in the Geneseo Compass January 1992

“Just the Facts, Ma'am": The F-word on SOFI's and in Life

At the convention of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco last month, there was -- amid papers on John Donne, Dante, and Emily Dickinson -- a session entitled “Antifeminist Harassment in the Academy." After a witty paper dealing with women's supposed lack of humor, and twenty minutes of Annette Kolodny insisting that she administrates more kindly and gently, Dale M. Bauer (English, Univ. of Wisconsin), author of “The Other 'F' Word: The Feminist in the Classroom," (College English [April, 1990]), spoke. Reading her handout, a fine selection of comments that praised her for her “very in-depth knowledge" while damning her for “letting her own opinions ruin an otherwise excellent and informative course," I had a powerful sense of déjà vu. Returning home to dig out six years of SOFI's, not only have I found the sort of unacknowledged conflicts of discourse that Bauer discussed in her paper, but also an alarming trend in the nature and frequency of these comments, some of which I list below. Included are the responses of each student to item #1 (The course increased my knowledge. . . . ) and #2 (The instructor increased my knowledge . . . .) and the grade each student expected to receive.

Humanities I
-Dr. Walker is extraordinarily knowledgeable, and we learned a great deal in her course. I occasionally question her tact and her objectivity in presenting the material. This isn't a course in feminism. 5,5,B
-Dr Walker prides herself in being a professor that cares whether her students learn something in Hum I or not. It is good to see professors like that when one is paying to attend college. . . . Because of Dr. Walker's EXTREME feminism, I feel like I'll receive a lower grade in this class than I otherwise would because I have a penis. 4,4,B
-Although the course and the teacher were interesting the teacher taught it with a very strong bias toward women. I think she could have been much more objective and selected paper topics that did not have to be written from such a feminine point of view. 4,3,B
-J. Walker is a good, thorough instructor. J. Walker is learned and experienced and displayed enthusiasm -- sometimes. Other times she was moody and crabby, and took it out on students by delivering obnoxious comments about things that are not her business, constant feministic remarks were annoying. Hum I is a good course, however, the instructor, although knowledgeable, was obnoxious and feministic. 5,5
-Some of the books covered should not be used such as Book of the City of Ladies, which was nothing more than a feminist essay. The excessive amount of feminism in the class was also quite nauseating.2,2,C
-Definitely keep Book of City of Ladies. Although at first I thought it would be a feminist book, it wasn't. It was quite interesting and enjoyable to read. It ties all books together.3,3,B
-Class is very interesting, my attention was almost always held. Lecturing was not dry. Your opinions are too often shown or spoken about the subject we're discussing. Everything was looked at from a feminist point of view. 4,3
-Professor Walker was an interesting teacher. She could usually turn the lamest class or text into something interesting. However, sometimes I think her feminist attitude got in the way of her teaching. She was very opinionated on the role of women in society and made it clear as to what she thought should be changed. . . . All in all a good class with a good teacher.4,4,B
Shakespeare I
-This course needs a feminist subtitle. Although feminism might be necessary to teach to English students, I don't think it should color Shakespeare to such a great degree. 4,4,A

Brit Lit I
-Often, her opinions are strong and she makes them well known. I found this very intimidating, especially in an English course where interpretation is the primary focus. All in all, I found the class stimulating and did learn a great deal. 5,5,B
-I respect her knowledge in subject area, but resent the chip she has on her shoulder. I do not appreciate being force-fed knee-jerk reactionary feminist bull shit, and I resent stabbing remarks she has a tendency to fire off. We as students pay teacher's salaries to perform a service to us. Do the job, drop the crap.4,3

Milton
-Very Sarcastic Woman! 5/5,C
Lit Forms: Myths of Gender
-She has changed my opinions concerning feminists throughout the semester. I had previously an incredibly negative stereotype tagged on these people and am now somewhat more openminded.5/5,B
-The class was interesting. Though entitled “Myths of Gender" it had a definite female slant. The title could have been “Myths of Female Gender" and had the exact same material. More representation of Male Gender Myths are needed to keep the course balanced. I found all other aspects of the course to be challenging and insightful. 4,4,B
-fair, but holds a strong view on feminism 3,3,B
-Good class to take if the teacher was not so opinionated. 3,3,B
-Dr. Walker is a good professor but she needs to be a bit more perceptive to the fact that the world will continue to sexist even if women aren't equal to men. She has a tendency to be moody and harsh but over all, has good intentions and good teaching methods. She's easy to understand and an interesting speaker. She just needs to relax a little. 3,3,C

"Good class to take if the teacher was not so opinionated."

