Teaching Sexualities
Chapter extracted from Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson (in press)
Schooling Sexualities. Buckingham: Open University Press and given by
Debbie Epstein as a paper at the Australian Association for Research in
Education Conference, Brisbane
30 November 4 December 1997
I drew my teacher very traditionally with glasses, conservative
clothing, in front of a chalkboard, a woman. I don't think I was
thinking about myself as a teacher but more what many of my elementary
school teachers looked like. What a stereotype! ... [I]t's funny how
many of the pictures drawn by my classmates resembled mine. _(Renee,
student teacher, quoted in Weber & Mitchell, 1995. Emphasis added by
Weber and Mitchell)_
Surveillance, survival and teaching
In chapter five, we drew together public discourses around schooling
and sexuality with a discussion of the school as an institution in
which sexualities are shaped and actively produced by participants in
schooling. This chapter will focus more narrowly on teachers both in
relation to their own sexualities in the school context and with regard
to their interactions with students and (potential) impacts on student
sexualities. In Part One of the book, we traced the ways the
sexualities are shaped through discourses of, for example family,
(male) desire, marriage, love and romance, deployed in the 'public'
spheres of the popular media, politics and the state. We pointed out
the ways that sexualities are policed, often through the deployment of
'scandal', with normative forms of heterosexuality rewarded and other
forms of sexuality, from single parenthood to same sex desire and
identity, punished more or less severely. We have also shown how
discourses of 'childhood innocence' come into play, particularly in
relation to schooling, to produce moral panics around sexuality and
schooling.
The surveillance of teachers (and schools) with regard to the 'academic
achievement' of their pupils has reached unprecedented heights in the
UK during the late 1980s and the 1990s and teachers in the Anglophone
world generally have been at the sharp end of what Jane Kenway _(1987)_
has called 'discourses of derision' _(see also, Ball, 1990)_. These
discourses, combined with those around sexuality and schooling, means
that the surveillance of teachers in relation to sexuality is
particularly strong. This is a process which disciplines all teachers
(or teaches them to discipline themselves by punishing some), but is
gendered and racialized and bears particularly heavily on teachers
identifying as lesbian and gay.
This was graphically illustrated in the case of Jane Brown, the head
teacher of Kingsmead School in Hackney, whose refusal of subsidised
tickets to take her pupils to see the ballet of Romeo and Juliet
reached the headlines in the across the Anglophone world. We have
discussed this case in somewhat more detail in chapter four.1 Here we
wish only to point out that the fact that she was 'outed' by the press
in this way led to her experiencing what amounted to a siege: she had
to go into hiding with her partner and her partner's children for a
while; she has been beaten up by young men as she left the school after
a parents' evening; her every move has been under intense scrutiny. Of
course, like other stories, Jane Brown's is not only about persecution,
but also about support and doing significantly better than just
'surviving'. The massive attacks on her led to the mobilising of
support, from other lesbians and gay men, from Hackney National Union
of Teachers (NUT) and, most significantly, from the parents of children
at her school. In March 1995 the report by the OFSTED (Office for
Standards in Education) inspection team on her school was exceptionally
positive. The relief felt at this is not so much a vindication of
inspection of this kind per se, but illustrative of the fact that, as a
lesbian, she needed to be exceptional to be seen as being 'acceptable'.
A year later, she underwent the training to become an OFSTED inspector
herself, passed the course and was offered a post, only to have the
offer withdrawn as a result of further media 'outrage'.
Teaching as seduction
Jane Miller _(1996)_ shows that the feminization of teaching since the
mid-nineteenth century has involved, among other things, signifcant
efforts to control the sexuality of women teachers. There was a long
period, for example, when women teachers were not allowed to be
married, but rather had to occupy the positions of desexualizied
spinsters. So there is a long history of wariness about teachers'
sexualities, which works together with the historical specificities of
the present moment to produce the kind of punitive surveillance which
we have described in earlier chapters.
It is, no doubt, partly because of the level of surveillance of and
moral panic around schooling and sexuality that, as we have already
pointed out in chapter five, teachers are generally de-sexualized, in
very gendered ways, through their clothing and other aspects of their
self-presentations as well as through the institutions of schooling
themselves. As Renee notes in the quote heading this chapter, the
stereotypical teacher of the Anglophone world is not only a woman but
usually imagined as 'conservative', 'with glasses', which, as we know
from Dorothy Parker, is, in and of itself, de-eroticizing.2 The ways in
which teachers work to desexualize themselves within the context of
their daily professional practice form a kind of protection in a
potentially dangerous area of their lives. Teachers are not supposed to
engage in sexual relationships with their students (quite rightly, in
our view, given the power relations involved and the potential for
abuse). Neither, as we have seen in earlier chapters, are they supposed
to admit to their students that sexuality might constitute a
significant part of their lived experience. Insofar as sexuality is
legitimately speakable by teachers in the school context, it is
domesticated and oblique (for example, through mention of a partner,
preferably a spouse, of the opposite sex), within the ghetto of sex
education (which will be discussed in chapter eight), in the context of
rebuking a student (especially a girl student) for sexualized
behaviour, or within a pastoral situation where the teacher is dealing
with the results of sexual behaviour by or towards a student (a
situation in which the teacher's options are limited by statute).
There are many senses in which teachers' sexualities remain closeted,
regardless of how they identify or the kinds of lives they lead. If, as
Eve Sedgwick _(1990)_ has argued persuasively, the closet can be seen as
an iconographic metaphor for the late 20th century, this is even more
so in relation to education. Not only are teachers' sexualities (gay or
straight), so to speak, 'in the closet', the whole of formal education
(at school and university level) in Anglophone countries can be read in
this way. Yet, as we suggested at the end of the previous chapter,
teaching can also be seen as a process of seduction. In using the term
'seduction', of course we do not mean that teachers literally seduce
their pupils in a sexual sense though this does happen from time to
time, usually between male teachers and female pupils, notwithstanding
the greater publicity given to seductions of boys by woman teachers
(see chapter four). Rather, we are seeking a metaphor to describe the
kind of thrill and pleasure which can be produced by the best teaching,
the kind of intensity of feeling, akin to love that can pass between
teachers and taught. This has been written about (and written off) in
terms of students, especially girls, having 'crushes' on their
teachers, but the importance of such feelings to pupils construction of
self can be seen in stories like Peter Redman's memory of 'Mr Lefevre'
_(Redman & Mac an Ghaill, 1997)_ which we quoted in chapter one.
