibility, she has thought about it, and she has learned something.  And though it was hard to be certain from the pieces I read, maybe she functioned as a kind of whistle-blower, too, which is always a hard and brave thing to do.  In which case, I wish her doubly well.     

I felt so uncomfortable when I read about some of the choices Chávez made (at least as they were being reported; you know how sometimes media reduce or distort things).  It's great to be a pro-sex feminist, and it's great to have fun parties.  And of course, her own free time is her own business.  But if she indeed suggested that students try sex work, especially to spice up their creative writing, that's troubling. 

I really feel like students--of any level and age--are an almost sacred trust, that they are vulnerable, even if they're in their seventies, and that we as teaching professionals need to err on the side of professionalism, carefulness, and boundaries.  Our job is to provide a crucible or petri dish or pick-your-metaphor where their creativity can grow, where they can explore their choice of material, where their work can be heard and helped and honored.  I have had students who wrote the wildest, raciest, boundary-pushingest stuff, and I've had students write gorgeously about very "safe"-seeming material.  But it comes from them, from their impulses and creative ambitions, not from mine.  I'm there to listen, to support, to help with craft.  To hear it into speech.   

My classroom may be unspeakably tame, but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say I prefer it that way.

I would like to add, just to defend the field, that this issue--the issue of confusion around boundaries, professionalism, and sexuality--is not at all specific to creative writing.  Almost all women of a certain age can report the blurring of sexual boundaries in the academy in a variety of disciplines, and the white male tenured profs who practiced it were generally not subjected to major investigations.  In some situations, it was even kind of a norm, something to negotiate, navigate, roll one's eyes about, and little more.  (I remember leaving a reception at a distinguished scholar's home when I was an undergraduate and having him try to put his tongue in my mouth as part of his cordial good-bye.  Ugh.  Some of you probably have more troubling, serious stories.) 

So I wouldn't say, Oh, those creative writers.  They're wild.  They don't have boundaries.  While artists are known for pushing boundaries and experimenting in all kinds of ways, the sexualization of students by professors definitely happens across the disciplines, and unscrupulous people in all kinds of academic departments exploit those power relationships to their own ends. 

Finally, "Ms. Chávez has accused her accusers, in complaints to the university and the state, of discriminating against her because she is bisexual and Hispanic" (this, from the Chronicle piece).  When I first read this, I was initially like, Oh, no.  Really?  Is this really the time to play those cards? 

But then I thought about the generations of sexual exploitation in the academy by white male heterosexual professors.  Would such a national fuss have been made if she'd been white and male and had simply restricted herself to unphotographed, uncommercial activities with students?

And finally-finally, phone-sex work pays $40 an hour?  When TAs are lucky to make $15K a year, that's pretty alluring.  (Come to think of it, it's a damn sight more than lots of tenured professors make.)  Ultimately, that discrepancy is far more troubling, in terms of what it says about what we value as a culture, than the actions of the particular individuals caught up in this situation. 

But that's an old story.

A complicated case, this raises issues that aren't easy to untangle.

Here's wishing peace, justice, clarity, and rapprochement to everyone in the English department at the University of New Mexico, who could probably all use a nice long vacation at this point.  And if you're on the job market this fall, you might want to think through some of these issues yourself--because if our mock interview today here at UNL was any indication, you just might get asked about them.