- Contested Bodies
I was teaching advanced composition in my institution’s rigorous winter mini-session in which students must generate fifteen to twenty pages of polished writing in a mere seventeen days. This accelerated pace requires the professor to be supple, and often improvisational, in pedagogy to guide these students to enhanced literacy and to expand their cognitive processes. During that intense winter session, two moments (one fleeting, one serious) challenged my pedagogical notions about the process by which we impart knowledge and elicit thoughtful writing by raising questions about what it means to have a body in the classroom.
The fleeting moment involved a student e-mailing me for assistance on his research paper, and after I returned his draft, heavy with comments, he replied with thanks and congratulations to me on my “engagement.” Indeed, I was engaged at that time, but I had not announced my engagement in that class, or to any of my classes for that matter; I found out months later (by happenstance from that same student asking for an academic recommendation) that he’d found out from a pal whose chum was my graduate school classmate and Facebook friend, and thanks to the (lack of) privacy settings on Facebook then, my status was known within three degrees of separation. We all face these moments of wondering who knows what about us, which are increasingly relevant in a twenty-first-century academy.
The second, and more serious, incident was more immediately problematic: while watching Michael Haneke’s psychologically disturbing 2001 film The Piano Teacher, a student collapsed. It turned out she fainted, since she hadn’t eaten all day, but in that fainting moment, there was pandemonium, ambulances, ineffectual bureaucrats, and fifteen other students staring: they stared at her, and they stared at me, presumably for my reaction as the “authority” figure. The first EMTs, responding down Park Avenue in Manhattan, were in their own car accident at our corner, so my class was able to watch the melee of an ambulance respond to its own accident while we waited for another ambulance to tend to my student, their classmate, who had fainted and was visibly uncomfortable with our fretting over her. Once she was pronounced fine by the second EMTs dispatched, I dismissed the [End Page 183] class and spent time with this student, listening to her as she expressed her mortification. Her concern was not with her health. Her concern was that by fainting in such a public space, she made her body the object of (a/our/my) gaze. Lisa W. Loutzenheiser and Lori B. MacIntosh (2004: 152) considered this notion when they reflected on the epistemology of the term queer and, in making connections to the “Otherness” of the queer subject’s body, also made links to any body that is not conducive to a heteronormativity ubiquitous in most structures and institutions. They note these bodies are subject to trauma and violence often enacted through “silencing.” And as I looked through the photo roster for that class later that night, I saw what she saw: a majority of white, presumably heteronormative, gender-normative, skinny college kids, who, passively, through these “normative” privileges, indict this student’s body when she faints. (Note that I’m consciously not soliciting student testimonies here about the incident, as the verisimilitude of the moment is less germane to this article than the perception I had and how it fulminated a larger discourse on the gaze, social media, and bodies. In some ways this is my minority testimony, and that perceives a normative lens in that classroom space.) I wondered how they saw me—not just in identity terms, but also the devices of seeing, no longer restricted to eyeballing a physical body but now expanded to the bodies we produce in social media, in our web presence as part of our departments, and, of course, our body of writing. I’m reminded here of Brenda Jo Brueggemann and Debra Moddelmog’s (2002: 332) formulations in which they reflect on the risk/reward dyad of coming out in the classroom and anticipate not only new media concerns but also the connections to disability studies...