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Assimilation, Sexuality and the Contours of Relational Care in Academe

Reflections on Care In retrospect, it seems that I always had a feeling of disquiet about living in the United States after moving from India to complete my PhD at Purdue University, but it was difficult to identify and name for several years. After I finished my PhD work at Purdue, moving into a tenure track job in the US seemed to be the natural and inevitable outcome of my graduate education. I was offered a job at the University of Montana, so there I went. Missoula was a beautiful town with a lot of outdoor opportunities, a collegial department with clear and reasonable expectations for tenure, and a vibrant LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered) (1) community. In many ways, my experience was typical of a highly educated immigrant assimilating into American culture by means of a professional and (relatively) well paid job. I acquired a car, a few credit cards, a twang in my accent, and even a baseball cap. And so, I drifted into the American cultural, economic and professional mainstream. Yet, despite my department's generous offer of financial and administrative support toward my green card application, I never actually filed one. I was reminded to do so year after year by everyone I knew, including my family in India, my department chair, my immigration lawyer, and other friends in academe and beyond. I still can not identify why I kept hedging and hesitating, and even now can only describe my procrastination in terms of a latent, non-specific disquiet about place and my emerging American identity. In early March 2004, however, four events occurred that brought such latent disquiet into sharp relief. The Bush Administration began promoting the case for a Federal anti-gay amendment (the so-called Federal Marriage Amendment); the media marked the first anniversary of the Iraq invasion; I received news of a promotion at work; and I met the person who is now my partner. These events were momentous. The first three crystallized my disquiet into a fundamental question about the potential impact of my labour as an associate professor in an American University. Specifically, I confronted the stark fact that a large amount of my labour, in the form of taxes, had already contributed toward violence--against Iraqis, against LGBT communities in the US, and against soldiers in the US military. I had discussed the matter with friends and colleagues before and had always taken comfort in the fact that my most significant contribution to American culture lay in pedagogy, but my class on conflict and collaboration now appeared pale in significance compared to my new thoughts about what my labour was "really" doing. I decided take some concrete steps about creating alternatives to my American academic career. Opting out suddenly became an option. Meeting Luke helped simultaneously ease and exacerbate my existential dilemma. On one hand, having a supportive relationship actually helped me find the courage to leave Montana in the face of my fears that I might be throwing my career away. On the other hand, I found myself building very personal connections to Montana through Luke, even as I was preparing to mentally transition out of it, and so our decision to leave came at just the moment when we both felt most connected to the town in which we lived. I let my future department know that my relationship with Luke would be a factor in deciding whether or not I would be able to move, and to my surprise the department immediately offered to bear Luke's moving expenses should he decide to come with me. This was reassuring not only from a financial standpoint, but from an institutional one. We knew that Aotearoa/New Zealand had just passed a Civil Union bill, and the University of Waikato's institutional recognition of the legality of our relationship was, we thought, a good sign. We were able to see that a move to Aotearoa/New Zealand would enable us to experience life in a country that supported LGBT rights, was largely anti-war, had instituted civil unions, and where universities did not administer their employees' relationships according to sexuality, gender, or marriage. …