Jane Miller _(1990)_ in her book Seductions uses this word as a metaphor
for the kind of attraction which women (even feminists) may feel
towards even very sexist ideas. She uses 'seduction' in order to imply
the ways that sexuality spills, sometimes messily, often ambiguously,
into women's lives, 'into their thought, their work and into the
reports they have been able in one way or another to give of
themselves' _(Miller, 1990: 2)_. She makes the point that using the
metaphor of seduction helps us to understand the ways that power is
experienced in contexts of inequality, defining seductions as:
all those ways in which women learn who they are in cultures which
simultaneously include and exclude them, take their presence for
granted while denying it, and entice them finally into narratives which
may reduce them by exalting them. (ibid )
As we have already pointed out, schools are structured in inequality,
primarily through age relations, always as inflected by other
inequalities such as those of class, ethnicity and gender. Children and
young people who attend them as pupils/students are engaged in the
important work of 'learn[ing] who they are' in a cultural institution
which both includes and excludes them and in which their presence is
essential (just as the presence of women is essential to society) but
also, paradoxically, denied in some important senses. It could, indeed,
be argued that those young people (and adults) who are the most
successful in negotiating the education system, those high achievers
who end up as university undergraduates and maybe even doctoral
students, are the ones for whom the metaphorical seduction, by ideas
and by teachers, has been most successful. And teachers, themselves,
having previously been seduced re-enter the arena of schooling to
perform, again, the act of seducing the minds and energies of their
students. As Simon commented when we interviewed him:
we all have special people in our lives, my House Master at [my grammar
school] was mine. Yeah, he made me into a teacher, not made me, but
made me into a teacher, and he developed my political ideas. Mmm, he
was a very strong influence on my life, very much so, indeed, and I'm
glad he's become very successful, cos he deserved it.
Similarly, June Levinson, _(1994: 14)_ in a strongly evocative passage,
recalls how:
When my gaze fell upon the new fourth year English teacher, ... it was
a falling in love with a future vision of myself fiercely academic
yet thoroughly approachable, teacherly but sensual. She allowed us
glimpses into her life which cast her family as solid, ordinary,
working-class Mancunians and herself as surprisingly exotic. In the
slides she showed us of her Indian trek, her normally tightly bound
hair was flowing down her back, and she looked carefree and joyful in
the embrace of her dark-skinned, Indian boyfriend _(quoted in Miller,
1996)_.
Both of these excerpts vividly capture the influence that the loved
teacher can have on a pupil. Simon's stressed 'he made me into a
teacher' and June Levinson's 'falling in love with a future vision of
myself' bespeak an intensity of feeling normally reserved for one's
most significant relationships, and, indeed, demonstrates the
significance of relationships between students and much-loved teachers.
For students, this can express itself in a love of a particular subject
which might stay with them for life, a frequent topic in the Guardian's
regular column about successful people's favourite teachers. For
teachers, on the other hand, one of the great rewards of teaching is
the buzz of pleasure obtained when students respond positively to one's
teaching. The second quote shows, too, the way these dynamics are
racialized and classed. June Levinson's teacher was seductive because
of the combination of the familiar ('solid, ordinary, working class
Mancunian') and 'exotic'. Her 'Indian trek' and her 'dark-skinned,
Indian boyfriend' added to her attractions and the 'gaze' which 'fell
upon' this particular teacher was a complex combination of colonial,
maybe Orientalist, gaze and the desire to be, as well as to be with.
And while the aspects of her life shared with her pupils offered a
seductive combination, the very act of allowing them these 'glimpses'
added to the seduction a process which we shall discuss in more
detail below, when we come to the story of 'Mr Stuart'.
Successful teaching, as Gillian Spraggs _(1994: 181)_ has argued, is 'a
kind of performative art' in which '[as] with all artists, your basic
material is yourself and your experience'. In other words, successful
teachers have to put enough of themselves into their performances,
allow enough glimpses into their own lives, to fire the imaginations of
their students. For all teachers, this is a process which can be
difficult since it demands a performance which is both revealing
(enough to be seductive) and masking (because of the required
de-sexualization of teachers). Furthermore, as well as the requisite
fascinating glimpses of the teacher's life, the seductiveness of
successful teachers is predicated on the fantasies which their
students/pupils develop about them. These fantasies may be overtly
sexual, but more often they involve the kind of identification
described by Simon and by June Levinson where the desire is to be like,
or to be, the teacher. There are also more generalised (and gendered)
cultural fantasies within the public sphere, and amongst teachers
themselves about what it means to be the ideal or perfect teacher.
These fantasies range from the teacher-as-mother figure, so common in
infant and primary schools, to discourses about discipline on the one
hand and charisma on the other. Jenny Shaw _(1995)_ argues that these
shared fantasies are productive of anxieties, many of them
(particularly, she claims, in the context of debates about single sex
schooling) about sexuality. Shaw asserts that the long-running debates
around single-sex and coeducational schooling:
serve as a defence mechanism which aims to suppress the subversive
potential of sexuality. ... Once it is seen as a discourse that serves
a defensive purpose it is easier to see that it is not really about
academic performance but about fears and fantasies which have become
attached to schooling, sexuality, separation and merging. _(Shaw, 1995:
129-139)_
Virtually everyone been to school and has had teachers whom s/he either
loved or feared, sometimes both. Our fantasies and fears relate to
these earlier experiences of schooling, and taken together with the
seductiveness of ideas, with the erotic charge of successful teaching,
and with all the transferences and counter-transferences involved in
relationships between teachers and taught are also deeply implicated
in what seems like an almost obsessive drive to desexualize schools.
