BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine
Page 24
Young girls in English class are consistently taught poems like these, poems written by men and inspired by/directed at women. And even the smartest, most ambitious girls are not immune to responding by imagining themselves as the muse and not the iambic musician. Hence, the schoolgirl crush. The knot of passion and knowledge has been referenced for ages, and not just by male teachers like Roethke. As feminist critic and humorist Regina Barreca wrote in her 1997 book, The Erotics of Instruction, “Sometimes we sublimate effectively, and become the beloved in our own classes, imitating, perhaps unconsciously, the mannerisms and habits of an influential professor. Sometimes we sleep with the teacher … Often we translate our desire into the love of the subject, or the text, or the way the light hits a four-o’clock window in a November classroom.”
I myself have chosen all three of these paths at one time or another, but it is the first and the last that are of most interest for me here, as I am now a teacher at a university. I learned to “sublimate effectively” my desire for my own teachers by falling in love with the subject and, in my own teaching, taking on—maybe consciously, maybe not—their tics, their jokes, and the methods they used to make knowledge such a turn-on for me in the first place.
But it was men who engendered the allure of knowledge for me, and gender is key to making this kind of sublimation effective. An unspoken cultural consent backs Roethke’s feelings for Jane. In many literary and pop cultural representations of teachers and students (not to mention in the minds of many male faculty themselves), the father/lover role is as natural as the moss clinging to the wet stone in “Elegy.” Of course, this doesn’t mean that as a culture we are entirely comfortable with teacher-student romance, let alone sex—only that for years it has been a tacitly, if not openly, accepted arrangement in higher education, and the student-teacher crush a hallmark of the heterosexual female high-school experience.
Still, the idea that male professors dote on the sweet, hopeful malleability of their students, and that female students in turn yield both intellectually and sexually to these male minds, doesn’t exactly hold the same romantic frisson as it might have in Roethke’s day. As we all know, many students have little to no appreciation of this behavior, and thanks in large part to the feminist movement, we can freely and publicly question the behavior of dirty old professors using the miracle of knowledge to get into the pants of their eighteen-year-old students. Though university sexual harassment policies have an annoying way of erasing female students’ sexual agency—no matter how gender-neutral the official language is, it is female students with male professors that these laws are meant to “protect”—they have at least brought quid pro quo harassment out of the closet.
But the mutual desires of student and teacher still exist, even if they’re not acted upon. In fact, such desires are frequently seen as an extension of charismatic classrooms and youthful self-discovery, part and parcel of the dynamics of instruction—and debates within academia and depictions in popular culture take as a given that what we talk about when we talk about teacher-student love is the love between male professors and female students. Movies like Woody Allen’s 1992 Husbands and Wives (in which the Woodster makes time with his Columbia pupil Juliette Lewis) and the more recent and far less slapstick Blue Car (in which a young girl is wooed by a teacher she later discovers is less a brilliant, tortured writer than a sad guy with a midlife crisis), as well as David Mamet’s vitriolic stage play Oleanna, only brush the surface of the pop culture canon of this pairing. (The disturbing-yet-hilarious 1999 film Election, in which a scheming twelfth-grade overachiever played by Reese Witherspoon has an affair with one of her teachers, paints a less idealized picture.)
And, with the exception of writers bell hooks and Jane Gallop (whose liberal stances on teacher-student relationships are routinely misunderstood), the age-old gendered assumptions (male professor = predator, female student = victim) are so taken for granted that popular culture rarely touches on their reversal. As Gallop wrote in her 1997 book, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, “If we imagine a sexual harassment scenario where the victim is male or the culprit female, the abuse of power would not be reinforced by society’s sexual expectations.” That is, the expectation is that males are active and females passive, that men are the lookers and women the looked at. Only nowadays, with increasing numbers of female professors, it would seem as if such an equation would begin to falter.
So what do we do with a female professor whose classroom is a space, as hooks wrote in a 1996 article for Z Magazine, of “erotic energy” that “can be used in constructive ways both in individual relationships and in the classroom setting”? Is she merely Roethke in drag, or is she something else? In the female-run classroom, what happens to our tried-and-true perceptions of masculinity? Of femininity? Of power and desire?
For me, teaching does not reverse the gender of Roethke’s father/lover figure to produce the mother-child/teacher-student dyad. When I began teaching undergraduates at twenty-three, I wasn’t old enough to be my students’ mother; more important, I have a built-in resistance to our culture’s deification of the maternal role, knowing too well how it can be used to deflect female authority. Maternity simply does not get at my experience of university teaching, because while I know that my real job is to help my students by challenging them to think through complicated ideas and to avoid sound-bite writing, teaching—when it works—is deeply pleasurable for me, sometimes erotically so. Ten years into it, I still see teaching as at least partially seductive work, not entirely unlike flirting: It can involve the kind of witty banter where each party lobbies for interest from the other. It allows for the gratification of projecting one’s best self outward and seeing it mirrored, however briefly, in the other.
