A PASSIONATE SUBJECT: REPRESENTATIONS OF DESIRE IN FEMINIST PEDAGOGY

ABSTRACT My research area is in literature and feminist theory, particularly fiction(s) and theories of the body, of women's pleasures and desires and the ways in which these theoretical discourses are being textually inscribed by contemporary women writs. As a university lecturer I am now finding those theories and fictions particularly useful in reading my role as a feminist pedagogue, and in interrogating the stories and theories in circulation about what it means to be a woman and a teacher in a university. In this article I offer a reading of some recent writing (and conversations) about the bodies and desires of feminist teachers, about their pleasures and dangers in theory and in practice. Amongst others, I draw on the work of bell hooks and Audre Lorde on 'the erotic', Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray on women's writing, Jane Gallop's critique of the maternal 'good' feminist teacher and Helen Garner's 'novel' about a sexual harassment case, to problematise the work of sexed bodies in a potentially volatile workplace. Writing through my desires is also crucial to the performance of the possibilities of desire in feminist pedagogy as I read them. Literature and pedagogy intersect for me through the pleasures of reading and writing; of learning and constructing new knowledges, and now in teaching them. So reading texts on feminist pedagogy through my position as a practising teacher and feminist theorist also involves the inscription of my body as a woman and my desire for writing which incorporates this.

I have spent the last 5 years reading and writing about women's writing; about the theories of ecriture feminine from theorists like Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous and finding points of intersection with the practice of contemporary women writers in Australia. It has become my passion and my pleasure, in making those connections and in enacting those theories in my own writing practices--especially, in recognising those pleasures as academic discourses. Through my pleasure in reading and writing, I now find myself in the position of teaching reading and writing practices in a university, and thinking about how my personal pleasures of learning might affect my practice of teaching. As is my (learned) habit, I have been looking around for other women's stories of teaching and how passion or pleasure is incorporated into their stories. Such narratives have the potential, as Carmen Luke suggests, to 'reveal patterns of how we were taught to become girls, then women; how we learned to become academic women; how we learned to teach students and teach colleagues about ourselves as scholars and women' (1996, p. 4). This is a passionate subject for me, as I regard myself as still negotiating the choices and limitations of my own position as a woman-feminist-academic in a deeply embedded patriarchal institution. In this article, then, I want to follow through some of the connections between those stories about what I will loosely term feminist pedagogy and the ways in which desire is represented in those texts. My discussion is premised on the idea that our identities are configured through our relations to various discourses, including those discourses of desire and academic teaching and its gendering of bodies; through the practice of 'writing the body' in its various manifestations. I also want to place those pedagogical narratives alongside the theories of desire that I know best, through the writing of Irigaray and Cixous. They argue that the very act of writing is an act of desire which constitutes 'the very possibility of change' (Cixous, 1976, p. 879), of intervening into representational practices. This is also my desire.

One of the first books to excite me about teaching was bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress (1994). In her chapter, 'Eros, eroticism and the pedagogical process', she writes about her early experiences in women's studies classrooms, where, she says,

there was a place for passion in that classroom, that eros and the erotic did not need to be denied for learning to take place. One of the central tenets of feminist critical pedagogy has been on the insistence on not engaging with the mind/body split. This is one of the underlying beliefs that has made women's studies a subversive location in the academy. (hooks, 1994, p. 193)

To hooks, this pertains not only to connecting knowledge to experience, or theory to practice, but to the way it is taught or embodied by the teacher. She talks about ways in which we are taught to ignore the body of the teacher, a device Catherine Waldby calls 'the fiction of the disembodied scholar' (Waldby, 1995, p. 17), whose authority lies in being seen only as 'a properly trained mind, unlocated in the specific historical experience and social position of a sexed, classed or racially marked body' (Waldby, 1995, p. 17). hooks remarks on the institutional imperative to 'fit' the white male body, which refuses to be recognised as a model:

As a black woman, I have always been acutely aware of my body in those settings that, in fact, invite us to invest so deeply in a mind/body split so that, in a sense, you're almost at odds with the existing structure, whether you are a black woman student or professor. But if you want to remain, you've got, in a sense, to remember yourself--because to remember yourself is to see yourself always in a system that has not become accustomed to your presence or your physicality. (hooks, 1994. p. 135)

hooks remembers when she first began to teach, she was perturbed by her body signalling a need to go to the toilet in the middle of a class. She writes,

I had no clue as to what my elders did in such situations. No one talked about the body in relation to teaching. What did one do with the body in the classroom? (hooks, 1994, p. 191)

I have had similar fears, not of going to the toilet, but of beginning to menstruate before a lecture. I double up in cramps, dizziness and nausea at the onset of bleeding: how does a woman teach in such a position? A friend of mine tells me that when she was teaching and suddenly thought of her 9 month-old baby, her breast milk would sometimes leak visibly onto her professional lecturer's blouse. Can this be possible? Do teachers' breasts leak and their wombs menstruate? What else might (teaching) women's bodies entail, and how does this affect their pedagogical positions?