The extreme nature of the wish to erase sexuality from schools is
revealed, especially, in moral panics about sexuality and schooling
(discussed in chapter four) and also in some of the parliamentary
debates about schooling, sexuality and sex education (see chapters
three and eight).
However, this drive is, as we show in this book, largely unsuccessful.
Not only is sexuality part of the coinage of relations amongst
pupils/students, it is also a major factor in many interactions between
teachers and students, and is, as we argued in chapter five, one of the
major resources for resistance to schooling on which pupils draw _(see,
also, Kehily, 1993)_. Teachers, it seems from our evidence and those of
other researchers _(see for example Rogers, 1994)_, frequently use sexual
taunts to enforce their control, especially of boys. 'Don't be such a
Nancy-boy' was a frequently cited example, used particularly when boys
were unwilling to perform particular versions of masculinity during,
for instance, physical education. Similarly, in the stories young
people told us and others working on the Sexuality and Education
Research Project about the ways they resisted schooling, sexuality
featured strongly. Many of these stories, such as the 'Christmas Kiss'
story discussed in chapter five, featured a kind of sexualised play
which challenged the authority of the teacher. For straight teachers,
this is complicated enough. For those who identify as lesbian, gay or
bisexual, such 'games' are fraught with danger _(see, also, Spraggs,
1994)_.
The limits of discretion: Neil's story
One of these dangers is that of being 'outed' against one's will. Most
lesbian and gay-identified teachers find this, at the very least, an
alarming prospect (although, as we shall see, coming out deliberately
can be done, in certain circumstances, with considerable success).
There are widespread mythologies about lesbians and, even more so, gay
men as marauding and dangerous, liable to prey sexually on young
people. These were pervasive during the age of consent debates
discussed in chapter three and, indeed, seemed to be the main reason
why MPs voted for reducing the age of consent of gay men only to 18,
two years older than the age of consent for women and for heterosexual
men. In dominant discourses, then, it is axiomatically problematic for
lesbians and gays to become teachers (or to work with children/young
people in other capacities). This means that the teaching performance,
using one's own life as the material for it, becomes immediately more
complex. In discussing these complexities, it is important to keep in
mind that they are inherent in the wider problematic of the
simultaneous absence and presence of sexualities in schools. Indeed,
the argument of this chapter is that the positioning of lesbian and gay
teachers is illustrative of and contributes significantly to the
discursive framing of sexualities in schools.
When teachers come out as lesbian or gay (or when they are 'outed'
against their will), they take a number of risks: of loss of
credibility; of incurring homophobic abuse; of being pilloried in the
popular media; of losing their privacy; and even of losing their jobs.
All the lesbian or gay teachers we interviewed during the course of our
project, whether they were out at school or not, spoke of the risks
both of coming out and of staying in the closet. Neil, for example,
told us a long story about how:
I live very close to the school I work at, not actually in the
catchment area that was a deliberate choice. But two gay friends do
live in the catchment area, and, horror of horrors, some new neighbours
moved in ... and then it turned out that the children had been
allocated a place at the school I teach in ....
Although I'm out [outside of school], I'm not sort of camp or anything
like that, and, so far as I was concerned, [my friend's new neighbours]
had got nothing to worry about, and certainly wouldn't have known
anything about it. As far as my friend's situation is concerned, his
other half is supposed to be a lodger as far as the neighbours are
concerned. He lives with his lover. Anyway, after a couple of weeks,
they started getting a lot of aggro from the neighbours including some
house bricks thrown at them through the greenhouse, and all sorts. Then
the children started shouting at them, things like 'poof' and, you
know, the usual sort of homophobic things ...
And then, just before Christmas ... the head summoned me. She said, 'I
just wanted a word with you', and I went in and she said that this
particular mother had been and complained. And I said, 'Why, I don't
teach this child?' But she said, 'She thinks you are a danger to the
children in your class' and I said, 'Well, why? Because I'm not
adequate?' and she said, 'Well, let it just be said that she considers
you to be, to have dangerous friend, friends who could be a danger to
children'.
Here, the risk of being 'outed' at school (as against in the rest of
his life) is vividly captured in the phrase 'horror of horrors'; the
safety of the closet is dubious at best. Neil's closet was immediately
endangered by the chance that his friends lived in his school's
catchment area and that their new neighbours' children attended his
school. Merely visiting his friends was enough to cause Neil's status
as a safe teacher to be threatened. The head's report that '[the
mother] considers you to be, to have dangerous friend, friends who
could be a danger to children', shows the ellipsis between having gay
friends and being supposed to be gay yourself, and between being gay
and being a danger to children. It also reveals a depth of anxiety
about sexuality and schooling, here focused on the gay teacher (or the
teacher who had gay friends), which can only be explained in terms of
unconscious fears and fantasies, perhaps based on the seductiveness of
teaching as a process.
Neil's response was, perhaps inevitably, defensive:
I said, 'Well I can assure you they are not,' and I said, 'it is no
business of hers' ... '[W]ell I've had the complaint and I have to
inform you', she said, 'I'm not complaining to you, and I'm not, um,
asking you to alter anything you've done. You're a hundred percent
professional, and I'm perfectly happy with what you're doing', she
said, 'but I'm just warning you that this women is out to cause
trouble'. She said, 'If you want me to I'll back you up with unions,
because really she [the mother] is making slanderous allegations, and
we don't even know what she is saying, outside in the playground'.
Because a lot of the communication that goes on is outside the actual
school building.