To borrow a great line from a bad source: I am a professor, not a potted plant. I profess opinions; the time and temperature I merely articulate. “I found [her opinions] very intimidating, especially in an English course where interpretation is the primary focus." Let's catch that last part again, please. Interpretation is the primary focus? And how do we get interpretation without opinions? This student is convinced of two things: 1) that there are INTERPRETATIONS of the text -- THE interpretations, don't you know -- which are part and parcel of the canon and which will Be On The Final; and 2) it is my job gently to elicit from students carbon copies of those interpretations.

No, I do not mean to imply that student resistance to professors' opinions is limited to feminist professors. Many of my non-feminist colleagues encounter similar remarks when teaching literature or Humanities courses. But those complaints are not linked to gender, do not include phrases such as “knee-jerk reactionary feminist bull shit." Now let's think that one through. Just for starters, can there be such a thing as a reactionary feminist? (Even Camille Paglia, that wolf in ewes' clothing, is not a “reactionary feminist"; she is simply not a feminist.) And a feminist bull? “Well, you know what I mean," the student would no doubt protest. “Yes," I would respond, “indeed I do. You mean that my knowledge of the subject matter, knowledge which you say you 'respect,' is ultimately less important than the fact that I make you uncomfortable with your assumptions." For this student, my knowledge of English literature is something entirely apart from my observations about the objectification of women in sonnet sequences. “The instructor, although knowledgeable, was obnoxious and feministic." Same song, different verse. In the classroom I am supposed to be knowledgeable and to dish out “just the fact, ma'am." But what are facts? Are not the baseball card trades made by Abram and later Isaac of their wives for asses and camels some FACTS of Genesis?

So I must find a way to present these FACTS with no “obnoxious comments about things that are not [my] business, [or] constant feministic remarks [which are] annoying." And when Creon says of Hamon's plan to marry Antigone “there are other fields for him to plow" or when Virgil describes Camilla as having “a female's love of plunder and spoils" while everybody from Turnus on down is plundering like mad, how does a “knowledgeable" professor present these lines without being “annoying"?

"This course needs a feminist subtitle."

In that senior Shakespeare course, I presented a number of critical perspectives to display the variety of tools available for tinkering with a text. I taught six plays from four different critical perspectives, one play (Lear) from no perspective at all, and three texts -- the sonnets, "Venus and Adonis," and Twelfth Night -- from an unapologetically feminist perspective. And yet no one has ever called me a semiotician, a cultural materialist (or even a Marxist), neo- post- or otherwise a Freudian, a new historicist, or dumb -- although I always admit I have no idea how to teach Lear.

Even more exaggerated, and therefore more revealing, is the complaint of the Hum student about Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). Of the ten texts I taught, nine are by male authors and no one (except the chair of the Womyn's Action Coalition this last semester) has ever objected to that fact. But one text by a woman is “nauseating," although my male colleagues who assign de Pizan are not accused of an “excessive amount of feminism." Similarly, when I replace the oft-used “pretend you are Dante the pilgrim" paper assignment with “pretend you are Christine the scholar," I am told that I “could have been much more objective and selected paper topics that did not have to be written from such a feminine point of view." And yet how many generations of Geneseo students (well over half of whom are female) have unquestioningly followed in the patriarchal footprints of a poet whose world view allows only two women to speak a total of 39 lines in 34 cantos?

"She just needs to relax a little."

While continuing to be “stimulating," “thorough," “interesting," and “enthusiastic," and, of course, after reading SOFI's which feature the word “moody." Right. The truth is, I'm not a relaxed person. I have not had a relaxed life. My teaching style, which gets more positive than negative reviews, is consistently unrelaxed. I know and regret that this will annoy or, worse yet, intimidate some students, but that, as Arlo Guthrie says, is not what I came to talk about today. I always consider a negative remark garnered by my lack of relaxation to be a fair cop; what I object to is having that negative response ineluctably linked to my gender, as in the Milton student's comment: “VERY Sarcastic Woman." What does being a woman have to do with it? (I ask disingenuously.)
On the first night of my first Myths of Gender class, I asked how many students considered themselves feminists. Three hands went up. But when I asked the class to write anonymous dictionary definitions of the noun “feminist," with two exceptions, all forty-four people in the classroom rendered some version of “a person who believes all people to be equal." If this Norman Rockwell caption is truly their definition of “feminist," why on earth did only three hands go up? Here we see the conflict of denotation and connotation that causes students to place “feminist" with other pejorative. Yes, I agree with that student; I certainly do need to relax a little, but I doubt I'll get the chance in this lifetime. A colleague, looking at a shelf of feminist books in my office, remarked kindly: “you'll get over it." At that time, the summer of 1986, I had published a good bit, but not one word of scholarship on gender issues nor had I even considered teaching a women's studies course, so I could only ask: “Get over what? being a woman?"

