Masculinity and (my) Class(es)
I've been trying to wrap my brain around the way that the students I have right now differ from my teaching experiences inside the beltway; and one of the most obvious differentiators is class. Just a casual glance at the clothes these folks wear around town--mostly just t-shirts and jeans or cargo shorts--makes me deeply aware that we aren't in foggy bottom anymore, where dressing down means juicy couture sweats or popping the collar of your logo'd polo shirt.
But class doesn't entirely explain the problems I'm having with motivation, with talking up in class, with verbal expression--and neither does ability, per se. But when I start trying to link it with masculinity, a whole new dimension opens up.
More so than a working class university, this is a masculine university. The Mountaineer moniker certainly tells you something, and is more than just a mascot when we consider a certain strong, silent ethos that pervades the classroom.
Whiteness is also at issue here, and my sense that my prototype student is a working-class white male says a lot about whata is happening with my classroom. Verbal flourishes are outside accepted constructions of their identity (not that some of my students haven't gone their, but they seem to be flouting some sort of unspoken dictum about normative behavior.
It also seems to affect the women in my classes, particularly the white women. For the first time in my career, I'm having trouble eliciting responses from the majority of the white women in the class, which is leading to a more embarrassing issue of having trouble learning their names (of the fifteen or so students whose names I can't immediately muster, almost all of them are virtually silent white women).
I am finding here that there's way too much to tease out in one blog post, but I want to illustrate a bit. For the comp class, I've gone with my food and politics course again--one that at GW was wildly popular with both genders. At one point late in the semester last year at GW, an impromptu group presentation for some fun in-class work produced a good-natured poke at my masculinity. It was nothing I'd never heard before, and given the other men in the classroom, a couple of whom were openly gay, and others who were hardly mountain men, I felt no threat in the jibe, inappropriate as it may have been.
Here I imagine such a barb would not ever be made, perhaps because such things are unspeakable, but if it had, it would have been freighted with open hostility, a sense that I am not one of them, and that my authority means nothing because I don't measure up on a certain masculinity scale: I gesture wildly, I know about fois gras, I speak in long florid sentences, I dress up, I do not have wild facial hair (which is alarmingly common here). I am not a real mountain man by any stretch.
Those who know me will know how unsettling this has been to me, but until recently, I've not been able to pin it down. Now that I have, I'm wondering how it will change my pedagogy: will I be more butch in class? will I confront it head on? will I soldier on as I have, and be deflated by course evaluations that don't ever really express what they think of me?
Comments
I don't have any great words of wisdom except to say that it's still quite early in the semester, so don't let your initial impressions govern your attitude from now until December. Also, it's possible you just have some weird classes this term and that, in the future, they won't be quite so weird. Finally, speaking from experience, I know that being far from what has been familiar for so long can be really disconcerting and can result in a focused dysphoria about your teaching.
Posted by: gzombie | September 14, 2005 11:06 PM
I definitely agree with gzombie about the focused dysphoria about teaching inspired by the unfamiliar - that pretty much sums up my entire year last year. I will say that your analysis is extremely interesting. I know that my husband and I used to run into some interesting gendered responses - that while he went over extremely well with almost all women and with the non-typically butch boys, the thick-necked, I-was-football-star-in-my-town-of-2000, types literally did not know what to make of him. They didn't always love me, but I was comprehensible. But they really just didn't get my husband b/c he didn't fit any scale of masculinity they'd ever encountered. And the women/girls who'd shaped their life around appealing to/manipulating the thick-necked jocks didn't know how to deal with him, either.
I should say that neither of these were especially large contingents of students, and that I am also stereotyping dreadfully. But there's a lot of discussion about how gender affects women teaching, but less attention to this for men, I think. It is a huge influence.
Posted by: New Kid on the Hallway | September 17, 2005 12:44 PM
Good advice from GZ. You are certainly being required to stretch, but so are they. If this is a comp. class, it is probably full of frosh, right? They are in the process of learning the ropes and adjusting to a range of instructors much wider than any they have experienced.
I teach at a largely working-class campus, and while that is refreshing in many, many ways, it does mean a relative lack of sophistication.
Are there any of your colleagues you would be comfortable comparing notes with?
Posted by: mjones | September 19, 2005 6:37 AM
My boyfriend and I have both taught at several different colleges in NYC with students ranging the gamut from projects kids and immigrants in community college to upper-class trust fundies with plans for grad school (as well as interesting combinations thereof). Neither he nor I fit our gender paradigm well. He bakes bread, is a single dad, hates sports, and speaks French. I am an "opinionated" hand-me-down-wearing lone wolf of a woman. What both of us have realized is that our upper-class students tend to see us as themselves in 10-20 years, so they're very interested in our gender markings or lack thereof, while our lower-class students see us, mostly, as aliens. I find it surprising, given my humble background, and my lower-class students eventually identify with me more closely. But the gender-perception thing never changes. Our upper-class students see both of us as not wearing the right clothes, not being cool enough, and so forth, while the lower-class students are too busy trying to stay in school to care what you're wearing. I miss teaching lower-class students for that reason. You can focus on the nuts and bolts of teaching without worrying about whether someone's laughing at the shoes you picked out that day.
The distance your new students feel from you is probably not because of your gender performance, but because of a perceived class difference. By the end of the semester, they'll open up and trust you more, but they've been told their whole lives to shut up and act "normal" if they want to get through school. They don't know that they can open up yet.
Posted by: carrie | September 19, 2005 9:32 AM
Lots of good advice. Thanks. I think that after some of the initial disorientation of identifying class and gender as variables, i've found myself back into more comfortable territory: While I've never been one to go out of may way to persistently make these variables objects of inquiry, I also do not miss many clear oppotunities to point them out or question them with my students.
While I think I'm taking my own persona out of the mix more than I usually do, I'm still going to press on these axes at many many opportunities. And maybe, if we do have some trust (esp. in my comp class) I can make my own identity more of a text for public examination. This will be more or less inevitable in the Brit II survey, where we end with Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 which will bring many of these issues front and center.
Posted by: RMC | September 22, 2005 1:18 PM