Right to Sex (9781526612571) by Srinivasan Amia

Author:Srinivasan, Amia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Pub Plc

In ‘Eros, Eroticism and the Pedagogical Process’ bell hooks writes of her experience as a new professor: ‘No one talked about the body in relation to teaching. What did one do with the body in the classroom?’33 What you are supposed to do or not do with your body, and with your students’ bodies, is something university teachers do not, as a rule, talk about. Or, when they do talk about it, the discussion has almost always been set up by anxious administrators, in the form of mandatory sexual harassment training – training that has little to do with what is special or particular about the pedagogical relationship. Lessons from the workplace are transferred to the classroom, with no thought given to the way teaching might be characterised by peculiar risks and peculiar responsibilities.

Sometimes these conversations happen informally. A friend of mine, a young professor of law, recently described to me the awkwardness of sharing a gym with his undergraduates. They are free to look at his body, he said, while he ‘of course pretends they don’t have bodies at all’. I like that he said ‘of course’: it is self-evident to him that he cannot be a good teacher while also contemplating his students to any degree as potential sexual partners.34

But this is not self-evident to many, sometimes with poignant consequences. Another friend, when he was a graduate student, was mortified to learn that some of his women students were complaining that he stared at their legs when they wore shorts or skirts to class. No one had told this graduate student what it might mean for him, as a man, to teach under patriarchy: that if he just let his gaze go where it ‘naturally’ went, let his conversations and interactions with his students proceed as they ‘naturally’ might, he would likely fail to treat his women students on equal terms with his male students. No one told him that, unless he stopped himself doing what came ‘naturally’ to him, he would likely end up treating the women in his class not fully as students, but also as bodies to be consumed, prizes to be won, emotional reservoirs from which to draw. What’s more, no one had told him that his women students, raised as they had been on unequal terms from the start, might well go along with it. As a result, the young women he taught had been let down. But so, too, had this graduate student, whose own teachers had failed to teach him how to teach.

In 2019, Danielle Bradford sued the University of Cambridge, from which she had recently graduated, under the UK’s Equality Act for its gross mishandling of her complaints of persistent sexual harassment by a graduate student instructor. The university had upheld Bradford’s claim, but the only action it took was to insist, first, that the instructor write Bradford a letter of apology, and second that he have no further contact with her – a condition the university ensured would be met partly by restricting Bradford (not her harasser) from entering certain campus buildings.

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