School-smart and Mother-wise by Wendy Luttrell

Author:Wendy Luttrell [Luttrell, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317959090
Google: _eOCCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-02-04T05:06:46+00:00

Who gains by the “good” girl value construct as represented and lived out in the teacher’s pet contest? It would be simpleminded to suggest that only boys benefit, gaining more freedom of expression and attention (although empirical research does lend credence to this point).13 More important, how are we to explain the tenacious resonance of the teacher’s pet theme across all the women’s stories? There are ideological and psychological issues that require attention if we are to appreciate the full force of the pet contest and why women might want to compete in it.

The women understood the relationship between teachers and their pets as a form of patronage, whereby teachers chose individual students to be theirs to “own.” The pet’s ability to succeed thus depended on her patron, the teacher. According to the terms of this relationship, the patron promised support, encouragement, and praise in exchange for the pet’s productivity and achievement. Additionally, the association was understood to be a unique, one-to-one alliance between a particular teacher and a particular student (your pet cannot also be my pet). As a result, the women learned to view knowledge and power as personalized and individual rather than collective or social Moreover, this personalized and infantilized image as the teacher’s pet (the human pet being an infantilized person) connoted an affective bond. Being someone’s pet suggested an emotional or even erotically tinged bond between pets and their owners (as in the common expression, “petting”).14 However, the relationship between teachers and pets was charged with deception, which diminished the pet’s sense of self and worth, as women attested. Girls participating in such associations were seen or saw themselves as presenting a false self to attract the teacher’s attention. Moreover, because a pet’s achievements and school knowledge were gained through such deception, their accomplishments were viewed as suspect. Put somewhat differently, the women who could not perform as a pet felt unrecognized by the teacher, while the women who had been able to perform as a pet felt misrecognized by the teacher. Both cases were unsettling to the women’s identities as learners.

The women’s description of school as a teacher’s pet contest also illustrates the complexity of female objectification—how the experience of being or not being a desired object, a pet, was both distressing and pleasurable. We can interpret the teacher’s pet phenomenon as part of subject/object splits that are gendered. As Muriel Dimen writes:

Subjects, in our cultural and intrapsychic representations, are men. The subject says, “I want.” The subject, “Man,” desires. Since men represent authorship, agency and adulthood, women as adults are expected to be subjects too. At the same time through splitting that occurs equally on cultural and psychological levels, women are also expected to be objects (“object” here meaning not the intrapsychic representation of persons, as psychoanalysis uses the term, but “thing,” as the vernacular has it). As inanimate things, women are represented to be without desire, to be the targets of the subject’s desire. If subjects want, objects are there to be wanted.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.