But such seductions, with or without cultural consent, work differently for male and female students, for reasons beyond simple sexual desire. For instance, my experience and behavior as a female student in “love” with my male teachers differ sharply from what I have experienced in male students’ attractions to me. Whereas smart girls like Regina Barreca (and myself) readily “translate[d] [our] desire into the love of the subject, or the text,” in my own experience, and that of some of my female colleagues, this rarely seems to be the case with male students and their female professors. I’ve been surprised to hear (usually from other students) that former students have been hot for me, mainly because the students in question didn’t work all that hard in class. This is alien to my own experience: When you have a crush on a teacher, isn’t your first impulse (or at least the second) to work even harder to impress her or him? To, in the best of circumstances, see eros as the starter of wisdom and run with it? Doesn’t getting turned on by the messenger get you turned on by the message?
As Gallop wrote of two of her professors, “These guys were brilliant: I wanted to do work that would impress them, and I wanted more than anything to be like them … And I did my utmost to seduce them.” Why is this erotic-intellectual pairing so much more rare in our cultural mythology when the teacher is female and the student male?
I don’t mean to imply that the sublimation of teacher for text never happens for male students. A friend of mine who has a graduate degree in French studies and scrimps his money to spend half of each year in Paris will tell you, without hesitation, that it all began because he was in love with his (female) high-school French teacher. Yet such relationships, due either to rarity or cultural discomfort (or both), fall under the radar of American literature and popular culture. Rarely do we see a female teacher as a figure of desire for her male students without violent or potentially violent repercussions. They are usually turned into maternal figures (as with Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1995 flick Dangerous Minds) or punished (attempted sexual assault in 1955’s Blackboard jungle, murder in 1977’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar, rape in 1996’s The Substitute).
I’ve been reflecting on this issue even more than usual this semester, because I’m teaching film theory, itself focused o
n answering questions of representation, knowledge, power, and desire. We began the class with an analysis of how classic Hollywood films reflect and affirm gender roles through the “gaze”—that is, who looks at whom, who is on display, and who is in charge of the story.
In reckoning with what film theorist Laura Mulvey termed, somewhat clunkily, “to-be-looked-at-ness” on an exam, one of my male students wrote, “When a woman walks into a room, she’s a spectacle, even if she’s an authority figure like a teacher.” When I first read this, raving narcissism took over and I worried that it was about me: I always love marching into class that first day, because in my pink cowboy boots and short, dyedplatinum hair, I know I don’t look like their idea of a “real teacher.” Then common sense broke in and I realized he was probably referring to a clip from Top Gun, which I had screened as an example of the way a film can put even a potentially powerful female character in her place by overemphasizing her “to-be-looked-at-ness.” When the class of flyboys is introduced to civilian flight-school instructor Charlie (Kelly McGillis), we follow the camera eye (back and forth with the eyes of the guys in the class) to her back-seamed black stockings and heels. She pivots and faces the class, expertly lit with the sun behind her. Maverick (Tom Cruise) quickly realizes she’s the woman he tried, unsuccessfully, to pick up in a bar the night before. His response to this surprise is to challenge her authority, mocking her limited knowledge of aircraft capability. A few scenes later, of course, they’re getting it on.
This scene brings into sharp relief the difficulties that ensue when the expected erotics of the teacher-student relationship are enacted with the genders reversed. To put it more bluntly, though we might accept a woman as sexual (as long as she is heterosexual) and we might accept a woman in a position of authority, the two together at the same time is threatening to masculine privilege.
Here’s the problem: For a female student, identifying with the man at the front of the classroom means gaining power in the form of knowledge, authority, and sexual possibility. For a male student, however, identifying with a woman means losing it. So though the female teacher can be looked at as sexually desirable, looking up to her is problematic.
Take Van Halen’s classic “Hot for Teacher” video, for instance, which works precisely because the sexy teacher has lost all control of the students before she strips down to an electric-blue bikini and shimmies on the desk. It’s not about her desire (as if we could ever expect this from MTV); it’s about their adolescence, their male prerogative to make an erotic spectacle of her.
Contrast “Hot for Teacher” with another MTV video staple of roughly the same era, the Police classic “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” It’s another song about teacher-student desire, this time centering on a male teacher tempted by a female student. The viewer is meant to lust after Sting, certainly, but he’s not fetishized in the manner of either Top Gun’s Charlie or Van Halen’s hot teacher. He’s gorgeous, and appears more than aware of this fact, but he’s covered up in black graduation robes and his looks at the camera/viewer are neither coy nor playfully come-hither. And despite the fact that he’s in the typically feminine position of the gaze’s object, as he stares down his classroom of off-screen admirers, his masculinity and professorial authority are never in question—even if, as the song implies, he’s in danger of losing his job. It’s next to impossible to imagine a gender reversal of this video, as a female teacher simply could not sing about the temptation to sleep with a male student with such assuredness and unspoken cultural consent.
None of this analysis is meant to imply that the female-run classroom must be either devoid of erotic energy or a free-for-all for male students who won’t accept a female authority figure if they think she’s sexy. I have had and continue to have thoughtful, invested, smart male students. But no matter how “hot” I might hear myself described as later on, I have only rarely experienced this kind of energy transformed into something else, like an intellectual passion for the subject.