Neil's story draws attention to the dangers of being outed, through
unpredictable happenings, that might accrue to a gay or lesbian teacher
who remains in the closet. It is also demonstrates the role of gossip
more generally in policing the actions, and the identities, of
teachers. Furthermore, it shows that it is not actually within the
power of individuals to avoid such gossip, however discreet their
behaviour. Clearly, the neighbourhood hostility towards Neil's friends
had reached a pitch of queer-bashing at which personal injuries became
a distinct possibility, with 'some house bricks thrown at them through
the greenhouse'. But what was more, someone had spotted Neil visiting
his friends and this mother's complaint was the result of that. The
head's judgement of the situation was that Neil might need the support
of his union, and she was keen to back him up in this, but Neil was
more inclined to hope that things would simmer down if they were let
well alone. As he continued:
I'd rather just let the matter rest, which was fine and things have
plodded on really until June, June this year. I was just leaving the
school one afternoon and this particular women, this mother marched
into the school sort wielding the pushchair and the children in tow,
she had got another younger child, and, um, she starting screaming
abuse down the corridor at me, just as all the children were going out
of school, and parents were in and teachers were outside the rooms and
whatever, um, shouting things like, uh, I was a danger to the children,
that I was associated with pooftahs and queers, and um she would refuse
to have her children taught by me and I just very calmly sort of went
'I'm sorry not prepared to discuss this I'm not going to enter into
this, you can go and talk to the head if you want'. At which point the
deputy head came out and he sort of said to me, 'Look, move away. Just
go away. Don't get yourself involved'. And he managed to talk her into
going into the head and, um, the head reported back to me after, that
she had had the same reaction from this women that I'd just, and the
head said basically said to the women, 'Well if you are not happy with
the situation, and if you are not happy with the education that we can
offer then take your children elsewhere, you'd (be) perfectly right
to'. And she said, um, 'We are actually a very popular school, we are
actually overcrowded. There is a waiting list for children to come in',
and the youngest child had a reception place for this September and the
mother was warned that the reception place would be withdrawn, and she
had to sign to say that she understood this, and she wouldn't be able
to take up the reception place and the head even went as far as to look
round other primary schools to find to somewhere that would accept the
family. And from that point on the head said, Well I do sympathise with
you', she said. 'I'm sorry that you are in this situation', she said,
'it is just something that happens if you live close to the school'. I
said, 'Well it's not. Because I could have lived twenty miles away but
my friends still live near to the school, you know, it could just
happen out of coincidence'.
There are several things going on at this point in the story. First,
Neil is careful to establish his own cool and professional behaviour
(however he might have been feeling, a matter which, significantly, he
does not mention). Second, the mother involved apparently felt entirely
justified in her homophobic abuse of Neil. She had completely accepted
the logic of those popular common senses which position gays as a
danger to children. Since her only evidence that Neil was gay was that
he had visited his gay friends, it follows that she either thought that
only a gay person would be friendly with another gay person, or she
thought of gayness as a contagious disease _(like HIV/AIDS, see Redman,
1997)_. Third, the head reacted against the mother's homophobic abuse.
She was not prepared to condone this overt bigotry. Furthermore, the
disruptiveness of a parent making a scene (for whatever reason) in
school at a time of day when a number of parents were about, just as
the children were leaving school is something which any head would wish
to avoid both because of the possible effects on children and because
it is liable to lead to potentially damaging gossip amongst parents not
only about the teacher concerned but about the school as a whole. In
such circumstances, these events led to the head taking a firm, even
drastic, stand with the mother in question. Certainly, Neil felt more
supported than when she had gone straight to the head with her
complaints. Fourth, the head's judgement that such events are 'just
something that happens if you live close to the school' and Neil's
spelling out for her that the events were the consequence of his
friends' residence close to the school, rather than his own, reveal
that, although she was ready to stand against overt homophobia, she had
little grasp of the everyday lives of lesbian and gay teachers or of
the risks to them as a result of being outed through chance
circumstances or of the more pervasive character of sexual gossip about
teachers generally.
The support for Neil, from both head and deputy was, of course,
welcome. But it was not something he could be sure of in the absence of
whole-school policies about support for lesbian and gay teachers when
and if they come out or are outed in school. Such policies are thin on
the ground, and it was as recently as 1996 that the NUT, which has a
significantly more liberal record on this than the other teacher
unions, finally passed a resolution saying that the Union would support
lesbian and gay teachers who came out3. We shall be arguing in the
final chapter that developing policies supportive of lesbian and gay
teachers and students (out or in the closet) are an important part of
any struggle to improve schools in relation to sexuality.
Classrooms and closets/classrooms as closets: Mr Stuart's story
As is evident in Neil's story, schools, in general, are hotbeds of
gossip and this gossip is frequently about sex. Children gossip about
each other and about teachers. Indeed, such gossip forms an important
part of their preparation for meeting new teachers. Teachers gossip
about each other and about children and their families. Parents gossip
about their children's teachers (and, it seems, their children's
teachers' friends) and about the other families with children at the
school. It was all the more surprising, therefore, to come across a
situation in which there was a closing down of the usual gossip
networks as occurred in Edendale School. The Year 5 teacher, Mr Stuart,
came out as gay to the children in his class while Debbie was observing
the class.4 This was not a sudden decision. Indeed, he had been at the
school for several years and had worked hard to achieve a situation in
which coming out to pupils would be positive. He had been out to the
head and other staff for a long time. He was active in lesbian and gay
politics and had discussed this with the head, including the
possibility that he would be outed by the press. The head had been
supportive and had ensured that he would receive the support of the
school's governors should such an eventuality take place. About a year
later, and a year before Debbie had observed his class, he had met with
the head to put forward the view that he was uncomfortable about hiding
his gay identity from pupils, that it was not appropriate for him to
lie to them should they ask him questions about his personal life, and
that he did not feel that it was possible to deal with homophobic abuse
between the children adequately without coming out to them. Again, the
head had supported him and had suggested that he meet with the school's
Governing Body. At this meeting, he put forward his views and
successfully obtained their support for the idea that, should it be
appropriate, he would come out to children in the school. Indeed, one
of the parent governors commented that it was important for the
children to learn that some people were lesbian or gay.
