A different kind of love for V-Day

Please read this article: "Love On Campus." Special thanks to Mana for sending it to me.

At first it may seem like another media studies analysis, but by the end I was inspired. Surely, there are parts of it that I take issue with. For one, can't this love be the province of more? Could we not extend it beyond the coterie of a professor-student ingroup? Can't the bearers of love also be non-academics?

There are so many different kinds of love. While I feel the love that the author talks about in this article is abundant in my life, it is not the only love with which I am nourished. Thank you to those who have bestowed any form of it upon me. Oooh, gotta cut it out before I get too mushy...

Stil, this article is particularly cool, because it speaks to some of the reasons why I want to eventually continue with scholarship. The feeling, the power, and the ardor of ideas run deeply for me. And I want to pass this on to others. But I would also hope that I do and will continue to do so beyond the strictures of the classroom or office of a university. Also, can those relationships happen more equitably, be a more balanced exchange? I don't think the line between pupil and teacher is always so cleanly cut. Aren't we always both? Also, how does this kind of love operate in tandem with or in opposition to others? Dare I say it, is there a hierarchy of love?

Nonetheless, it is a solid reminder that we should celebrate love in its many forms and challenge the long-held notions that confine people to privileging heterosexist eros.

If that wasn't enough to get you to click on the link yet, here's a little tidbit preview:

"Teaching, Yeats said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket, and this is how it gets lit. The professor becomes the student’s muse, the figure to whom the labors of the semester — the studying, the speaking in class, the writing — are consecrated. The alert student understands this. In talking to one of my teaching assistants about these matters, I asked her if she’d ever had a crush on an instructor when she was in college. Yes, she said, a young graduate student. “And did you want to have sex with him?” I asked. 'No,' she said, 'I wanted to have brain sex with him.'"

When we're talkin' brain sex, call me unabashedly polyamourous.