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Admitting Impediments: or things to do with bodies in the classroom

Erica McWilliam
a a

Senior Lecturer, School of Cultural and Policy Studies (Faculty of Education), Queensland University of Technology Published online: 06 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Erica McWilliam (1996) Admitting Impediments: or things to do with bodies in the classroom, Cambridge Journal of Education, 26:3, 367-378, DOI: 10.1080/0305764960260306 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305764960260306

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Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol. 26, No. 3, 1996

367

Admitting Impediments: or things to do with bodies in the classroom

ERICA McWILLIAM
Senior Lecturer, School of Cultural and Policy Studies (Faculty of Education), Queensland University of Technology
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ABSTRACT This paper indicates how new theorising of the body can be brought to bear on pedagogical work as an erotic field. I make a case that the body of the teacher needs to be remembered in writing about teaching and learning, because it produces desire in pedagogical events, for good as well as ill. I show the ways in which recent work on corporeality counters mainstream educational writing about students and teachers. I then comment on some brief accounts of the experience of learning, using some of these concepts as a framework for my analysis.

INTRODUCTION The title of this paper works in a manner that is perhaps a bit too fashionable in post-modern times, i.e. taking liberties with the canon in order to allow me to make my own playfully serious point. I write against the grain of much mainstream educational scholarship because I want to depart from a tradition of framing the teacher-student relationship as 'the marriage of two minds'. Yet I do not seek to contribute to a humanistic project of foregrounding 'the personal' as the flip-side of cognition-based pedagogical models. I am seeking instead to re/member pedagogical work as inescapably corporeal, involving fleshly bodies, with all the pluses and minuses that this can mean for classroom practice. In doing so, I am aware of the importance c f the momentous changes taking place in education by way of technological innovations and the challenges of teaching in cyberspace. To many of us as educational researchers, technology may appear to have triumphed over the need for teachers as 'bodies' located in particular times and spaces. Nevertheless, I insist that pedagogy always requires mindful bodies, whether of the biomedical or more 'volatile' sort (Grosz, 1994), engaged with each other in real or 'virtual' space. In this analysis I want to argue the importance of understanding the desire to teach and learn as embodied, i.e. as redding in the materiality of students and teachers, not simply in their minds. To begin, I want to challenge three widespread assumptions which have become taken for granted in mainstream
0305-764X/96/030367-12 1996 University of Cambridge Institute of Education

368 E. McWilliam education. The first is that teaching and learning is a binary formulation that can allow us to say all we need to about the performance of formal or informal educational events, despite the very complex and contested cultural production of meanings and identities that is always going on in classrooms. The second is the assumption that pedagogical events are staged exclusively for the benefit of student learners. Teachers' work is understood to be precisely synonymous with facilitation of learning, life-long or otherwise, through 'design and delivery' and/or the provision of education as a sort of personal therapy. This is the sort of logic which underpins a whole 'quality' literature in which teaching 'outcomes' are no more than the sum of what the learner can do after the pedagogical event. The third assumption I want to challenge is the classical idea that professional teaching is always dispassionate and unworldly in the sense that all should be given to students and nothing taken from them in terms of the teacher's personal gratification. BEYOND TEACHING AND LEARNING AS A BINARY SYSTEM Within the framework of education as an academic discipline, writers usually interrogate educational practices through the binary formulation of 'learning as distinct from teaching'. This bifurcation was generated out of the concerns of the predecessors of contemporary theories of learning and teachingRogers, Maslow, Kelly, Erickson, Piaget and othersthat pedagogical studies were too teacher-focused. Education was fundamentally ignorant about what learners themselves brought to the educational experience: [W]hen I tried honestly to review my [educational] experience, teaching seemed of such little importance, and learning so vastly important It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no influence on behaviour. (Carl Rogers, 1957, cited in O'Neill, 1983, p. 256) 'I taught them but they did not learn' was increasingly held to be the central dilemma of educational practice. It was the perspective of the learner, not prescriptions of good teaching practice, that demanded elaboration. Given the status educational psychology has achieved as a theoretical terrain, the experience of individual student learners has come to achieve primacy in educational research and curriculum design. Concomitant with this has been an increasing scepticism about teaching as a 'personality cult' and a rejection of what may be loosely described as 'authoritarian' or 'top-down' classroom practices. This is so widespread in popular culture that, as a teacher educator, I can now presume with a degree of certainty that my cohort of pre-service teachers will have a greater desire to counsel than to castigate. Few have any intention of being authoritarian. They do not seek the sort of perverse pleasure that becomes available through an arbitrary exercise of power at a student's expense. Indeed, the logic of any horror stories of oppression in the classroom that these student teachers bring is much more likely to work in reverse.

