Feeling seen, feeling the history and feeling the possibilities
I have lost count of the number of Law Schools I have walked into over the years. I have obviously studied in and worked at several. I have visited many many more. But I can count the number of Law Schools I have walked into where the walls have been dominated by portraits or photos of women. Until earlier this month that number was precisely zero. One of my more famous (read public) tantrums came in one of my previous roles where, in a staff meeting, we had agreed that we should brighten up the hallways in the Law School with some law relevant pictures. A week or so after that meeting I arrived at work and pictures of long dead white men adorned the walls and I lost the plot. It was not one of my finest moments but I do think I was right. I am not suggesting that we erase history or that we should ban Law Schools from putting images of dead white men on their walls, I am saying that we should be mindful of whose history we are portraying, who we are championing and what it means if you can or rather if you can’t see yourself reflected in the imagery that the place you are working or studying in chooses to put on the walls.
So when, on the 12th February, I was ushered into a smallish room in the Law Faculty of Lund University alongside a group of academics working on various aspects of EU Law, Policy and Politics for our 2 day workshop, my breath was literally taken away. As I made my way down a few steps, I was facing pictures of 4 women. I had no idea who they were at this point but the impact felt almost physical. The room screamed ‘you belong here’. There we were, mostly female academics being encouraged by those who went before us, those who made us being here possible. The 4 women are Anna Bugge Wicksell (1862-1928), Gunvor Mallin (1911-2010), Anna Christensen (1936 – 2001) and Christina Moëll (1959 -) and they are important and impressive figures in the Swedish legal world. Look them up! The Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon which has biographies of important Swedish Women is a good place to start.
As I took my seat and looked back at the door I had just come through, I noticed a further picture. And this time I did know who the woman looking back at me from inside the frame was: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I think I just stared. As it turns out RBG received an honorary jubilee doctorate from Lund University and the document is framed next to her picture. It was vaguely intimidating to give a paper with such a legal heavyweight, such a trailblazer, such a brilliant woman looking down at me with that iconic look but I hope she would have been proud of us and interested in our discussions.
Having the women on the walls made a difference. It is hard to explain why. Apart from immediately making me feel like I belonged in that room, genuinely. Apart from being in a room with pictures of important people on the walls and for once not having to roll my eyes about the choice of who is important and apart from the complete novelty of it, I don’t know why it made such a difference. It just did. It was nice and over the two days I think we all commented on it.
It made me think about the importance of representation which I have been thinking about lots lately but also about how far we have come since we saw the first female law graduates, the first female lawyers, first female professors, Deans of School… and how far we still have to go. There are still female firsts to be had and that’s before we even start thinking about intersections with other characteristics. But thinking about how much work there is still to do seemed less heavy with the 5 watching over our conversations. There they were, evidence of change and progress, evidence that we belong, that we are capable and important. I like how they are all different, the pictures chosen are not all the same style and they are not super formal either. They somehow felt more real and their roles and positions somehow more attainable. Ok, perhaps not RBG because, you know, she was RBG – but the others were just women doing their thing – just like we were in that workshop. It felt like by being there and by discussing work that had a focus on gender, we were honouring the work they had done, the way they had paved. It felt good to be seen, to see, to begin to understand our histories and think about the possibilities.
Turns out there were also some paintings of men on the walls – they were behind me throughout, I don’t know who they were, I didn’t bother to check. They just didn’t seem important over those two days. They probably are important, but not in this story and not today.
Student outreach work – why bother?
I have got a few things I want to catch up on – and you’ll be pleased to know it is not another Heated Rivalry post. It feels like I spent most of January asleep and most of February trying to wake up and catch up. I have not caught up, of course I haven’t. If I could actually catch up, that would suggest I don’t have a full time job… anyway. In the middle of my flu sickness absence, just as the coughing and snot production switched into crippling fatigue and stomach issues, I had a couple of days of almost coherence. Those two days coincided with the HELOA Conference I had agreed to go speak at with my absolutely brilliant colleague Jack Cooper. Here’s the blurb from the conference programme:
1.6: Working with academic colleagues to deliver effective outreach – Ballroom
Jack Cooper | Schools and Colleges Engagement Officer | Leeds Trinity University
Dr Jess Guth | Head of School of Business and Law | Leeds Trinity University
Engaging subject-level outreach is crucial to building meaningful relationships with schools and colleges and helping to breakdown barriers for students to access Higher Education. In this workshop, Jack Cooper, Schools and Colleges Engagement Officer and Dr Jess Guth, Head of School of Law from Leeds Trinity University will talk through their collaborative approach to designing and delivering high-impact subject outreach.
