This poem is part of our online special issue honoring bell hooks

Teaching to Transgress

By Margaret Stetz

Love
is on the syllabus.
You will feel it 
when you come into our classrooms
eyes downward 
thinking you are 
too much 
your voice your style 
so loud all wrong.
Look up.
Speak out.
There is only this moment
to be 
to be together.
We will hear you
we will hold you
because she taught us 
how
her words 
a hook piercing through our skin
a bell sounding in our ears
tolling telling
that on the final exam
the question must be
did we love you
enough?

Artist’s Statement: As a white working-class person from Queens, New York, I had to suppress and alter many aspects of myself to become who I am today, the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware with a PhD from Harvard University. Reading and teaching bell hooks’s work, however, has always encouraged me to embrace, rather than deny, elements of my own identity and experience, which do not conform to the class-based standards of propriety that still prevail in academia. Instead I learned from hooks to reach out actively to undergraduate students of diverse backgrounds and make them feel that they, too, belong in the world of higher education. Her essays have taught me so much about what feminist pedagogy must be and why: that it should be informed not only by inclusion, but also by love for the subject, for the process, and for one another.

Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware, where she teaches the courses “Educating Women,” “Girlhood and Violence,” and “The New Woman in Black and White.” She is the author and/or editor of several volumes, including British Women’s Comic Fiction, 1890–1990 and Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II, as well as more than 120 published essays. In the past year, she has also had poems appear in numerous literary journals and in the Washington Post.