The question arose in a session on the class topic 'Me, My Family and
My History'. Mr Stuart had asked the children to work in groups to try
to establish three 'facts' about boys and three 'facts' about girls.
They quickly discovered that this was not possible without resort to
'rude' things such as 'girls have vaginas' and 'boys have penises'. One
of the groups came up with the fact that 'girls can't marry girls' to
which Mr Stuart responded that, while this was true because of the law,
nevertheless 'women can love and live with women and men can love and
live with men'. One of the boys immediately called out 'oh, that's
disgusting'. In the course of challenging this heartfelt statement, Mr
Stuart said that he was gay. The children's immediate reaction was to
deny this because, as Elias said 'Everyone says you're not gay, because
your girlfriend is Ms Allen'. Mr Stuart responded by saying that he was
gay and loved and lived with another man, that the children had seen
his partner at school concerts and that, currently, he was feeling
quite lonely because his partner was working abroad for a long period.
At this one of the children said, in a puzzled tone, 'but we saw you
and Ms Allen and you were in the greengrocers, laughing'. Clearly, the
gossip networks had been active and the two teachers had been paired
off in the children's minds (after all, shopping for fruit and
vegetables is a very domestic act!).
Much to my surprise (and, indeed, to Mr Stuart's), his being gay did
not spread around the school. Two weeks later, for example, a child in
the other Year 5 class was in trouble for using homophobic insults, and
had no inkling that Mr Stuart was gay. When I interviewed Samantha and
Louise, I asked them about gossip:
DE: D'you sometimes gossip about each other or about Mr Stuart?
Louise: Yeah
DE: Who d'you gossip with?
Louise: Just my friends really. We don't really like spread it because it's not very nice.
Samantha: And then the teachers would know, or our friends would know.
Louise: Yes, they might think it's true and then they'll ask him and then it's not true, like rumours.
DE: Like what kind of things would that be?
Louise: Well, like, rumours
DE: Rumours, like what kind of rumours?
Louise: About, um, that two teachers like each other and that
Samantha: Yeah, Mr Stuart and Ms Allen love each other
Louise: Yeah, but then other people might find out and then if Mr
Snowden finds out anything that it's true then he might sack them. But
they're, um, they're best friends but not like, but they're best friends
Samantha: Yeah, yeah
It is clear, from the earlier classroom discussion and from the girls'
talk about 'rumours' that there had been significant gossip and
speculation amongst the children (and, perhaps, their parents) about Mr
Stuart's and Ms Allen's relationship. In fact, Ms Allen identifies as
lesbian and the two teachers are good friends both in and outside
school as well as working together in developing study programmes for
the year group. The children's speculation about their relationship
indicates processes of projection and the development of
(heterosexualized) fantasy within this primary school which are typical
of pupil/student gossip about teachers. At this stage, they are talking
both about rumours of Mr Stuart's gayness and of rumours about Mr
Stuart and Ms Allen. Indeed, we read Louise's response to Debbie's
question 'what kind of rumours' as a way of side-stepping the issue of
gayness. Samantha immediately picks up Louise's cue with an item of
heterosexual gossip. Louise, however, is still thinking about Mr Stuart
being gay, for her statement that 'other people might find out and then
if Mr Snowden finds out anything that it's true then he might sack
them' does not make sense on two counts: first, heterosexual, unmarried
teachers who become involved with each other would definitely not lose
their jobs and, as will be seen later, these girls were easily
sophisticated enough to know this; and, second, her concern is about Mr
Snowden finding out 'anything that it's true' and she knows that Mr
Stuart and Ms Allen are 'best friends but not like, but they're best
friends'. Debbie then reminds them of the classroom discussion in which
Mr Stuart came out to them:
DE: Mm. Cos I remember that came up in class one day didn't it that, when someone said --
Samantha: I think it was Levi. Just because they were talking to each other a lot
Louise: In the shop and they go to, um, they go to lunch break together
Samantha: I think they go to lunch break
Louise: That doesn't mean that they like each other, but they're just friends
DE: Well, they like each other, but like each other as friends.
Louise: I think they just go to lunch break together to talk about what
you're going to do and then you can do it after and things.
DE: Yeah.
Louise: And then they take another idea and they both do it.
DE: Yeah, because they've got the same year.
Samantha: Yeah and like, Mr West and Ms Humphrey do it as well.
DE: So it's the year group teachers.
In this part of the discussion, Samantha and Louise explore the nature
of Ms Stuart and Ms Allen's friendship. The go over what seems to be
the basis of the gossip about them, that they talk to each other a lot,
go shopping together and take their lunch breaks together. Louise makes
a distinction between them 'liking' each other, where 'like' stands for
'love', and being 'just friends' and then moves towards identifying the
friendship as, at least partly, based on working together to 'take
another idea and they both do it'. At this point, Debbie tries, once
again, to get them to talk about Mr Stuart's revelation that he was
gay:
DE: But what, what about, I mean, so you wouldn't want Mr Snowden to
hear that Mr Stuart and Ms Allen were boyfriend and girlfriend because
you know it's not true, but what about things that would be true? Would
you gossip about them?
Samantha: No
Louise: No, not really because Mr Stuart doesn't want them to know, he
just wants the class to know.
By this point, it is very clear to everyone involved in the
conversation that all three know they are talking about Mr Stuart being
gay, but no-one will name it. It is, in Eve Sedgwick's _(1990)_ terms, an
'open secret'.5 Here we see the girls aware of the secret but unwilling
to share it openly with Debbie. Meanwhile Debbie tries to get them to
talk about their secret, which, after all, they know she knows since
she was in the classroom with them when Mr Stuart came out and has just
reminded them of that. In her discussion of Henry James' Billy Budd,
Sedgwick argues that:
Both the efficacy of policing-by-entrapment and the vulnerability of
this political technique to extreme reversals depend on the structuring
of the policed desire, within a particular culture and moment, as an
open secret _(Sedgwick, 1990: 101)_.