Honestly, I don’t really remember giving the talk that much. I remember struggling to breathe and being tired and struggling to hold onto thoughts. I also remember Jack being a really good presenter and setting the scene really well. In essence the argument was that Universities doing outreach work with Schools and Colleges is important for a variety of reasons – social justice, raising aspiration and widening access and participations and of course recruitment. I think I was the only academic in a room full of professional services staff. I think often running outreach sessions, travelling to schools and colleges or welcoming them to campus feels like another thing dumped on academics, another thing to do that doesn’t feel like it is really our job, something to be got out of. I have certainly worked with academics with attitudes like that over the course of my career. We argued that the relationships between the professional services team and academic staff is key to doing good, meaningful and effective outreach. We encouraged participants of the workshop to think about what they do, why, if it works, how it could be better and what maybe just needs to be stopped. It seemed to go well. It is also the only conference ever where, as a speaker, I received a thank you card.
Since the conference I have had cause to think more about outreach work for several reasons. One is that we are in the craziness of the student number planning cycle, workload planning and thinking about how many students we will have and when, where and how to teach them. Another is that I have recently received the outreach impact report from Jack’s team. As I have been working through spreadsheets my mind has been wandering off thinking about 2 different things in relation to outreach work: The first is a question about why I have never seen it as an add on. Even as a baby academic, I loved doing outreach sessions, I genuinely enjoyed going into Schools and Colleges, chatting to potential students, learning from their teachers. And I still do. But why? The second is about why we do this work and how we know if it works.
So first, why do I like this work? I think it is because I have never seen it as a recruitment activity as such. Of course that is usually how it is positioned for a university like mine. We need to be visible to the 17/18 year olds in our region. We need them to choose us. We are not a selective institution, we have to actively recruit. I understand that the outreach work is basically that. But to me it has always been the other stuff that matters more. I am a teacher at heart and outreach work is teaching. I have stood in so many classrooms in Keighley, Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham and surrounding areas and seen how the stories I can tell about my journey into Law or my friends’ journeys to university and beyond changes the perception of what is possible.
I taught a Law class at a local 6th Form in Keighley about a decade ago and was confronted by an angry young woman. She said ‘Why are you here? People like us don’t go to university. Go tick your boxes somewhere else’. I didn’t know what to say to her. I let her get in my face, I let her storm out. I said nothing when she came back in. I could have told her that I did my A-Levels in Keighley and I went to uni. Many of my friends grew up in some of the most deprived areas of Keighley, an already pretty poor town, and went to uni. I have told that story so many times and it always helps shift perspective. But somehow confronted with that anger, it didn’t seem right. It felt like I, we, had somehow got out and left a generation behind. We hadn’t made it better for those who came after us. It seems that the older I get, the more the ‘I sat where you are sitting now and look at me know’ narrative just feels smug and patronising. As I finished my session, I asked whether I could go sit with the angry young woman for a bit and ask her some questions. Of course her initial response was ‘Why do you care’. But she didn’t leave. In the end we talked for about 20 minutes. She wanted to be a lawyer but was already being told she needed to get that nonsense out of her head and go get a job. Finishing School was a luxury, going to university was outrageous. There was no money to support her, there was no understanding about what a university was, how it worked or what might be possible. I tried to explain, as best I could because I realised that explaining universities is hard – they’re weird! I can’t say that she was friendly but she was curious, she asked lots of questions. Then I left. I didn’t hear from her again. I don’t know what she is doing now but I do know that she went to a very prestigious university to study Law – her teacher told us. I think about her often. I hope that whatever she took from our conversation, she used it to help her get to where she wanted to be. She changed how I think about outreach work. It’s my opportunity to understand where today’s kids, tomorrow’s students, are in terms of their journeys, their understanding of what the future holds, their views on the world and their expectations of what comes next. She taught me to never assume anything and be prepared to abandon prepared sessions and activities and to focus on connection. Conversation is more important than content. Creating a space where the basics of degrees, universities, legal institutions and careers can be talked about without feeling embarrassed at not knowing and showing up in a way that makes clear that there are people out there, strangers at this point, who believe in them and are willing to take a chance on them are the most important things. I’m not there to persuade them to enrol with whatever university I happen to be working for – although I love seeing familiar faces arrive for welcome week – I am there to help them realise that the power to change their world is right there for them to grasp and if they let us in just a little bit, we will be right there with them.
