Indecent Proposals: Teachers in the Movies

Abstract

ror Has Two Faces-in class no less-with Jane Gallop's essay, Teacher's Breasts, and you find an apparent contradiction. The professor played by Barbra Streisand blithely lectures about sexuality and casually acknowledges students' awareness of her breasts, shown off in a low-cut black dress; Gallop, however, contends that teacher's create a conflict about the question of sex and, thus, the question of (84-85). In Gallop's view, teacher's display of authority makes male student more not less recalcitrant, and more not less in struggle for power (86). As usual, Gallop offers a startling interpretation: breast-singular, symbolic, and maternal-is precisely imaginary organ of nurturance, what good feminist teacher proffers to her daughterstudents. Refusing to nurture, . . . bad, sexual teacher brings into discourse of feminist pedagogy not breast, which is already appropriately there, but breasts (87). By mentioning her in plural, Streisand sexualizes literature classroom, exactly as camera does when it follows boys hurrying to class or pans intensely yearning students' faces. Streisand's movie demonstrates these cultural politics, showing how female teacher's sexuality has to be managed in order to avoid threat of sexual power struggle Gallop accurately predicts. What we see in Streisand is a version of Gallop's theory: maternal breast-safe and good-is opposed to more dangerous plural breasts, offered promiscuously to class's gaze. The erotics of literature classroom in Hollywood imagination comes as no surprise. Hollywood eventually misrepresents all professions, and all voca

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