We also begin to see, in their clear refusal of gossip and the reason
Louise offers to the effect that 'Mr Stuart ... just wants the class to
know' just how aware the girls are of the policing of gay identities
and desire through homophobia. Debbie tries to press them on this:
DE: How d'you know that? What makes you think that?
Samantha: Yeah. Maybe, if he told us and then he might not want the whole school to know.
Louise: We wouldn't have done it
DE: Why would he not want the whole school to know?
Samantha: I dunno
DE: To know what?
Samantha: To know anything really
Louise: Anything, to like uh --
Samantha: He wouldn't tell us anything personal. Maybe he'd tell us that he, his auntie got his hair cut, her hair cut and
Debbie's pressure is met with complete resistance. First there is a
repetition that 'he might not want the whole school to know' and when
Debbie tries, again, to probe, Samantha takes refuge in her 'I dunno'.
When Debbie, in frustration, asks what it is that Mr Stuart wouldn't
want known, there are two lines of resistance to naming the word 'gay',
first that Mr Stuart wouldn't want anything known about him and second
that, in any case, he wouldn't tell the class anything personal. At
this point, Debbie comes as near as she can, without actually using the
word, to saying that Mr Stuart is gay and this finally prompts the
girls to talk about homophobia (though still not saying that Mr Stuart
is gay):
DE: Well, he did tell you about his boyfriend going to America, didn't he?
Louise: Yeah
Samantha: Yeah, but, he doesn't want, really, everyone at the school to know.
Louise: Maybe he does but, I don't know, I wouldn't really spread it because --
Samantha: Cos, it, people go a bit funny in this school about
Louise: Yeah and then they'd go, they'd jump around and tell
Samantha: Their mum and dad
Louise: and then they'd say 'is it true?' or something. And maybe
their mum and dad will think that he's a bad teacher and then they'll
think that 'oh no, my son is going to be, like, um, don't want my
daughter, he's going to be like that, so I'm going to take my kid away
from the school' and tell Mr Snowden about him and he could be sacked
DE: D'you think that would happen?
Samantha: No.
Louise: No, not really, cos, most grown-ups are, um, grown-up about it but some aren't really. Some are.
Samantha: Yeah, but, um, Mr Snowden knows, I think
Louise: Yeah, probably does. I think most of the teachers do, but that
could happen and then the parents might think that he's a bit strange.
Samantha: Strange.
Louise: So that if he's in class and they might take their child out.
DE: So you would be, like, really worried about Mr Stuart and what would
happen to him? It sounds like you'd be really kind of, protecting him,
yeah?
Louise: Yeah, we don't, cos we don't like supply teachers at all really.
Samantha: I know, cos we don't want a new teacher.
It is clear that the children are absolutely aware that homophobia is a
feature of the 'particular culture and moment' that they have to
negotiate and that gay desire is policed hence, perhaps, the reversal
involved in identifying Mr Stuart and Ms Allen's friendship as a
romance. They know that 'most grown-ups are grown-up about
[homosexuality], but some aren't really'; they know, or think they
know, that the head teacher is aware of Mr Stuart's gay identity; they
are aware of the potential dangers of coming out and seem to have made
a conscious (or semi-conscious) decision to build a kind of closet
around the classroom. They have done so in order to protect their
teacher since they 'don't like supply teachers' and 'don't want a new
teacher'. The children have a standard of comparison, here. While
Debbie was observing the class, Mr Stuart had been away for nearly
three weeks on jury service. The supply teacher taking his place had
fallen significantly below the standards that Mr Stuart set himself,
particularly in relation to the respect he offered the children. We
would certainly read their not wanting a new teacher as implying a
positive comparison of Mr Stuart with other teachers and, indeed, of
their feelings towards him.
In discussing this transcript with others in a variety of academic
seminars and in-service sessions with teachers, it has been suggested
that the a contributory factor to the children's closeting of their
classroom was that they were fearful that, as members of his class,
they themselves might be tainted with the stigma associated with
gayness. Certainly, this may be the case for some of them, but that is
not how it felt to Debbie in this conversation. It seemed to her at the
time, and it seems to us looking at the transcript, that the wish to
protect Mr Stuart predominates heavily over other feelings. Earlier in
the chapter we quoted from June Levinson to discuss how seductive it
can be for children when a teacher shows them glimpses of their lives.
Certainly, the children in Mr Stuart's class seemed to love him (not
only in this conversation, but throughout the period of Debbie's
observation). The seductiveness of Mr Stuart's actions here was not
erotic, but consisted of inviting these 9-10 year olds to see his world
from his point of view, treating them with a respect rarely accorded to
children and, in so doing, entering into a kind of social contract with
them: he would treat them respectfully and they would protect him.
Indeed, one of the (many) negative effects of the punitive surveillance
of teachers which we have described, is that it is likely to undermine
this kind of respect for children. It can be risky, the costs too
great, and it requires a certain courage to proceed in this way when
the system is stacked against you.
Mr Stuart is happy about having come out to his class, though it is a
process which he recognises he will have to go through again and again
with no guarantees as to the results. He has written about coming out
at school in the Times Educational Supplement (TES)6, has appeared on
television, has been reported on in some of the tabloid press and has
frequently run workshops for other lesbian and gay teachers about
coming out. He certainly regards coming/being out at school as
providing him with a sounder and more reliable protection than trying
(perhaps unsuccessfully) to remain closeted. Neither would he be happy
to depend on his friendship with a woman teacher, even if, like Ms
Allen, she is a lesbian, to provide camouflage for both with gossip
making them appear straight. But he is also aware that the choices he
has made may limit his possibilities in terms of future jobs. He would
not, for example, be willing to work at a school where he could not be
out (and, in any case, it might prove difficult to put this particular
genie back in the bottle given his public stance) and, especially in an
era where schools are very concerned about marketing themselves7, this
could prove a problem.