The politics of gendered bodies in feminist pedagogical texts was addressed by Jane Gallop when she presented a paper in Australia in 1993 entitled 'The teacher's breasts'. In it, Gallop traces an ethic of maternal nurturance, symbolised in the writing by the image of the breast of the teacher:

The breast--singular, symbolic, and maternal--is precisely the imaginary organ of nurturance, what the good feminist teacher proffers to her daughter-students. (Gallop, 1994, p. 11)

This is a symbol Madelaine Grumet also draws on extensively in her book Bitter Milk: women and teaching (1988), to critique the contradictions of women's roles as teachers. The symbolic maternal is also embodied in the concept of Alma Mater, a term which is discursively constituted on the relation between women and universities as maternal. Variously translated as 'bounteous mother', 'foster mother' or 'soul mother', alma mater is also the name attributed to the Roman goddess of teaching, especially the teacher of the mysteries of sex (Walker, 1983, p. 23). This association between sexuality, maternity and teaching has been left behind in favour of the benign and self-less maternal teacher, an icon often embodied in statues at campuses across the USA (see Fig. 1).

It is interesting to note that tropes of sorority tend not to enter narratives of the feminist classroom, perhaps in acknowledgement of the very real differences in institutional power allotted to teacher and students, but also perhaps a recognition of the often unstable (and even antagonistic) relations to feminism present: a classroom does not usually bring together sisters in arms. The persistence of the asexual mother-figure does serve specific institutional purposes in continuing to deny the impact of embodied knowledge through an (apparently) benign parental role. In her response to Gallop's paper, however, Vicki Kirby questions why we have not overturned the apparent delusions of maternal stereotyping, asking,

Why is the maternal guise of benign innocence, purity of purpose and desire, natural devotion and selflessness, not openly recognised as fraudulent, and a burden of prescriptions that are ultimately paralysing for women? (Kirby, 1994, pp. 18 19)

This nexus of maternity, breasts and paralysis reminds me of Irigaray's essay, 'One does not move without the other', in which she challenges the nurturing-mother suckling-daughter discourse by having the daughter dispute the goodness of her mother's milk: 'I drank ice with your milk, mother ... You have poured into me, and this hot liquid has turned to poison that paralyses me' (Irigaray, 1982, p. 12). Irigaray plays on the French glace, which means both ice and mirror, so that mother and daughter icily mirror each other: 'I resemble you, you resemble me ... I am another living you' (Irigaray, 1982, p. 13). Not only is this milk hard to swallow, but the breast becomes stifling:

You have made me something to eat. You bring me something to eat. You feed me, you are my feed. But you give me yourself too much, as if you wanted to fill me up with what you bring me. You put yourself into my mouth and I suffocate. (Irigaray, 1982, p. 13)

What she wants--her desire--is for the social relations between mother and daughter to be alive between women, rather than being frozen through the function of mothering, endlessly exchanged between the third term of the father. The last fines of the essay lament the daughter's desire for life: 'And all I expected of you was that, letting me come into being, you would go on living still' (Irigaray, 1982, p. 14). This particular reformulation of relations between women seems relevant to the classroom, especially as Elizabeth Grosz interprets it, as 'an active subject-to-subject relation':

the mother must give the daughter more than food to nourish her, she may also give her words with which to speak and hear. The gift of language ... will always be reciprocated as food can never be: it is 'returned' to the mother 'with interest', in the daughter's new-found ability to speak to rather than at her mother ... Restructuring the mother-daughter relation, then, means that the fantasy of the phallic mother, the fantasy of a mother capable of satisfying all needs, is given up ... (Grosz, 1989, pp. 124-125)

In her response to Gallop's paper, Moira Gatens would point out the impediments circumscribed by the imposition of a familial psychoanalytic model onto pedagogical relations, which blind us to the operations of desire (Gatens, 1994, p. 13). But what happens when those relations are re-imagined outside of those traditional roles? Imagining the teacher's role as providing a 'gift of language' rather than the provision of food not only reinvests the concept of 'mothering' as positively enabling for both women, but also displaces the hierarchical model of teaching as knowledge transference into a more interactive and dynamic teaching model which feminist pedagogy claims to prefer (see Schniedewind, 1993; Shrewsbury, 1993; Thompson, 1993).

