: )

Thanks for the kind words. There are more segments, though I am not sure how many, since I am dividing the essay for the web–for length and readability considerations–differently than I did in print. Again, thanks!

Is #7 the last one, or are there more?

However, if you tell me that you’d rather I not do that, I won’t. Let me know when you have a chance, please.

With Richard’s permission, I’ve moved a discussion that used to be here to an open thread.

In terms of eroticism in the classroom, bell hooks has a really interesting piece in Teaching to Transgress about teaching being an erotic experience. Audre Lorde’s piece “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in Sister Outsider also comes to mind.

First, thanks for the kind words. And you may be right about the place where this section ends; it is the one entirely new section of the essay and so I am not entirely sure if it fits well, if it needs, in terms of the ending, to be retrofitted, etc. Section 6 actually began as the conference paper I wrote about. Section 7 picks up pretty explicitly on the ideas in the last paragraph of section 6, so we’ll see. I will be interested, if you come back to read section 7, to hear what you think.

and yet…i am wondering why i felt the end was anticlimactic…almost as if the focus on teaching/student was not the most powerful place this could have narrowed in on…almost as if larger points made earlier overshadow such a conclusion. that feeling of the lede being buried.

but an inspiring piece, nonetheless. just my storyteller chops were asking me questions, so i passed them on to someone clearly adept at the same process. they are still questions, not really conclusions. it may be a piece you need to read a few times to get all in place.

To reveal your investment, to work with students who wanted to talk about sexual abuse or other kinds of sexuality.

“And yet this stance is, in itself, think, a response–an entirely valid, reasonable and necessary response, but a response nonetheless–to the erotic potential of the classroom.”

Inasmuch as there is an idea of it as erotic which I’m responding to, yes. I don’t feel that personally, though, at all.

I don’t think your choices would be framed the same way if the context were creative writing.

Which choices?

I find the classroom space powerfully *unerotic.* I like my students lots, but the concept of romance or sexual attraction entering that space — well, any space with a rigid power dynamic — squicks me.

And yet this stance is, in itself, think, a response–an entirely valid, reasonable and necessary response, but a response nonetheless–to the erotic potential of the classroom. I certainly do not go looking for romance or sex in my classrooms, and yet I have, over the years, had a fair number of women students make rather overt passes at me, and some have even propositioned me. In many cases, the women were significantly younger than I, and so what they were feeling could easily be categorized as a “school girl crush,” but one woman–who was close enough to my age to be considered a peer–invited me to the hotel of my choosing, that night, and she would pay, and it would only have to happen once, and no one would ever know. More to the point, I met my wife when she was a student in my class–and she is close enough in age to me to be my peer. We did not start dating till she was out of my class, and “shedding”–if I can use that term–the teacher-student relationship that was the context of our meeting took work, very conscious and hard work, but our initial attraction took shape in the context of the classroom. (The story of how we finally came to acknowledge that attraction is more complex than I have time to go into right now.)

I guess my point is this: I don’t think the classroom is unerotic by nature; I think its nature, especially including the power dynamics you are talking about, makes it erotic (and by erotic I do not mean, obviously, genitally sexual; I mean a place full of the tension of desire and desire fulfilled or unfulfilled between and among human beings) by defiition.

I find the classroom space powerfully *unerotic.* I like my students lots, but the concept of romance or sexual attraction entering that space — well, any space with a rigid power dynamic — squicks me.

This series of essays was truly awesome.