Homophobia In The Classroom
I am often impressed with the work the students do when they read The Mirror Dance. In the first few years I taught the course, I was moved when students who had initially been biased against lesbians would come to a different conclusion after reading the book and writing a paper about it, and they would be proud of having changed their views. The assignment I give on The Mirror Dance asks the students to trace their feelings as they read the book and to write about these feelings in a paper. In the end, they draw conclusions about the import, to them, of their own responses. What insights do they gain by considering their feelings?
The first two times I gave this assignment, I asked the students to add to the end of their papers a paragraph identifying characteristics of the lesbian community described in The Mirror Dance that were those of a women's organization. To my shock, each year, several of the students said, "I just cannot see this lesbian community as a women's organization. It is the opposite of what I think a women's group is." To these students, it seemed, lesbians were not women. After receiving such responses in the second year, I decided to delete the extra paragraph from my assignment. I was not ready to take on the problem of rejection of lesbianism that the students' views pointed to.
In their papers about The Mirror Dance, the students reveal a range of emotional responses:[2]
These comments are from student papers on The Mirror Dance, spring 1991.
I could really identify with the women in The Mirror Dance who were searching for their own identity within the group. (Yoko)
I saw many parallels to my own experience. (Rose)
I found myself very emotionally involved. … I felt confused and frustrated. I also felt fascinated by the complex workings of the interactions of the women. (Julia)
I was disappointed by the community examined in The Mirror Dance because it was far less noble and infused with political meaning than I thought it should be. (Kim)
As I progressed through the book, my feelings switched from surprise to acceptance, because all of a sudden the community didn't seem that weird. … The chapter on children really hit home with me. (Peggy)
I was sad because so many of the women felt they could not tell their parents. (Arlene)
In general, I feel the students appreciate The Mirror Dance and its multivoiced style, and they use it to come to valuable recognitions about lesbians and about themselves. The problems that arise concern how they judge the social reality described in the book. In class, when the students discuss their feelings in response to the study, I mostly listen, for I have found that the students feel very differently when reading The Mirror Dance than I did when writing it. The main difference is that they view the community depicted in the book as a group that does not live up to their ideals. To say they feel disappointed puts their response mildly. They feel disheartened, painfully let down, disturbed, confused, and angry. Not all feel this way, but most do. They do not like the way members of this lesbian community gossip about one another, or exclude male children from a Thanksgiving dinner, or conform to group dress norms that stress androgynous clothes, or how they deal with their personal relationship difficulties. They do not like how the women speak of themselves in terms of other women—that Mary is Jo's lover and Amy's former lover, for example.
The students report feeling most positively about the community after reading the chapters in the last section of the book that deal with the outside world, and with how members experience difficulties at work and among their families that cause them to keep their lesbianism a secret.
The students like being drawn into the lesbian world described in the book. However, most say they would not want to be part of a community like this one. For these students, the community is "them," and the students have specific troubles with what "they" do.
It always seems curious to me that when the students read The Mirror Dance , they take as true many of the negative statements about the community that are made by the women in the pages of my book. They assume the community is what its members say it is, without seeing beyond the surface nature of the complaints to the more underlying social reality. In a way, despite their protests, the students in my classes become extensions of the voices of the women in the book. For instance, a student will say, "Marge says the group felt suffocating to her. That's how I felt." Or, "Leslie says the community was only interested in emotional trauma. I wouldn't be able to stand that." However, I have noticed that the students are selective in which complaints they identify with. Certain criticisms made by the women of the community are seized upon more than others, which suggests to me that something more is occurring than simply personal identification.
After I have listened to the students' responses and read their papers, I come to the next class session seeking to explain a few of the community dynamics I think some of them do not understand. I want to explain how a social group may not be exactly what its members think it is. Especially, because it is highly criticized by the students, I want to explain how gossip (talking about others and being talked about) is not necessarily bad, but, in this community, helpful and desirable. Individuals need to talk about each other in lesbian communities in order to learn about how to be a lesbian, or how to get along with each other, or to solve their problems. There are no lesbian television shows or large numbers of books, magazines, and public images, or grandmothers and mothers passing down instructions. Most self-knowledge must be created in face-to-face interactions and through word of mouth. When I offer such an explanation to the students, I think I am doing so because they lack skills for analyzing interactions in a lesbian setting. I do not think, although I often feel, that there is an emotional dimension to the students' apparent failure of sociological understanding.