If breasts have become an embittered symbol of a stifling pedagogical practice, surely they can take on quite different meanings when freed from an oppressive maternal role.

Kate Llewellyn's poem, 'Breasts', characterises breasts as readers and bearers of knowledge. It begins,

As I lean over to write
one breast warm as a breast from the sun
hangs over as if to read what I'm writing
these breasts always want to know everything
sometimes exploring the inside curve of my elbow
sometimes measuring a man's hand

...

these are my body's curious fruit
wanting to know everything ...

(Llewellyn, 1986, p. 158)

Helene Cixous also delights in representing breasts as a source of creativity through the body of women's desires. Her textual use of milk is a means to write back to the mother, taking up the pen neither as sword nor as phallus but as ink from her own breast:

Write? I was dying of desire for it, of love, dying to give writing what it had given to me. What ambition! What impossible happiness. To nourish my own mother. Give her, in turn, my milk? Wild imprudence. (Cixous, 1991, p. 12)

Here, though, mother is not necessarily a literal mother. Cixous's passion for writing-for the pleasure of writing our bodies and our desires afresh--can happily take on the power of birth:

She gives birth. With the force of a lioness. Of a plant. Of a cosmogony. Of a woman ... And in the wake of the child, a squall of Breath! A longing for text! Confusion! What's come over her? A child! Paper! Intoxications! I'm brimming over! My breasts are overflowing! Milk. Ink. Nursing time. And me? I'm hungry, too. The milky taste of ink! (Cixous, 1991, p. 31)

Both mother and child, birth and text, come to satisfy and feed her self, in an endless overflowing of a desire to write through her woman's body; to acknowledge the body's effects in the production of discourse. As Kay Torney notes,

The breast is not usually represented as a generative or storied organ: pens/penises, and even, for the consciousness raised, uteri, are more usually imagined as the tools of literary and cultural production. (Torney, 1995, p. 20)

For Cixous, 'writing is precisely the very possibility of change' (Cixous, 1976, p. 879) through which women can inscribe for themselves and invent new desires outside of those provided by patriarchy: like being mothers or daughters, good or bad teachers. What is being written about women as teachers is therefore potent: it is a discourse which participates in shaping our desires about feminist pedagogy, as our participation in its writing can also shape that discourse. If feminist teachers are rejecting the image of the traditional maternal role as paralysing for both student and teacher, if we have no desire to fit the 'fiction of the disembodied scholar', then our teaching bodies could also be configured as female and non-maternal. Removing the parental role from the representation of women as teachers, however, brings with it the possibility of our teaching passions being eroticised as sexual.

This has been the subject of much public debate in Australia via Helen Garner's book, The First Stone: some questions about sex and power (1995), which raises questions about contemporary relations between teachers and students, women and men. In between the pages of Garner's desire to know what happened between the Master and female student in the Ormond College affair, I was arrested by the following passage:

The erotic will always dance between people who teach and learn, and our attempts to manage its shocking charge are often flat-footed, literal, destructive, rigid with fear and the need to control. For good or ill, Eros is always two steps ahead of us ... (Garner, 1995, p. 161)

Garner's narrative is organised around a trope of the displaced mother: she positions herself as a seventies feminist who can't work out why these feminist daughters are not eagerly stepping into her feminist shoes. They even refuse to speak to her about their relation to the third term--the Master of the College. Could this be an enactment of the scene of feminist pedagogy as it is constituted by familial relations? And how is this affected by Gamer apparently aligning herself with the politics of those rebellious American feminist daughters, like Rene Denfeld, Naomi Wolf and Kate Roiphe? But let us leave the family, if we can; what I want to pursue is how a concept of eros, or the erotic, can operate in such a passionate and delicate topic as sexual harassment in the pedagogical workplace.

A friend of mine articulated this complexity a few years ago when, as students, we were talking about the way we excel when we're 'a little in love' with our teachers; she said, 'You think you want to fuck them but it's really their mind you want'. Her pithy comment both confuses and collapses a desire for knowledge and a desire for a person (or a body). Those traditional and hierarchical binaries of mind-matter, reason-nature, and their corollary man-woman, are tangled up in this web. So how can we interrogate and represent our desires outside of those dichotomies? Jane Gallop performs such an act in her essay, 'Knot a love story' (1992), precisely through exposing those dichotomies. Her argument disentangles the excitement of teacher and student for teaching and learning with each other, from the continually intervening and dominating cultural narrative of romance into which, she argues, their desire for each other is interpolated. The junction of sexual desire and pedagogical desire thus constantly shifts as the overriding romance narrative, a device she employs to tell her story, is far more acceptable in this culture than a love of learning, which struggles to be told. This is Gallop's story, and I am wondering if it is a story particular to women.