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Much contemporary educational writing, building as it does on psychological theories of personality, cognition or behaviour, maintains this 'teaching or learning' binary formulation. Models of teacher-centred or 'top-down' education are disrupted when educational debates are framed in terms of 'learners' and 'learning'. 'Action learning', 'learning theory', 'learning styles', 'lifelong learning', 'learner-centred' classrooms, 'needs-based' educationall these terms owe a legacy to the dominance of a tradition which theorises pedagogical events through the discipline of psychology. The: separation of learning from teaching in the discourse of educational psychology has foregrounded the 'student as personified learner' in social institutions such as schools and universities. It has acted to privilege learning over teaching in ways that have challenged teachercentred and teacher-serving educational practices, both past and present, a task which has been widely regarded as both desirable and laudable. However, what is becoming evident more recently is that educational arrangements which are founded on this bifurcation of teaching and learning now threaten to erase the notion of 'teaching' altogether. At the very least, we are witnessing in the burgeoning academic work on 'open learning' a preference for substituting the term 'delivery' for teaching and/or the substitution of 'instructional designer' for 'teacher'. The 'teacher' is in decline as an object of educational inquiry. As bodies of knowledge, anatomical or virtual, teachers are being excised from pedagogical processes The following excerpt from a recent article on open learning is a case in point: Currently much attention is being paid to the pedagogical issues related to the delivery of telematic:;-based distance education [e.g. forms of screen-based learning], such as the context within which learning takes place and the role that the course and learning environment design has in encouraging effective learning...the principle (sic) issues are now becoming those of the organisation and management of these virtual learning environments so that effective learning, and course delivery, can take place. (Jennings, 1995, p. 30, my parentheses) What is significant here is that the words 'teaching' and 'teacher' never appear and, indeed, are almost entirely absent from the discussion which follows. The 'learning as distinct from teaching' binary is being re-worked as 'learning as distinct from design delivery1. 'Teaching' has been displaced into 'design and delivery'. In turn, both design and delivery are held to be the outcomes of particular organisational and management processes and strategies. The solution to students' learning difficuliies is not to be found in the doings of the pedagogue, but in the construction of a more efficient loop from academic manager to instructional designer to 'deliverer' to learner and (feed)back to academic manager. This construction of pedagogy as a cycle of information in a one-way flow (design-deliver-evaluate-re-design) does not address knowledge production as distinct from information dissemination and consumption, necessarily relational