Disciplining the Other, Constructing the Norm: Harry's Story
Notwithstanding the apparent ease with which Mr Stuart, in a school
with a strong and sympathetic head, was able to come out, for lesbian
and gay identified teachers the fears and fantasies which abound within
and about the profession are, perhaps, particularly acute. The
'horror', which Neil alluded to, of being outed is often avoided by
dint of distancing oneself from anything to do with lesbian or gay
sexuality. This was a telling part of Harry's account of himself as a
teacher:
DE: You were saying that you felt like you had to definitely play a part?
Harry: Oh yes, yes!
DE: Can you tell me a bit about the part?
Harry: The part, I guess the part was to emulate the straight male teachers.
DE: What does that entail?
Harry: It entailed initially hitting pupils and being physically
violent, or physically intimidating and (taking a deep breath ) trying
desperately not to appear soft.
DE: Yeah? Because that was the give-away?
Harry: That seemed to be the give-away, yeah. .. I think that perhaps I
was also steering clear of talking about anything that would suggest,
give the children an opportunity to point the finger at me, or ask that
awful question, which children in school are perfectly capable of
asking
What is captured here is the strongly felt necessity to take any means
available to avoid the inference that he was gay. Harry has to cut and
stretch himself in painful ways in order to avail himself of the
sources of recognition which he needed, to make himself recognizable as
a teacher. What is clear, in this interview, is that there is more to
the horror of being outed than the risk of losing one's job. The
exposure of this part of his identity, one which he was not at ease
with anyway, seems at least equally important here. Harry's evident
distress during this part of the interview was compounded by his view
that hitting children and being physically violent was both wrong in
itself and constituted a truly terrible form of pedagogy. His chosen
form of defence, then, was far from the seduction which we have argued
earlier in the chapter is a key element in successful teaching.
The general presumption of heterosexuality, which we have identified
elsewhere as a primary manifestation of heterosexism _(see Epstein &
Johnson, 1994)_, works as a technology of the self in the production and
policing of teacher identities. In Harry's case, the distance which he
perceives as necessary to avoid the danger of being identified as gay
by his pupils is achieved by dint of adopting an extreme version of a
style of teaching in which he consciously (at least in retrospect)
performs his gender as what he describes as 'straight macho'. Harry's
performance draws, in horribly poignant ways, on (straight) male
privilege. It is significant that he was able to associate himself with
heterosexuality by resorting to violence. That this simply would not be
available as a strategy for lesbian women tells us much about the
structuring of the sexual politics of schools.
Some lesbian teachers try to 'heterosexualize' their performances in
order to fit in to schools and escape identification as lesbians.
Gillian Spraggs, for example, talks about teaching her subject
(English) 'in a mode of rigid and safe academicism' _(1994: 181)_. Sarah
O'Flynn _(1996: 86)_, in her examination of the many different ways in
which lesbian teachers teach and survive in schools, argues that some:
seek to establish a sense in which we are the same. It involves
minimising difference and literally working psychically to create that
sense of similarity with the heterosexual majority. Nevertheless,
having success at this needs maintenance. It involves investments of
time and energy and achieving success at it in one location, doesn't
necessarily mean one will be able to repeat the process elsewhere.
There is a sense in which one is confined in one's job. Conversely,
being completely out can also result in this.
This, as we noted above, is one of the costs to Mr Stuart of his
success in coming out in his present school.
Technologies of the self: dressing not to impress
On a different note, Didi Khayyat writes about the way that she handled
herself as a secondary school teacher:
One of my students that summer, a young woman of about nineteen, took
it upon herself to 'expose' my sexual preference. I knew that her
intentions were not malicious but that she was acting out her
attraction to me. ... The more she goaded me about my sexuality, the
more I ignored her and the more she made her accusations publicly.
Because my other students liked and respected me, their response was to
silence her, to disbelieve and discredit her intimations that I was a
lesbian. To them, I was a teacher they liked; therefore I could not be
a lesbian. _(Khayyat, 1992: 1-2)_
Here we see simultaneously the presumption of heterosexuality and the
erotic charge involved in a relationship between a successful and
charismatic teacher and her students. Indeed, the (usually homo-erotic)
'crush' which the adolescent girl has on her favourite teacher is
commonplace, famously in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie _(Spark,
1969/first edition 1961)_, and within the school story genre more
generally, but also in many adult women's memories. But these crushes
are meant to be a phase and their very ubiquity perhaps contributes to
the notion which frequently meets lesbian and gay identified people
when they come out, that they will 'grow out of it'. The frequency of
homo-eroticism within the teacher-pupil/student relationship may also
make the performance of heterosexuality a feature of much teaching, but
perhaps particularly salient for lesbian or gay teachers.
Of course, it is not only lesbian and gay teachers whose sexuality is
disciplined and for whom the performance of conventionally gendered
heterosexuality is a requirement. The teacher's 'uniforms' discussed in
the previous chapter are, indeed, heterosexually desexualized! And for
women teachers, particularly, this is complicated by issues of age and
appearance. Jane Miller _(1996)_ points out that:
Brains, looks and clothes become interchangeable terms in the covert
regulation of women teachers and their potentially wayward sexuality.
Some of us asked in the early seventies if we might wear trousers to
work. To do so was regarded as brazen, unprofessional and political.8
So several already 'naturally' trousered persons gave much judicious
thought to the issue. The decision eventually went our way, but was
relayed to us with a list of caveats evincing a positively unseemly
interest in anatomy and current fashion. Trousers could only be worn as
part of what was known then as a 'trouser suit'. Bums must not be seen.
And there was also a list of the kinds of trousers we might absolutely
not wear: ones made of denim or jersey, for instance, and ones which
were either tight or flared. It was not, of course, that any of the
women who availed themselves of these new liberties bothered much with
the detail. But we yielded to the convention which lets men wear what
they like, so long as it includes trousers, while exercising what is
allowed as control over female dress in the interests of
professionalism.