Outreach work helps me design better transitions from College to Uni, it helps me create better teaching materials and use better examples, it helps me meet my students where they are and it makes me a better teacher. It also reminds me of my own privilege and the distance that can create and it reminds me that making the world a better place is our job and that while if often feels that way, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Even if it is just the one student encounter described above (and I think there are more), I am honoured to have been part of a little nudge that propelled her to jump into, what was for her and her family, a terrifying unknown, but one that had the potential to change her life. I hope it did.
I think in answering the first question, I have also answered the why we do it question. I guess I can’t speak for others but in summary, I do it because it changes the world for the better. Does it work? I don’t know. I know from the impact data that we have, that our outreach work generates applications for our courses. So for those who do it purely from a recruitment point of view – it seems to work. Does it change the world? Does it shift perspectives on what is possible? It often feels like it but actually I will never really know what impact I have. I like to think that sometimes I make a difference, that I am part of the spark that puts into focus that nothing is impossible and that whoever you thought you were, you deserve to go after your dreams. I don’t need data to tell me that I am helping to raise aspirations, creating the possibility to imagine a what if. And to be clear, I don’t care whether that what if is about becoming the next hot shot lawyer or rocket scientist or about living off grid and being self-sufficient or about finding your person and raising a huge family – or all of those things at different points in time. The power lies in the confidence to define your own what ifs. I know the power of being given the confidence and freedom to figure out my what if. I grew up in an environment where there was no real pressure to do well and no pressure at all to do anything specific, just lots of support for figuring out my dream and then living it. If I can be a tiny little bit of that for one or two kids I am lucky enough to cross paths with in those Schools and Colleges, then yeah, outreach work works.
Heated Rivalry: What if nobody knows you are their person?
I was going to stay away from writing more about Heated Rivalry. Let’s be honest, the internet – and social media in particular – is full of Heated Rivalry analysis. I haven’t properly read any of it. I have scanned some and some pops up on on my feeds and I note it as I scroll through. Some of it seems like good analysis raising interesting points, some of it seems completely unhinged and some if it so sort of dumb that I wondered whether the authors watched the series with the volume turned right down and their eyes closed. I don’t have the knowledge or skills to provide an academic analysis of the writing, the cinematography, the acting, the technical aspects… not my field. I also still don’t understand why the show has had such an emotional impact on me and why that impact lingers. That may be a therapy questions, I may just roll with it. I have watched Heated Rivalry a couple more times. I have read the books. I might at some point review the books as a whole – but then again, what would I say? They’re romance novels with some vaguely spicy sex scenes in them. So I probably won’t review them because actually romance novels aren’t generally my thing. I read the books because of the TV series. I preferred the TV series.
Anyway, there is one bit in the series that I wanted to explore further because it really hit me but it is also a scene where the reaction to it or experience of it seems to be very different for straight and queer people (using queer as a shorthand here because I prefer it to alphabet soup but you do you with labels). Or at leas that is what the online discourse suggests. I am talking about the scene where Shane gets knocked out cold on the ice and is taken to hospital and the hospital scene that follows. So for context, Shane and Ilya have, at this point been hooking up for years and their relationship is evolving and has become something more than just hook-ups – even if neither of them at this point know what that is or means or could be. But nobody knows. Not a single other person knows that they mean something to each other. From the comments online this seems to be the bit that hits so differently for queer people than it does for cishet people. I have seen lots of comments (the less unhinged ones) about how Ilya is obviously worried, how he has to wait until the morning to go see Shane in hospital, how sweet they are in the hospital scene… and all of that is true but I think for many of us who are queer, there is so much more there. Let me see if I can unpack this.
On the ice, before it is in any way clear how serious the injuries might be, my thoughts went straight to the realisation that if Shane dies (and the first time round watching, my brain was programmed that something terrible was going to happen – because it usually does to gay characters), then 2 things would happen – a huge part of Shane and who he was would be erased and Ilya would have to grieve alone without anyone ever knowing what he was to Shane and Shane to him. This big part of both of them would just cease to exist. Even if there was no death but maybe life changing injuries or injuries which would end Shane’s career, Ilya would no longer have access to Shane, everything changes. The Hockey world provides access to each other, trying to navigate their relationship outside of that context would be really difficult, particularly given their hyped up rivalry that means everyone assumes they hate each other. There would suddenly be gatekeepers and Ilya getting information about how Shane is, never mind getting to see him would seem really weird and impossible to navigate – it would likely force either coming out or retreat. Ilya needs to come up with a credible plan for the visit to the hospital. In a non closeted dating/hooking up scenario, he could just go and it wouldn’t be weird. In this case he has to assess whether others would see it as weird if he goes and is seen. He needs a justification for going that is not simply ‘I care about Shane’.
