Undressing and redressing the teacher's body

In Chapter Four of Mitchell & Weber's book Beyond Nostalgia, the authors address the phenomena of teacher dress and her/his undressing by way of the student gaze, calling attention to the manner in which many teachers are constantly involved in a body project to construct a particular teacher identity. Mitchell & Weber cite Frigga Haug (1987), to whose work the idea "that the body can be a memory project in and of itself is central" (p. 132). Elaborating further, Mitchell & Weber propose the following arguments:

"Teaching necessarily occurs through the body. Although its presence is obvious, the teacher body is too often neglected, avoided, or taken for granted in an uncritical manner. There seems to be a social taboo that prohibits paying professional attention to the basic aspects of self that we all experience, teachers and non-teachers alike: appearance, dress, body shape, sensation, sensuality, sexuality, physical appearance, pain, desire, fantasy, em

otions. Those fundamentally important aspects of human existence cross the boundaries of race, religion, class, sex, age, and all the "isms" we use to identify ourselves in various milieus. However, the way the body and its various features are conceptualized, manifested, interpreted, and lived depends very much on prevailing cultural norms. Are teachers thought to be exempt from all of this? Is the body not essential to both our basic sense of self and our teaching identity and practice? Crucial to self-study, the body provides vital information on who we were and who we have become. In the words of theorist, Roland Barthes, "What I hide by my language, 

my body utters" (1978, p. 45). 

In the following passage, I will further examine these theories as the apply to my own experiences as a teacher by loosely following the guidelines for a teacher body-pho

to essay given in Box 4.3 on p. 141-142 of Mitchell & Weber's chapter. The first photo was taken after I had completed my student teaching practicum. To the student's right is her English teacher and my cooperating teacher, dressed in a black dress with pink and read floral designs, a red necklace, wearing round wire-rim glasses, a red designer necklace, hair cut short, gesturing with a proud smile toward the camera of her graduating student standing between us. We both are close to the student, with are arms around her back. The student also has one arm positioned a

round Ms. G's shoulder, and the other around my waste. All of us are in good spirits, celebrating this special occasion - dressed formally, scaffolding our already established mode of teacher dress. Wearing a silver tie and black shirt with matching slacks, I sought a style of dress that emulated the sophisticated taste in clothing many of our male students displayed at the Prom the month before graduation. I intended to fit in despite the race and class politics of my positionality that were often positioned as opposite from theirs when such discussions directly encountered those themes. My hair is cut short and my skin is quite pallid. I'm happy, but nervous in this photograph. This nervousness is shared by Richard Johnson (1997) who is later quoted in Mitchell & Weber's article:

"Children need the gift of touch, they need to feel wanted and most of all they need to feel valued. But I'

m male, and part of my teaching code prevents me from showing the care that I often want to show... Recently, while I was on practicum, a young boy came up to me and gave me a hug. I just froze, my mind racing a million miles an hour. Do I hug him back? If I do, is that taking the student-teacher relationship too far? Why shouldn't I be able to give him a hug? Why should I even have to think about all this stuff" (p. 103).

This photograph evokes much of Johnson's emotions for me. But unlike Johnson's description, on this particular evening, much of the physical expression offered by both students and teachers was exceptional in the sense of its occasion. The contextual aspects of this experience are important to note as the comfort level of most participants that evening was likely due to the fact that parents and administrators were present, secu

rity guards, school officials, and friends were there to support the students. Their culminating presence offered students and teachers and opportunity to feel at ease with each other in what would otherwise be an institutional space occupied by a lack of these forms of expression between student and teacher in the halls and spaces beyond the classroom. The regimented training-like character of the faculty and administrators prevented much of this kind expression from occurring on a daily basis in the school, except perhaps among the students themselves who shared close friendships. My cooperating teacher was exceptional in this regard as well, often hugging her students in class, offering "high-5s" and other physical gestures that pointed toward her radical teacher/maternal love for her students. Having a close-nit family, often wearing religious signifiers such as her crucifix, and alluding to her family relationships, 30+ years of marriage, and so on, positioned her body and discussions of body, sexuality, and identity in her advanced placement English classroom as normative, trusted, understood, expected, and/or affirmed. I, like most of her students, regarded this identity as an established but fading norm 

among adult role models in our lives. Like many of the students, I came from single-parent home, was not religious, was unmarried, was closer to their generation than Ms. G's, and shared many other common belief systems and values that counteracted those attached to her identity and reconstructed in her classroom. In this way, I felt more vulnerable to their judgments, not less. There was little distance between my age and theirs, often only six or seven years at most. My familial role might have been one of big brother or older cousin, not father or uncle. 

So when I arrived across town at the high school I was hired, I began to acquire the notion that I had to recreate an adult identity that reified a particular teacher identity - one that ascribed authority under the auspices of such claims as not being "your father, uncle, brother or cousin...I'm your teacher." I was an older leader, one with acquired subject knowledge and pedagogical training. But, I could not escape my body. I was young, skinny, and sensitive to the students' gaze. As students felt more comfortable in my classroom, around November I started getting questions like "what are you?" "Are you white?" "Do you have culture or a cultural background?" I was impressed by their directness and attributed some of the questions to my strong emphasis on works of literature commonly left out of the curriculum due to their racial or cultural themes. Discussions of identity were the first important discussions we had engaged in together. While most of those talks focused on their own identities and those of the literary characters we read about, it was time they address my body as well.  So I testified how I understood my cultural background, my mixed class identity, my geographical ubiquity growing up with a single-parent, and what it meant to be an army-brat. Along with those discussions later came topics of physicality. Always having struggled with genetically inherited back problems, some days were worse than others regarding physical pain as the result of energy, stress, and workload. "What's wrong with your back?" I was often asked. "Why are you hunched over?" Always embarrassed by this mild physical deformity and disability, I had often responded with anger when approached by peers growing up who typically were not as constructive in their questions and comments. But these were my students and behind their curiosity was often a concerned inflection. I realized that in some ways my body was a teachable moment.