Ghosting Our Ghost

Phantoms of gender

By Tierney Smink

Illustration by Em Bennet

Now, it’s a given. As you walk into the classroom, you shut the door behind you. 

This seems obvious, keeping the door shut to facilitate learning or mitigate distractions. But for the first few weeks of Spanish this year, the class was a door-open, welcoming place in the hallway. Before we knew it was haunted. 

It’s a haunting both physical and metaphorical. I walk into the classroom casually, almost forgetting the door, pulling it shut behind me before sitting down in my seat. But, our Pupin basement classroom has a special talent for opening the door even when we shut it. My teacher whispers an almost aggressive “Tierney,” nodding to the door that stands agape behind me, and giggles to herself as I walk back to the doorway. It never shuts on the first try. Minutes later, we hear the creak and see the door opening slowly as a group of students walks by, glancing back towards our shocked and confused faces. This open door breaks the brief time we forgot about our ghost, snapping us out of the reality of our environment. 

This Spanish class might be the most unique class setup of all of Columbia-Barnard Spanish classes. It’s tiny. There are seven total beings in the classroom: six women and one ghost (and two sewn-together stuffed animals, if you count our Frankenstein-esque class mascots as eight and nine …).  But the powerful difference is the lack of a male presence. We are encouraged to speak up as women, in both our physical Spanish class and in our outside lives. 

But the ghost still haunts us. Our teacher yells at us all the time: “Take up more space!” In a world where female voices are already so quieted, she wants us to push against the boundaries society has subtly yet rigidly put in place. As she reminds us daily, we women are taught from a young age to leave no trace, to hide ourselves from being noticed. In other classes, I hesitate to raise my hand and voice my points, ideas, and contradictions. Here, we raise our hands and offer our voices without hesitation, unafraid to make mistakes, or accepting that we may, and that is more than okay. Here, it’s welcome. Here, we fight that haunting. 

Learning Spanish offers an opportunity to address the power of gender in language. English, at least, doesn’t have gender engraned into its DNA. The Spanish language literally encodes masculinity. It’s built into the syntax, allowing someone to say los amigos or mis hermanos when talking about all men, mostly women, or anything in between. This is something that we learn to reject, using amigues or amigxs, creating space for ourselves and the people around us. We shut the door behind us, pushing our ghost outside of this environment and trying our best to take up more space. But even when we’re taught these imperfect solutions, do they fix anything? Does anyone actually use them?

But when our ghost opens up the door, we can see everything outside, and the things start to sneak into the cracks. We lived with this ghost our whole lives, letting its actions dictate our own. Ghosting our ghost is hard; it’s something we do slowly and surely, acknowledging the truth and how we can change ourselves and our own outlook. Outside these four walls, or when we leave the door open behind us, the ghost follows us. But here, we learn to fight back—as long as we remember to shut the door in our ghost’s face. 

Happy Halloween. Control your ghosts.