370 E. McWilliam and dynamic, as a form of cultural exchange. Reference in the new educational literature to the learner/student as a 'client' of the educational institution certainly maintains the notion of pedagogy as relational, but it is a relationship that is increasingly held to be directly synonymous with that of 'producer and/or consumer' in commerce and industry. My problem with all this is not, as I have indicated earlier, premised upon that romantic and sometimes technoparanoid view of education which insists on putting a 'human face' or a 'personal touch' to pedagogical events. My concern is, rather, an epistemological oneit is to raise the whole issue of the domain of human capability and thus teaching and/or learning as a lived and palpable experience of desire, pleasure and pain. In saying this I would want to acknowledge the work done by Madeleine Grumet, whose powerful analysis of the pedagogical roles played by women in the last two centuries Bitter Milk: women and teaching (Grumet, 1988) documents sensitively the challenge of reclaiming and transforming as the work of women a pedagogical role which has been stigmatised as 'women's work' (p. 58). Grumet addresses a number of contradictions in the ways in which women have enacted pedagogical work in modern schooling culture. She argues that the disservice of Marxist analyses has been to 'collapse' the schooling system into an economic system. The result is a discourse which ignores both 'the experiences of family life, of bearing, delivering and nurturing children' and 'the language of the body, the world we carry on weight-bearing joints, the world we hear in sudden hums and giggles' (p. xv). In her long overdue analysis of women and teaching, she insists upon a place for intimacy, for the legitimacy of the lived experience of women teachers, with all of its contradictions, in a new politics of educational knowledge that is inclusive of personal identity. My own concern is to explore 'the language of the body' as more than body language. I suppose I could say more playfully that metaphors like 'face-to-face' teaching deny the fact that the face is a surface connected not just to a brain, or even a mind, but to all 'productive' body parts via the neck and head. To argue the point of this 'body-to-body' pedagogy more strongly, I want to provide what I confess to be a very sketchy map of recent theorising of the body, before proceeding to the more thorny question of its implications for teachers as 'bodies of knowledge and desire'. THE BODY AS A SITE/SIGHT OF INQUIRY Just as explorations of 'teaching as distinct from learning' or 'nature as distinct from technology' set particular constraints on ways of inquiring into one or other element in these binary pairs, so too discussions of bodies are limited by a binary formulation of 'body as distinct from mind'. Whether scholars blame Descartes or Rousseau for the prevalence of mind/body dualisms in Western scholarship, the fact remains that, in the history of Western thought, a mind/ body dichotomy has privileged the mind as that which defines human 'being', while the body has been the excess baggage of human agency.

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It is not that the human body as a physical essence has been ignored. Educators, for example, have certainly stressed its importance in relation to the training of young people. The idea of 'a healthy mind in a healthy body', of a necessary relation between the 'physical' and the 'mental/cognitive', has been at the heart of childhood education, physical education programs and popular physical culture for over a century. However, the body's importance has been perceived, in the main, in terms of the necessity of its careful management in order to enhance, or to avoid distracting from, 'mental effort'. The secondary status accorded to 'physicality' is certainly a theme in the shaping of young lives, whether it is through the notion of encouraging children to burn off 'excess energy' before class, to sit still during class or to rein in adolescent sexual experimentation (Stinson, 1995, p. 45). Until relatively recently biomedical jmd academic orthodoxy held that the body is merely a 'fixed system of muscle, bone, nerves and organs' which transcends history and culture and thus is 'amenable to scientific examination...a site of established fact' (Kirk, ] 993, p. 3). For more than a decade, however, a project of recovering the importance of the body as a field of political and cultural activity has been under waya project which, according to Eagleton (1990, p. 7), is 'one of the most precious developments of radical thought'. This project does not reject the body as the biomedical korper out of hand, but distinguishes it from the idea of the body as leib, a 'lived body', by drawing attention to corporeality or embodiment ;is a generative principle (Leder, 1990, p. 5). 'Body' becomes available as a subject of discoursea textas well as an object of external gaze. Conceptual shifts in disciplinary approaches to the body may have occurred, but this does not mean that, broadly, our culture has moved on from the dualist understanding of 'mind over body'. Indeed, as Leder (1990, p. 3) argues, Western society is still very much dominated by 'a certain "disembodied" style of life', whether through shelters that disengage us from direct corporeal experience of the outer world, machines which allow us to disinvest the work of the muscles, technologies of communication and transportation which allow us to transcend the spatial limits of the body or operations that computers can effect without human presence. However, a return to the body is also evident, in the rise of 'alternative lifestyles': martial arts, body therapies, arts and crafts, the green movement and so on. Furthermore, for good and ill, visual representations of an ideal body (slender and muscular) are increasingly important in popular culture as a means of signifying 'health, capability, self-control and sexual attractiveness' (Kirk, 1993, p. 6). Bodies are thus fashionable topics in a range of disciplinesfrom media and cultural studies to sociology and philosophy. Increasingly, questions are being asked about what is 'natural' aboui: the body, about its limits in a world of virtual reality and transplant surgery, about the ethics that might govern degrees of intervention into bodies, about the significance of bodies as personal resources and social symbols, about the clusiveness of bodies as actual objects of analysis (Shilling, 1993). What is important about much of this scholarship