"fair, but holds a strong view on feminism"

At least as appalling as the overt attacks wielding the weapon of the f-word are those students who offer praise by assuring me that I am not “as feminist" as they had heard or who judge me to be fair or smart or funny in spite of being a feminist. Last year one of my colleagues was urging an advisee to sign up for my Hum class, but the student hesitated saying “I've heard she's a feminist." “Well, sure," my colleague responded warmly, “but so am I and you've had two classes from me." “Oh!" gasped the student, “but I liked your classes!" BUT. . . but. Let's look at the student who praised Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies by saying “at first I thought it would be a feminist book, it wasn't. It was quite interesting and enjoyable to read." This student was trying to be nice. But by defending de Pizan's text from the f-word, the student reveals a prejudice so deeply rooted that it survived not only exposure to a real live feminist but also, and more sadly, to a remarkable text.
". . . and [I] am now somewhat more openminded." But only somewhat.

As I flipped through SOFI's dating back to 1986, I was gratified to find fifty to a hundred scribbles of praise for every slam listed above. But, depressingly, while teaching students who each year enter our school with higher and higher academic qualifications, I found that the frequency of negative remarks which included the f-word had actually increased in the last three years. (While in the year and half since tenure I've been arguably less un-relaxed.) What I suspect is that our students are becoming less relaxed. We are getting brighter and brighter students, and the students of 1991-92 realize what the students of 1986 did not: it's difficult to maintain a veneer of intellectual respectability while claiming that there are too many books to read or that the papers were graded for grammar as well as for content. Our brighter students are able to dismiss a challenge or a source of discomfort with a somewhat more sophisticated put-down, one that wears the guise of ideological difference, however poorly thought-out. That this criticism can emerge in increasingly anti-feminist remarks on SOFI's is, I suggest, a sign of the cultural climate analyzed by Susan Faludi in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). Consider the cultural assumptions (and lack of logic) behind the following: “Class is very interesting. . . . Your [feminist] opinions are too often shown or spoken about the subject we're discussing." And what made my lectures interesting, if not my opinions? Ah, but all those other things I say are not perceived as opinions, only the feminist things. I now teach The Peloponnesian War as a text about why the US had no business initiating Operation Desert Storm, and in the two semesters I have presented this opinion, not one student has felt it worth a line on a SOFI.

***

In this essay I've conflated two problems: students who read feminism as an f-word in any context, and students who suggest that it's OK to be a feminist, just not [every day] in the classroom. As the work of Faludi and others can show us that Geneseo is a microcosm of our culture, so I would suggest it is a microcosm of the academy. After that MLA session, I was hyperventilating to a Milton scholar about the politics of the MLA Program Committee which allotted the largest ballroom for me to present my very un-gendered Milton paper to a room little more than half full, while allotting only a small conference room to the harassment session which had people ten-deep out in the hallway. “But Julia," he protested, “you can't want the MLA to be taken over by special interest groups!" Special interest groups? Nearly one-half of the nearly 10,000 people attending that convention were female. That session was not on feminist readings of obscure texts, but on how women are treated in the academy. Women are not a special interest group. In this context, Miltonists are the special interest group. But my friend and my students do share one assumption: our profession is about traditional readings of traditional texts, and any deviation from those traditions is non-intellectual, anachronistic, trendy, and deeply suspect. (As a member of the Philosophy Department said last spring outside the Humanities faculty meeting to a student demonstrating for inclusion of women in the pre-modern canon: “So what do you want us to do? Find some lesbian, Icelandic poet and require her? Ha!")

Even in “Myths of Gender," where my two main texts are Ovid and the Bible, a student could write “it had a definite female slant. . . . More representation of Male Gender Myths are needed to keep the course balanced." And what, pray tell, are Metamorphoses and Genesis (sans Harold Bloom) and the epistles of Paul if not “male gender myths"? What that student means is that by questioning those canonical texts, I was showing a bias; nobody questioned my choice of the texts. Similarly, my friend the Miltonist assumed that I should consider Milton my primary interest and being a woman only a special interest. Gender issues should not be regarded as a “special interest." The gender issues we can discuss in Humanities go as far toward explaining the values of Western culture as do issues of law, theology, ethics, and the idea of the good ruler. Indeed, they are inseparable from those other issues. And yet I wonder if the professor who told his class that gender is not an issue in Antigone has ever been called “biased" on a SOFI?

As a feminist, my opinions about gender issues are feminist opinions, but they are no less or more “opinionated" than are my views on the Gulf war, Scott Norwood's kicking ability, Northern Exposure, or where to eat in Italy. To segregate opinions on gender from all other opinions is to return the thinking of Creon, Pericles, and Paul. And for those students (or readers) who suggest that, while a token nod to feminism is acceptable, equating gender issues with canonical concerns is “too extreme," here's a quote from the great feminist hero, Mae West: “Too much of a good thing is wonderful!" And these are just the facts, ma'am.