Body and desire of writing —diaries—

Abstract

We started out as full-time teachers at the university. We are now separated by an ocean and the Caribbean Sea. One is in R.D., the other in MAD. This is the first time that we are working on a full-time basis as academics, so we are excited although we are more than thirty-five years old and, at that age, one does not harbor many illusions anymore as we have been told since childhood, “the flame of love and the fire of life go out with the years” or, at least, it should.

This is an attempt at displaced writing. As with any attempt, it probably contains in its initial gesture a certain propensity to fail, to settle in the pit of failure as a possibility of being. To be another writing that, although embedded within the academic sphere, denies and perverts the academic codes and imagines other types of writing permeated with bodies and desires. As an attempt, this draft intersperses, and puts in dialogue, different writing dimensions (romance, work, everyday life), and its fabric is produced by hands that desire, touch, caress, love, but which are now experienced in the distance and entangled in a writing precisely characterized by that geographical distance. Also, it engages with those many other ‘she’ whom we read and who accompany us.

We could say that we wrote this text with the aim of questioning the academic system and its normative writing, we could say that we wrote it to blame and shame the academic institutions that expel us, but that feeds on us, our precariousness, our hyper-productive rhythms and our desire —concealed and dressed in uniform— that beats and produces papers. What can be found in this text is that very desire —crude and free of any format.

Our last four-handed writing —the Decalogue of ideas for a feminist school— did not work out well, or maybe yes; it got a lot of attention and left an echo like a shout in a cave. We received many criticisms for it, anonymous, disembodied criticisms of our bodies which write, feel, dissent and imagine that writings, and the spaces in which these are produced, can be different, and, above all, can be shared with others.