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372 E. McWilliam is a recognition that the body must be regarded as unfinished or incomplete as a cultural production, always in the process of becoming, lacking finality but yet insisting on the possibility of being a finished product (Leder, 1990; Butler, 1993; Shilling, 1993; Grosz, 1994). THE BODY AS THE SEAT OF DESIRE With the recovery of the body has come an acknowledgement that 'desire' has been excluded from a host of rational discourses which continue to produce the subject as 'delibidimised actor' (Lash, 1991, p. 260). Again, there is a burgeoning and at times rarefied post-structuralist literature debating the multiple sites of desire, its radical possibilities and its evasiveness as an object of inquiry. What is important to this paper is that desire has been restored to academic discourse about the body, both through the psychoanalytic concept of oedipality (desire as a lack, barred or repressed from articulation) and through the 'anti-oedipal' work of Deleuze & Guattari (1984), who posit desire as a material presence, a productive force generated out of the body as a social entity. Angel (1994, p. 63), for example, draws on Deleuze & Guattari to argue that the teacher's body can be interrogated as a 'sight and site of authoritative display', a body that 'can be facialised', i.e. can take on a consistent image or be 'made over' as a political surface. The idea of the teacher maintaining a 'scholarly face'indeed, of maintaining face at allis usefully re-worked here. Desire is inevitably gendered. In 're-membering' desire, new theories of corporeality have recovered notions of pleasure, sexuality and eroticism in ways that have disturbed the more unified stance of feminists in the 1980s, raising, for example, the possibility of enacting a more pleasurable heterosexuality than previous analyses allow. No longer can it be assumed, according to Jackson, that all women who take pleasure in heterosexual sex are 'simply wallowing in a masochistic eroticisation of their own subordination' (Jackson, 1995, p. 133). The notion that eros should always be interpreted as pornography, the property of men as the objects of male gaze (e.g. Dworkin, 1981), has been challenged by analyses which insist on escaping a 'sex-negative cul-de-sac...in which Eros was confined to the nether hells of rape, pornography, prostitution, incest and child abuse' (Grant, 1993, p. 9). While theoretical debates continue, some feminist educational writers, including myself (McWilliam, 1995, 1996), have come to consider the possibilities that a project of the desiring body has for feminist pedagogy as a site of resistance. Shapiro (1994), for example, argues that focusing on the desiring body allows us to say what bodies know, including the injustice that we have lived out. Gotfrit (1988, p. 124) likewise insists that notions of pleasure and desire, refusal and resistance, are grounded in the body. An oppositional politics should not ignore its importance as a site of lived culture where dominant practices are contested as well as produced. Like Stinson (1995, p. 47), who argues for a 'choreography of research', Gotfrit signals the importance of bodily 'acting out' a feminist politics of resistance. In my own work (McWilliam, 1996)

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I explore the question of the relation of gender and pedagogy by inquiring into the importance of gendered bodies in the construction of the great teacher as a cultural phenomenon. I ask whether men's teachingmale diction as a mobilising of desiremust become malediction (seduction) when it is enacted by women. Psychoanalysis has had a monopoly on theorising desire in the current feminist literature. While I believe that there are some interesting ideas that can be applied to re-claiming the teacher's pedagogical body which derive from psychoanalytic feminism, I am less sanguine about psychoanalytic pedagogical models as the new alternative, given that such models tend to connate the teacher-student relationship purely with that of analyst and analysand. Instead, my work is part of a larger project of rc-configuring a model of pedagogical instruction that engages quite specifically with the materiality of classrooms and bodies. I want to understand the part that bodies play in ways that invite and anticipate uncertainties and irregularities in the performance of teaching and learning as a dramatic enactment of cultural exchange and social transformation.