bell hooks seems to concur with Gallop when she writes that 'to understand the place of eros and eroticism in the classroom, we must move beyond thinking of those forces solely in terms of the sexual, though that dimension need not be denied' (hooks, 1994, p. 194). Erica McWilliam similarly argues that pedagogy is an 'erotic field' in which 'successful teachers appropriately mobilise forces of desire (the desire to teach, the desire to learn) both of which are productive in ways which are not merely malevolent' (McWilliam, 1995, p. 15). McWilliam also insists on 'the separation of the erotic not from the corporeal but from the explicitly sexual' (1995, p. 20). I regard this as a key to the parameters between 'eros' in the classroom and sexual harassment, which in no way eroticises knowledge. McWilliam traces a heritage of women as powerful teachers through the ancient practice of teaching the erotic arts, in which:

women [gave] quite specific instruction about female bodily pleasure to other women. In this tradition, knowledge was transmitted typically through a strict procedure whereby the disciple followed step by step a woman who was 'keeper of the secrets'. (McWilliam, 1995, p. 10)

This clearly has links with the idea of alma mater being a teacher of the mysteries of sexuality. It is through this line of inquiry that McWilliam brings together a tradition of women, teaching and pleasure which, she suggests, is a site feminist teachers can reclaim to validate the erotic that can dance between people who teach and learn. This would validate Vicki Kirby's desire 'to acknowledge our passion for the power of learning, our delight in the flirtatiousness of intellectual debate' (Kirby, 1994, p. 19).

By extension, Audre Lorde considers that the pleasures of the erotic can operate in every aspect of our lives, 'whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea' (Lorde, 1984, p. 57). She argues that 'we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our life other than sex', but for her,

The erotic functions ... in several ways. The first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference. (Lorde, 1984, p. 56)

Knowledge and pleasure are also embedded in the discourse of jouissance, a term used by French feminist theorists. It represents an alternative mapping of pleasure in relation to a woman's body which challenges the sexual economy of patriarchal narratives. It is a term which is untranslatable in English as it remains ambiguous in French, moving between a number of levels of pleasure, to include sexual orgasm, spirituality, ecstasy, physical or corporeal pleasure, intellectual or conceptual joy and libidinal energy. The term is mobilised to spread the erogenous zones of women's pleasure over her entire body and all of its activities, including its writing and, presumably, teaching.

This concept of jouissance and Lorde's 'Uses of the erotic' relocate the forces of desire and erotics beyond purely sexual terms without foreclosing on them. The process of teaching and learning readily incorporates pleasure and passion. As Magda Lewis argues, 'the production of shared meaning is one of the ways we experience deeply felt moments of psycho sexual pleasure' (Lewis, 1993, p. 181). And those pleasures--our bodies of knowledge as teachers--are fundamentally embodied not only in our performance as teachers but in our lived bodies as women. As women teachers, we don't have to be represented as either mothers or men. As women, white or black, we are still in a system that has not become accustomed to our presence or our physicality, to repeat bell hooks, so we must remind ourselves of our bodies, and incorporate our leaky and inquisitive breasts and active wombs into our stories of pedagogy for others to read and write about. Similarly, our classes are comprised of many student bodies variously responding with their desires and knowledges; racial, classed and sexed bodies, able and aged bodies, maternal and non-maternal bodies: all are part of the condition of eros in the classroom, and part of the power of teaching and learning and whatever dances between. Our acknowledgement of bodies, how we write them into our stories and acknowledge their desires, inevitably affects our bodies of knowledge and the possibilities for teaching. And as with any feminist practice, this can be regarded as both a narrative strategy and a lived practice through which we read (and write) our texts, our courses, our students and ourselves in our institutions.

Correspondence: Dr Alison Bartlett, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Queensland 4350 Australia; e-mail < bartlett@usq.edu.au >.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): FIG. 1. Statue of Alma Mater at the University of Illinois. The inscription reads, 'To the happy children/Of the future/Those of the past/Send greetings' (photography by Jilli Streit).

REFERENCES

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CIXOUS, H. (1991) 'Coming to Writing' and Other Essays, D. JENSON (Ed.), S. CORNELL, D. JENSON, A. LIDDLE & S. SELLERS (tr) (Boston, MA, Harvard University Press).

GALLOP, J. (1992) Knot a love story, Yale Journal of Criticism, 5, pp. 209-218.

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By ALISON BARTLETT, University of Southern Queensland, Australia

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Source: Gender & Education, Mar98, Vol. 10 Issue 1, p85, 8p, 1bw.
Item Number: 369990