firing nude teachers and other hypocrasies

Music: AFI: December Underground A lead news story on one of the Austin television networks today—as well as a popular bulletin on myspace.com—is about an Austin high school art teacher who, by gosh, made some photo-art with a friend. Some of this photo-art featured her naked breasts and a handful of provocative poses, a little S&M, but none of it of the "turn on" sort. Heck, the stuff is mostly of the eroto-art genre that one becomes immune to after months of exposure to any college art program and their students wandering the halls with portfolios of sloppily yet artfully displayed flying, flaming penises and Warhol-eqsue silkscreens of vaginal interiors. An artist herself, Ms. Tamara Hoover's work is just as provocative as the photos taken of her (just substitute one part object for another). I mean, aren't chicks with dicks pretty accepted not-so-shock fare after the sex wars? I mean, Piss Christ took the cake, didn't it? And didn't Jane's Addiction proclaim that, after 1988, "nothing's shocking?"

In any event, it takes a case like this to remind one very quickly about the differences between the university and high school educational setting; high school is not quite in loco parentis yet. The parents have their talons in everything (but their kids real, acid-dropping, pot-smoking sex-filled lives . . . heh heh heh). Indeed, at my high school the neighboring church, First Baptist of Snellville, practically ran the school telekenetically. Anyhoo, the Austin Independent School District has began the process of firing her, as they consider a number of photos pornographic. The district has a legal right to make this determination, from what I gather, or otherwise they would not have made this pornographic statement: Although everyone has the right to freedom of speech, AISD holds their teachers to a "higher moral standard." [EDIT 14 June: here's the actual text of the AISD statement: "Please know that AISD has no intention of infringing upon a person's legitimate rights to free speech and expression. However, public school educators are legally held to a higher moral standard, in order to protect the young lives they influence."] I don't have the direct quote handy, but that's what was said: "higher moral standard." Of course, when anyone whips out morals instead of policy or the law, they either have the policy in the back pocket, or they have a grudge. Or both, as is the case here, I suspect. So from my armchair—or rather, computer chair—what would the grudge possibly be?

My prediction is this: first, Hoover ain't straight (if her art, and art of her, is any measure), and as we all know, if you're going to be a queer high school teacher, you better damn well be the art teacher, the P.E. instructor, or waaay back in the closet (you know, that literature teacher you had that loved Gone with the Wind). Second, you don't express your queerness in art for all the parents to see, especially art that features little girls with ding-dongs sans Little Debbie. I find it all quite wonderful myself, because, you know, I'm me and wear my affinity for the perverse—like my throbbing heart—on my sleeve. Anyhoo, what I’m suggesting is that many folks in the school probably wanted Ms. Hoover gone long before this flap; this flap was just what they needed to make her go away. Once this all blows over, I'm sure she'll "tell all."

More distressing is the more obvious: teaching, like preaching, being a cop, and any position that creates an immediate hierarchy in which the person "in power" has something you want (knowledge, recognition, love, pardon, salvation, and so on) is an erotic process. I don't mean "sexual" in that blatant sense, just, um, a bit charged. And a lot of folks, especially folks that teach kids below 18, don't like to be reminded of that. I know, I've written on this topic before and it's obvious and all that, but, it always amazes me how stupid the "analysis" of this kind of "story" on the television has become. The transference "problem" is why sleeping with your underage students is such an overdetermined transgression (the truth of the repressive hypothesis, in a sense): NO DUH! C'mon, folks: although David Lee Roth has lost every and all sense of any cool he had left, he did pen a song every generation in the last thirty years knows: "Hot for Teacher." And here we have an art teacher whose person and art rip back a relatively transparent curtain to disclose the erotic (and gendered) dynamics of the educational process. But isn't art a privileged process because it gets to point out the naked emperor obliquely with tongues in cheeks, whereas us essay writing hacks are not given similar license (goddamned thesis statements!)? The short of this is that Ms. Hoover is being punished for what she is supposed to be teaching, and, of course, for speaking—nay, showing—truth to/in power.

Is it just me, or are these kinds of cases getting more alarming, that is hyped up, on television. I worry worry worry that the university is next. I have learned since coming to UT that parents call professors here to bitch them out too—just like they did at LSU. The last glorious liberty of the university—freedom from the PTA and its publicity-blackmail tactics, surely a unit more dangerous that David Horowitz—needs to be defended.

[sigh: insomnia tonight]