THE DESIRING BODY IN THE CLASSROOM It is clear from current theoretical debates that desire may be understood as an embodied force which must be cultivated and mobilised, on the one hand, and suppressed, regulated and controlled, on the other. Much writing about teaching has refused the troubling word 'desire' for the more sanitised term 'motivation', seeing it as part of a larger field of regulation and discipline, that of 'classroom management and/or control'. Both of these related termsmotivation and managementdisallow the more uncertain and transgressive ways in which the student body might produce desire, given that motivation is targetted towards rational goals framed in some respects by others. There has also been a preference for motivating 'materials'kits, worksheets, technological resources of various kindswhich ignore or at least downplay the materiality of the teacher's body as well as that of the student. Likewise, management implies the enacting of normative practices which rein in desire-as-eros, refusing any problematic straying into erogenous zor.es and away from 'good (business) practice'. Despite the best efforts of 'law and order' enthusiasts in bureaucratic circles, 'progressive' learning theory still i ells us that the days of 'every eye on me' should be at an end. While I applaud the move away fro:n pedagogy as a form of narcissistic student capture, I do want to raise the matter of what is lost by decreasing the 'visibility' of teachers in pedagogical events to the point where we have become 'immaterial' to pedagogical practice. Ceitainly, the teacher's body is now an object of suspicion because of the power it can wield as a potentially abusive body and, of course, much feminist work has been devoted to requiring the regulation of the male pedagogical body in particular. Nevertheless, while

374 E. McWilliam abusive pedagogy is a possible outcome of the desiring teacher's body, so too is powerful pedagogy of a most elating and transformative kind. To illustrate this point, I draw on accounts provided in Kerr Conway's anthology of autobiographies, Written by Herself (Kerr Conway, 1992), which indicate that an elating and elated teaching body is often the sight/site out of which future scholars are propelled into an on-going love affair with their disciplines. In a number of these accounts, the body of the teacher is crucial inasmuch as it performs what it looks like to have a love affair with a body of knowledge and this performance is enacted and observed as erotic, a manifestation of desire which is necessarily ambiguous and duplicitous within the pedagogical event. The book is made up of a series of narratives written by eminent American women about their journey towards and within their life's work. Their recounting of the work of their teachers suggests that their teachers were doing much more than 'motivating' and/or 'managing'. Even if we are to acknowledge that a florid and romantic style is to some extent a gendered cultural norm for this sort of writing, nevertheless it is clear that the teacher's desiring body is material to the pedagogical relationship. Zora Neale Hurston, for example, writes of her experience at a night school in Baltimore: There I met a man who was to give me the key to certain things....There is no more dynamic teacher anywhere under any skin. He radiates newness and nerve....Something about his face killed the drabness and the discouragement in me....He is not a pretty man, but he has the face of a scholar, not dry and set like, but fire flashes from his deep-set eyes. His high-bridged, but sort of bent nose over his thin-lipped mouth....Caesar or Virgil in tan skin. That night, he liquefied the immortal brains of Coleridge and let the fountain flow. I do not know whether something in my attitude attracted his attention, or whether what I had done previously made him direct the stream at me. Certainly every time he lifted his eyes from the page, he looked right into my eyes. It did not make me see him particularly, but it made me see the poem.... But he did something more positive than that. He stopped me after class and complimented me on my work. He never asked me anything about myself but he looked at me and toned his voice in such a way that I felt he knew all about me. (pp. 44-45) There are a number of interesting points to note here in relation to powerful pedagogy as an erotic field. The first is that the student's interest is not an overtly sexual interest, but it is physical, a recognition of the materiality of the teacher as a 'body of knowledge'. She describes his skin, his tone of voice, using powerful heterosexual metaphors about the relationship between teacher and learner (e.g. '[he] let the fountain flow'; cdirect[ed] the stream at me'). She was naked before him ('I felt he knew all about me') in her state of ignorance/inno-

