Are You Experienced? Teaching and Reading Joy(ce) through the Body

by Janine Utell

The one sure thing is that teaching is sexual. What is uncertain is which practices are natural and which unnatural, which fruitful and which barren, which legal and which illegal. When the sexuality of teaching is more generally felt and admitted, we may finally draw the obvious moral: it is a practice that should only be performed upon the persons of consenting adults.
(Elbow 70)

Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me.
(Joyce 3.434-36)

Thanks to the generosity of a colleague willing to lend me her summer cottage for a few days, I am writing this essay at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. I read and write in the morning and into the afternoon, and then at around four o'clock I head to the pool. There, I am conscious of my body, more so because for the first time in my life I am wearing a bikini.
     I remember being in a department store shopping for bathing suits with my mother when I was around thirteen or fourteen. For some reason, she told me I would probably never be able to wear a bikini—I just didn't "have the body for it.” But here I am, thirty-one years old, standing in the shallow end of the public pool, wearing a bikini. (It strikes me as interesting that at this writing Slate.com is celebrating the anniversary of the bikini; female self-consciousness and anxiety over body image does not seem to be part of this encomium, but that may be a topic for a separate essay.) I am conscious that my body is not as tan as those of many of my fellow bathers; I am, after all, an assistant professor concerned about tenure, and spend most of my summer days in my office rather than stretched out in the sun. My body is a little flabbier than some of the others; exercise is not really a part of my daily regimen, although maybe it should be given my stepping over the threshold into my third decade. But I am also conscious of the eighty-degree water on my bare skin, and how much better it feels than a clinging nylon suit.