In the hospital scene, we see more than Ilya’s worry for Shane. I think we also see the pain of not being able to be there for Shane, to sit with him and hold his hand. We see the pain of not having been able to go to the hospital with him, to not be someone who might be called with updates – either directly or via family. It’s the pain of being treated as someone who is just on the periphery of Shane’s life, not central to it. While Shane clearly has Ilya at the forefront of his mind – concussion or not – the rest of the world doesn’t know and doesn’t really care and is in fact at best bemused by and at worst suspicious of Ilya’s hospital visit. The acting in these scenes is superb. The emotional depth breathtaking. Everything in the scenes suggests to me that the writers and actors were very aware if the implications of the relationship being a secret in this medical/injury context. It feels like Ilya carries the weight of how close they came to being erased from each others lives because he was the one who had to watch Shane being stretchered off, he was the one who didn’t get updates and couldn’t reach out to anyone for updates. He was the one who didn’t exist.
It feels like many straight people online missed the subtext of these scenes that had so many of us sobbing. So many of us know at least bits of that erasure. Being closeted doesn’t just mean sneaking around, it also means risking complete non-existence in the eyes of a world that doesn’t know what you mean to each other. It also entirely possible that I am just hyper aware of this narrative as we come up to the anniversary of my ex-girlfriend’s death. It’s 14 years since she died and we had not been together for a decade before her death but we were still really good friends (there’s a good lesbian stereotype for you). Just before she died she had started seeing someone new, I never got change to meet her but I wish I had. There were several former girlfriends at the funeral. I found the funeral really difficult. A couple of friends of hers/ours spoke or did a reading. The service was nice overall. But I didn’t recognise her in all the speeches and conversations. Because she never actually came out to her parents fully (they knew but preferred not to know), because some of our friends certainly took her being bisexual to mean she could just choose to be straight and should probably do that and because, while not closeted exactly, she kept her life compartmentalised, the stories that were told about her at her funeral were the stories that made her family feel comfortable. They didn’t include me or the 5 year relationship we had, they didn’t include the girlfriends that followed. They didn’t include this huge part of her. At the time I just remember keeping it together and justifying those choices because funerals are for those left behind, for the family… but we were left behind too and for a chunk of time, I was her family. We were important and central in her life too but those stories were erased, in the narrative of her life as it was told after her death, we did not exist. And it’s not that I’d forgotten that but it had become less important over time. And then I watched those scenes, and I remembered that feeling, felt that feeling.
I have other examples, far less serious ones, where even when we are out and open, the world can erase us. Sometimes it feels like being pushed back into a closet and being asked to be grateful that it is a walk-in closet rather than a tiny wardrobe. In 2008 I was in hospital with pancreatitis and Kath had to battle so hard to get information and be allowed to be with me. Now partly that was just crappy hospital processes and idiocy but partly it was also the fact that for one or two staff, including one consultant, positioning Kath as anything but my girlfriend was more comfortable. Even after he had been told our relationship status and I had given him an unfiltered mouthful (thanks pain meds), he still referred to Kath as my sister. We complained and got an apology from someone on his behalf but never from him. I always think I have been incredibly lucky to go through life with so little discrimination, hate and nonsense levelled at me but once I start thinking about it, I can give you a long list of micro- aggressions and attempts at erasing my reality for the comfort of others. While those things are annoying in every day life, when you experience them in a context that is more vulnerable like medical care, suddenly even little things can feel existential. What if I have to go to hospital for something, an emergency and the doctors refuse to give Kath updates about me? What if I am really struggling and they won’t allow her to see me. What if something happened to her and I have to deal with a homophobic arse before I can get to her? I don’t want to think about what that feels like when it is amplified by the fact that nobody knows. That for all the world, you have no business or right wanting to be with your person because nobody knows they are your person. Imagine being in a situation where nobody would call you, where information would not be released to you, where if you turned up, you might be sent away. I just can’t even. But I think we have to think about it. We have to get angry about this and channel that anger and talk about these things because things are not getting better for us. Things are getting worse. The closet is the only safe option for far too many and I hear a lot of stories about people having to retreat to that safety. I am not ok with that. I am not ok with any of it and I am acutely aware of the juxtaposition of a show like Heated Rivalry being on mainstream TV and streaming platforms across the world at the same time as queer lives feel very much under attack in so many places. I don’t know what that means but if elements of the show prompt me to share more of my experience and be open about it and try and explain what it feels like even in this incredibly privileged position, then maybe I can shine a tiny little light into the darkness while I figure out what I can actually do to make a difference.
My Conversations 