This may seen unimportant. It stands in, however, for some central
ambiguities. The possible sexual provocations of a young woman teacher
may be used to cancel her professional competence and judgement. Just
as the absence of sexual provocations in an older woman teacher may
exile her from the human altogether. Both are assessed not as workers
but as more or less desirable women and as more or less well adjusted
to a small number of fundamentally sexual roles. _(Miller, 1996: 16)_
In some ways, Jane Miller's account of 1970s discussion of the wearing
of trousers may seem quaintly anachronistic in the 1990s. However, its
continuing relevance is evidenced not only by the teacher uniforms we
saw in our school observation, with denim, for example, still seeming
almost unwearable by women teachers. It is also striking that mid-1990s
panics about violence in schools have been accompanied by comments
about the deleterious effects to children's values if teachers do not
dress appropriately and even the suggestion from some Conservative MPs
that teachers should be compelled by law to dress 'smartly'. Our
observation would indicate that such legislation would be an
unnecessary addition to teachers' disciplining of themselves through
their dress. For women teachers, dressing 'neutrally', in ways which
de-eroticize their bodies, may be an important strategy for trying to
avoid sexual harassment from male staff and students which, as
Valerie Walkerdine _(1981)_ has shown can take place with boys as young
as three. For them to wear clothes which drew attention to 'their
potentially wayward sexuality' runs the risk of attracting the male
gaze on themselves as heterosexual objects.
Both male and female teachers are expected to display an acceptable
face of heterosexuality. But it seems from our research that
heterosexual male teachers are less likely than either gay male or
women teachers to suffer severe consequences for behaviours which are
deemed inappropriate. For example, Julie King, a senior teacher in one
of the schools where we did our research, recalled how:
There were like and still are like two members of staff and without
exception each year group complained that these two male members of
staff continually invaded their personal space and they found it
uncomfortable and unpleasant and it made them feel very uneasy. And in
fact it was reported to the head about these two members of staff and I
know with one of them there had been several incidents of, more than
just harassment really, quite sort of reported cases of things like
going off with a girl after being at the pub for lunch and then
bringing her back couple of hours later, that kind of thing, and the
head did investigate several of these cases with the union, but
nothing, it was very difficult to prove, in fact impossible to prove
and the head couldn't take any action because of it being I mean the
other person's like the union rep, he's the union rep whose very clever
on sort of union issues and just could never be brought to task for it.
And the other one, the other person mentioned by these girls is ... the
head of [lower] school and I reported that he was, um, that the girls
were complaining about him invading their personal space and to try and
respect their personal space in the future, but he does still
contravene it on occasions. I mean, um, but it's nothing that, it's
just sort of you know, get into a class or sort of making sexual
innuendoes that make them feel very uncomfortable. With the other
member of staff, for the last couple of years it's all been quiet on
the western front, I think the last case, because there was a
complaint, a parent made quite a serious complaint about him kissing a
girl. But again he denied it and the union were in and there was no,
it's a very serious allegation as you know and you've got to be able to
conclusively prove it.
It is virtually impossible to imagine a similar result in respect of an
equivalent parental complaint about either a women teacher kissing a
boy or a teacher of either sex kissing a pupil of the same sex, both
because they would be less likely to be offered adequate union support
_(Bartell, 1994; Spraggs, 1994)_ and because of the high possibility,
even likelihood, that their case, with or without conclusive proof,
would end up being spread across the tabloid press. It would seem,
then, that while the sexualities of all teachers are policed, the
disciplinary process is more likely to take a coercive turn in the case
of those who depart from the norm of the (white) heterosexual male.
In this chapter, we have been concerned to explore 'Teaching
Sexualities' by examining the experiences of lesbian and gay identified
teachers. As we have seen, the particular patterns of self-discipline
in their case, engendered by the panoptical gaze of, among others,
students, parents, the popular media and politics, can tell us much
about the ways that sexuality is played out in the school system. The
seductiveness of successful teaching may produce anxieties which
produce and feed upon scandalous stories in the popular press,
particularly in relation to gay and lesbian teachers who are, it seems,
automatically assumed to be dangerously attractive to their pupils. The
act of teaching seduction is a delicate, complex one, vulnerable to the
crudity of the disciplinary processes attendant on the surveillance of
teachers. Even to discuss these issues may raise the hackles of some.
We fully expect this book (and in particular this chapter) to cause a
scandal about 'trendy educationists' who say that teachers should
seduce children!9
Notes
Reference
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Miller, J. (1996). School for Women. London: Virago.
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1 For the implications of this case in terms of local politics, see
Cooper _(forthcoming)_
2Dorothy Parker's well-known couplet reads 'Men seldom make passes/At
girls who wear glasses' _(Parker, 1979)_ in Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations (1977: 368 16)
3Prior to this, the NUT's most recent advice to lesbian and gay
teachers was that 'ordinarily personal sexuality is not a matter for
discussion with pupils'. It then advised that, should the question
arise, teachers should try to 'draw the questioner into a more general
consideration of relationships' _(National Union of Teachers, 1991)_
4This discussion draws on Epstein _(1997)_
5This is a theme to which Sedgwick constantly returns.
6In order to retain the promised anonymity of the school, we are
refraining from giving the reference for this article. 'Mr Stuart' is,
as with other names, pseudonymous. Obviously, his public political
activities make him and his school traceable (though, interestingly,
the tabloid press have not mentioned his school by name, even when
writing about him as a person), but that is something he has negotiated
directly with the head and governors. Debbie's undertaking, as a
researcher going into the school, was not to identify the school in her
writing.
7See also, Epstein_(1994)_ and _(Epstein & Kenway, 1996)_
8Debbie's first experience of school inspection by one of Her Majesty's
Inspectors in the early 1970s is memorable for his main comment on the
quality of teaching that he did not like to see women teachers in
trousers!
9The British Sociological Association Conference in 1994 was on the
them of 'Sexualities in Socieity'. This produced a major outburst from
the press, ranging from moral outrage in the tabloids to trivialization
of the issues in even the most liberal broadsheets. We know of one
paper about sexuality and education which was withdrawn, after the
author had been pursued by the Daily Mail in the period immediately
before the conference took place.