Perhaps the division between a desire to be like and a desire for is not as tricky for the female student, not only with male teachers but with female ones as well. Female students who become enraptured by female teachers have more than one way to go with their desire, as they don’t need to cross—gender identify. My experience as both a student with female teachers and a teacher of female students leads me to believe there’s another layer to the erotics of instruction, one that does not necessarily replace sexual desire but complicates it, turning the passion for a person to a passion for the subject more easily and sometimes more intensely. When I was taking a class in modernist literature with Ms. Prosser in college, for instance, I would get nervous before I went to her office, trying on different outfits beforehand, and sitting there with shaking hands, not knowing what to do with myself once I sat down across from her. She was brilliant and funny, and sexy as hell. One time she complimented me on my earrings in class and I blushed dark red. I became obsessed with Virginia Woolf because this woman taught her. Female students, both straight and queer, look at female teachers as much as heterosexual male students do, but the gaze, and the intellectual inspiration that can arise out of it, is more complex.
Of course, there are few (if any) popular culture representations of nonpathological female-teacher/female-student desire. But what film theorist Jackie Stacey calls narratives of “intra-feminine fascinations” are another story. In her essay “Desperately Seeking Difference,” Stacey takes on Desperately Seeking Susan as a means by which to theorize “homosexual pleasures of female spectatorship”—simply put, a particularly female desire, sometimes sexual but not necessarily so, yet always entangled with emulation. Stacey’s point is that female-to-female desire is at its core delectably based on an identification with rather than a power over. She’s not taking hot sex out of the picture, but she’s expanding our definition of what might lie beyond as well.
And while Madonna’s Susan is not an official teacher in that film, she has a pedagogical role, initiating Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) into the New York art scene, satisfying sex, adventure, and self-knowledge. A more recent, though far less compelling, movie sets us right down in the belly of the pedagogical beast: Wellesley College in the 1950s. Formidably banal, 2003’s Mona Lisa Smile, despite its haphazard editing and Pretty Woman Professor stereotypes, does dramatize intrafeminine fascination between a teacher and her students. In shot after shot, Julia Roberts, as the bohemian art-history professor Katherine Watson, commands the looks of the girls as easily as she did those of men in her Erin Brockovich cut-offs. In Wellesley’s amphitheaterlike classrooms, she’s literally and metaphorically onstage: On her first day of teaching, when the lights are turned off and she shows her slides, she’s lit against the darkness like an old-fashioned film star—her students spectators, just like the movie audience. Only in this case, her to-be-looked-at-ness has the added layer of a pedagogical directive to look, since she is seducing her students into art history. Yet she can’t quite pull it off, at least not at first. It’s not just that she’s coded as dowdy in her neutral tones, pseudo-Indian jewelry, and peasant blouses; rather, she’s reckoning with young women who assume they already know it all, and she must break down their defenses and get them to (cue the music) Think for Themselves.
And Katherine does break through to them. The more she cracks their shells, the more the camera constructs the audience’s point of view as the girls’; we follow their eyes and see her as they do. They begin, one by one, to long for her—or for what she represents—and their creative, interpretive capacities grow. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character, Giselle Levy, is the first to be … seduced. The most sexually active of the group, as well as the only Jew suffocating under the weight of WASP propriety, Giselle at one point peers intently into a mirror, asking, half to herself, half to her friends, if she looks “like her.” Gazing at her own image and sucking in her breath, she whispers to her reflection, “I think she’s fabulous.”
We are treated to pl
enty of scenes like the one at a secret-society meeting in the girls’ lounge, where the camera pulls back to a medium shot of Katherine, smack in the center of a cluster of adoring young women who are drinking in every word that comes out of her lipstick-liberated mouth. And despite the treacly final scene where Katherine’s formerly most hostile student races after the teacher, tears in her eyes and graduation gown billowing behind her, the film does offer a window—however over-idealized—into the process by which desire inspires learning, and vice versa.
This transformation, from desire for a person to desire for knowledge, keeps teaching rewarding and learning passionate. And while this transference of teacherly temptation onto text is most familiar in our cultural imagery when the father/lover role coalesces in the body of the male teacher, an erotic pedagogy—where sublimation leads to scholarship—between a female teacher and her students is not yet impossible. Perhaps in the best of student-centered classrooms, men and women together would pick apart the following lines from “Elegy for Jane” where Roethke describes his beloved’s temper: “Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth, / Even a father could not find her.” Maybe they’d conclude that she’s not for fathers to find or a student/daughter to embody, but for all to study.
Holy Fratrimony
Male Bonding and the New Homosociality
Don Romesburg / SUMMER 2004
GAY MARRIAGE IS ALL OVER THE NEWS THESE DAYS, BUT YOU wouldn’t know it in Middle-earth. There, Frodo and Sam, the youthful heroes of Lord of the Rings, enjoy a love story as big as an IMAX screen, declaring heartfelt devotions as loud as THX allows. But there’s not necessarily anything gay about it.