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cence. The shift into the present tense in a passage of prose reminiscing on the past suggests strongly the immediacy of the event as it must have been experienced, how 'present' this teacher lemains in this student's lifelong love affair with knowledge. The author writes of 'something in her attitude' as possibly being the reason for his being attracted to her. If we can locate student 'attitude' as a posture in relation to disciplinary knowledge, then it becomes possible to read 'attitude' as the embodiment of the teacher's desire to instruct. The teacher's desire to teach meets the student's desire to learnto be taughtas mutual self-interest. The teacher did not 'seduce' his student by overtly flattering her, but rather by adopting his own scholastic pose ('he has the face of a scholar') and by acknowledging her approximation to that pose. Importantly, the outcome of this erotic encounter is that the student does not mis/take the teacher's performance as an invitation into a relationship with him ('it did not make me see him particularly') but experiences it as an irresistible invitation into the love of poetry. Literary critics inquiring into traditions of instruction in the erotic arts reveal the importance of transmitting knowledge through a strict procedure whereby the disciple followed step by step a woman who was 'keeper of the secrets' (Cryle, 1994, p. 77). Cryle cites the work of Nicolas Chorier who, writing in 1655 about ancient representai ions of the figures of Venus, depicted erotic art as a set of tableaux, setting out a range of venereal positions in such a way as to allow them to be taught to women of inferior status. He elaborates: They set out all they knew, and conceivably all there was to know, so that it could be understood and followed by others...the nature and number of those skills appeared quite finite...the set of postures is likely to be numerically precisteas is the space of effort available to the learner.... (pp. 12-13) [The] examples...to be imitated...continue[d] to be made present by the on-going practice of postural modeling as erotic learning. Later when the originals [were] lost, this procedure...continue[d] of itself, (p. 18) This speaks of the imposition of an ordered and disciplined classification of knowledge about desire through the body; not eros as excess or sexual precocity. Interestingly, the keen pleasure of classification and order is a quite specific feature of another of the women writers in the Kerr Conway anthology, Mary Floy Washburn: Professor LeRoy Cooley taught Chemistry and Physics in crystal-clear lectures: his favourite word was 'accurate' which he pronounced 'ackerate', and I have loved, though by no means always attained 'ackeracy' ever since. Particularly delightful was quantitative analysis, with the excitement of adding up the percentages of the different ingredients in the hope that their sum might approach one hundred.... (pp. 132-133)

376 E. McWilliam The idea that one can have an erotic encounter with numbers is, of course, unfamiliar in modernist educational discourse. However, it is interesting to note that earlier traditions saw no paradox here and indeed understood the notion of heightening desire by insisting on order. An attempt to impose order on desire is observed by both Cryle (1994) and Gallop (1986) in De Sade's attempts to 'teach someone a lesson' (Gallop, 1986, p. 117) through immoral instruction. In terms of contemporary pedagogical contexts, Gallop (1986) remarks cryptically: [I]t does not seem inappropriate that an arithmetic perversion should arise in a discussion of pedagogy. School presents us with a world of numbers: grades, curves, credit hours, course numbers, class hours, and room numbers. I suppose not all teachers experience as I do a diffuse yet unmistakable pleasure when calculating grades at the end of the term. (p. 128) The kinds of pleasure teachers may take in their work is a sticking point for feminists and other critical writers who point to the fact that this pleasure is all too often at the expense of the student. For psychoanalytic feminists, there is concern that the teacher's exhilaration may result in 'a spectacular missing by each of the other' as the teacher as ego-ideal appropriates and effaces the student as Other (Deutscher, 1994, p. 37). Black writer Maya Angelou does not, however, appear to have been 'missed', at least in some senses, in watching the display of her teacher's passion for knowledge at George Washington High School: My entire stay there might have been time lost if it hadn't been for...a brilliant teacher. Miss Kirwan was that rare educator who was in love with information. I will always believe that her love of teaching came not so much from her liking for students but from her desire to make sure that some of the things she knew would find repositories so they could be shared again.... (p. 115) Maya Angelou indicates the secondary importance here of the personal relationship between teacher and student in a way that flies in the face of humanistic versions of appropriate pedagogy. The teacher certainly 'occupied] the symbolic position of subject supposed to know' (Deutscher, 1994, p. 40) and this would remain a problem for psychoanalytic feminists. Deutscher's paper, 'Eating the words of the otherethics, erotics and cannibalism in pedagogy' (1994), argues for an ethics of mediation in this 'love-of-teaching-self. Deutscher (1994, p. 36) acknowledges 'the elating sensation of a physical carnation of one's body as teacher...the overt pleasure produced by the possibility of one's own performance as empowered subject of knowledge, the seductive effect of instantaneity between teaching and learning body'. In acknowledging this elation, she also cautions against its seductiveness for teachers. However, in Maya Angelou's case, the pupil's 'seduction' to the teacher's 'love-of-teachingself certainly seems to have been productive, not malevolent, in terms of her own future as a writer. Here the point of teaching is not therapy or the nurturing

