On the Erotics of Pedagogy
Jennifer Maher / SPRING 2004
WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN, MY ENGLISH TEACHER ASSIGNED THE class a poem by Theodore Roethke titled “Elegy for Jane.” In the poem, Roethke mourns the death of Jane, “[his] student, thrown by a horse,” eulogizing her “neckcurls” and “pickerel smile.” The randy Roethke (who, in fact, had numerous affairs with his students) ends his poem with this lament:
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
I read “Elegy for Jane” then as a romantic idealization of the relationship between me and my own randy high-school teacher, Mr. Miller, with whom I was in love. I thought the poem spoke to the desperate desire between us that couldn’t find its form, since, like Roethke to Jane, he was neither father nor lover to me.
Coming across this poem years later, I’m more than a little troubled by its representation of the not-quite-fatherly father figure who transmits his admiration and lust via the metaphor of female student as dead bird. At the same time, though, part of me is still touched by “Elegy for Jane,” with a nostalgia
based on a remembrance of my young student self. Thoroughly male-identified, I was as happy, to quote from the poem, as a “wren [with its] tail into the wind” to imagine myself “trembling the twigs and small branches” while my handsome teacher in his Levi’s and tie whispered words of love over my damp grave. Obviously, being female (and, well, dead), these were words that I could only inspire, not write. For a disaffected smart girl like me, poetry by men like Roethke was pure pornography.
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 on 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.