To reject a group because it gossips too much seems to me a bit
strange. In part, this may be a rejection of what women traditionally do. It may represent a wish not to be associated with women's more familial and down-to-earth ways. By extension, I think, given the subject of our reading, it may also reflect a wish not to be caught in a web of lesbianism—a web of women being intimate with one another. In brief, I think I have overlooked the extent to which the students' discomforts with the community in The Mirror Dance are products of homophobia—of fears of being among lesbians, and of being a lesbian. Thus one distances oneself. A student says, "It's okay for them, but not for me," and points to specific behaviors she feels are intolerable, in order to keep intact a sense of herself as heterosexual, or as a woman apart from a lesbian community.
When I discuss The Mirror Dance with the students, I try to be careful of their emotional responses to the book so they will not feel intimidated by the fact that I wrote it, or by the fact that I am a lesbian. When I think about their feelings after they first discuss them, I consider what the students do not understand. In other words, I deal with their criticisms in intellectual terms. Thus, I do a parallel distancing to that done by the students. I do this to protect myself, for the community in The Mirror Dance was once my community. I was friends and lovers with women in it. When I lived there, I felt it was a very good community. It was not too constraining or too gossipy for me. When the students criticize this community, they criticize something I am very much identified with.
I think that, in part, the students judge the lesbian community in The Mirror Dance harshly because they are largely unaware of the degree to which heterosexual culture is so taken for granted as to make anything lesbian seem tainted and wrong. Yet I, too, have this problem. Why else would I shrink from confronting it in the students? I may see the lesbian community in my study as good and as acceptable, but I certainly view the lesbian in myself as less than acceptable. Or why would I feel I cannot tell the students they are hurting me with their views, that they are not granting to lesbians—and, by implication, to me—the same quality of respect, and equality of judgment, they grant to themselves? I have taught my course on women and organizations for eight years, but I have never once talked about the way lesbianism is rejected in it and
viewed, by most of the students, as undesirable. I urge the students to identify with separatism when we study it, but I do not make a similar request that they embrace lesbianism. Yet if I can ask the students to question their integrationist values, surely I can ask them to question their heterosexual values.
I have only recently come to feel that I ought to discuss with the students the issue of homophobia in our classroom. Sometimes, such as this past year, the homophobia is more evident to me. This year followed that in which I denied permission to the hostile male graduate student to take one of my courses. I felt that the students in my classroom now, who knew about that episode, were more afraid than usual. They avoided talking about the lesbian content of The Mirror Dance , and one graduate student attacked the book's style "on literary grounds," with a vehemence I could not understand other than as an attempt to separate herself from its lesbian subject matter. Usually, however, the homophobia is more masked and more invisible.
Sometimes, I think, it is visible only to me. The first year I taught the course, for instance, I was afraid to have the students read an article titled "Beyond 'Subjectivity': The Use of the Self in Social Science," which I had written about the process of researching and writing The Mirror Dance .[3]
Susan Krieger, "Beyond 'Subjectivity': The Use of the Self in Social Science," Qualitative Sociology 8:4 (1985): 309-24, also in Social Science and the Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 165-83.
It discussed my personal experiences in the community and, in particular, my having sexual desires toward some of the women I interviewed. The article had already been published in a sociological journal, but I kept it out of my course reader because I feared that if the students were to read it, they would fear me in the classroom. I thought that if I subsequently put a hand on a student's shoulder, she would feel I was trying to seduce her and that everyone in the class would look at me and see a child molester. Finally, approaching the week when we were to read The Mirror Dance , I reconsidered my decision. I wanted the students to have my story of how I did my study. I also wanted not to be driven by fear. Fortunately, the students liked the article. It seemed not to frighten them so much as to make them feel more appreciative of my study and of me. I think it helped relieve their fears because it spoke of sexual matters explicitly and in a way that was personal to me.But my point is not the students' fears, but my own degree of fear. Homophobia has affected my Women and Organizations class not only
because the students fear lesbianism, but because I do. Occasionally the homophobia in my classroom is evident to me, such as when I feel the students in a class withholding themselves when we discuss The Mirror Dance , or when I am aware of withholding myself, as in not giving out my article. However, most of the time, the fear of lesbianism—of being intimate with other women, and of choosing women over men—is present in the classroom but underground. I would like to speak more about homophobia in my classes, but I am not sure, at present, how to do so.