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of individuals as much as it is the enactment of a genuine passion for disciplinary ideas. The fact that teachers' anatomical bodies can be demonstrated to be so important as 'sights' or 'bodies' of knowledge in the past has important implications for teaching the present generation of young people. To deny the productivity of the teaching body for both good and ill is to deny the importance of passion and desire in teaching and learning. Students and teachers have much to lose if eros, overt sexuality and pornography are conflated as all of a piece and thus entirely negative for the classroom. In the rush to end abusive pedagogy, care must be taken to avoid replacing one set of tyrannies with another. The pedagogical body needs to be re-membered in the interests of teachers and learners, through analyses which admit its, impediments, but insist on more than the safety of blandness. Correspondence: Erica McWilliam, School of Cultural and Policy Studies, Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology, Locked Bag Number 2, Red Hill, Australia 4059.

REFERENCES ANGEL, M. (1994) Pedagogies of the obscene: :he specular body and demonstration, in: J.J. MATTHEWS (Ed.) Jane Gallop Seminar Papers, Proceedings of the Jane Gallop Seminar and Public Lecture 'The Teacher's Breasts', June, 1993 (Canberra, The Humanities Research Centre). BUTLER, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: on the discursive limits of sex (New York, Routledge). CRYLE, P. (1994) Geometry in the Boudoir: configurations of a French erotic narrative (Ithaca, Cornell University Press). DELEUZE, G. & GuATTARi, F. (1984) Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia (London, Athlone). DEUTSCHER, P. (1994) Eating the words of the otherethics, erotics and cannibalism in pedagogy, in: J.J. MATTHEWS (Ed.) Jane Gallop Seminar Papers, Proceedings of the Jane Gallop Seminar and Public Lecture 'The Teacher's Breasts', June, 1993 (Canberra, The Humanities Research Centre). DWORKIN, A. (1981) Pornography: men possessing women (London, Women's Press). EAGLETON, T. (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, Basil Blackwell). GALLOP, J. (1986) The immoral teachers, the pedagogical imperative: teaching as a literary genre, Yale French Studies, 63, pp. 117-128. GOTFRIT, L. (1988) Women dancing back: disruption and the politics of pleasure, Journal of Education, 170, pp. 122-141. GRANT, L. (1993) Sexing the Millenium (Glasgow, Harper Collins). GROSZ, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: towards a corporeal feminism (Sydney, Allen and Unwin). GRUMET, M. (1988) Bitter Milk: women and teaching (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press). JACKSON, S. (1995) Heterosexuality, power and pleasure, Feminism and Psychology, 5, pp. 131 135. JENNINGS, C. (1995) Organisational and management issues in telematics-based distance education, Open Learning, June, pp. 29-35. KERR CONWAY, J. (Ed.) (1992) Written by Herselfautobiographies of American women: an anthology (London, Vintage Press). KIRK, D. (1993) Adolescent construction of bodies: some implications for health education and promotion, paper presented at the XII Congress of the IAPES for Girls and Women, Melbourne.

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