in loco parentis

Music: The Greencards: Movin' On Today Pamela Rogers, the hottest "rapist" in the recent female teacher boy student sex scandals, has been sentenced to nine months in prison for four known acts of a sexual nature with a 13 year old "star athlete." Watching the "news" this morning I couldn't help noticing that Rogers is, indeed, hot and that the televisual portrayal of the woman/boy affair is most certainly scripted by the "Hot for Teacher" Van Halen fantasy.

Speaking of "hot for teacher," I met with my amazingly cool and hot teaching assistants on Tuesday, Amber and Roger. After we discussed the fall course ("Rhetoric and Popular Music") and how to negotiate 250 students, and after our second pitcher of beer, we discussed teaching ethics. Since this was their first time in the assisting in the classroom, and because they are both hot, I had to underscore the ethical gist: please don't sleep with the students; and if you must, the better thing to do if you cannot help yourself is to wait until they graduate and disassociate from the university. I explained my own experience as a teaching assistant and newbie teacher (I dated a student, but waited until she graduated). We discussed the phenomenon of "the transference" and teaching and its relationship to male strippers in police uniforms and cowboys (well, every one of the Village People), and how, in general, sexualizing the students is both inevitable and also a bad thing to do. Someone said that antoher professor said that she just "turns it off" when sexualization starts to happen, but I countered that is complete bullshit and that the best you can do is shift that to a different section of the psyche. I mentioned how prohibitions sometimes backfire and how I should not have said anything at all: take the case of Pamela Rogers, for example, who slept not once, not twice, not three times, but four times with the up and coming young athlete. Surely someone said something—there was a suspicious comment, a tease from a co-worker, something to push the "do it" buttom, and the script then played itself out. You know, it's kinda like being at the top of a tall building and saying, "what if I jumped and ended it all right now?" Eveyone has those "what if" moments--its just that most of us don't jump. Having trouble in her marriage, and this young hottie leering at your breasts, and then that Van Halen filed away in the unconscious, she was overcome with a culturally overdetermined hydraulics.

Why is the taboo so overdetermined? they inquired. Insofar as part of the interplay of the transference/counter-transference involves—at least in the Freudian scheme—the projection of (unconscious) feelings about a parent, we're up against one of the biggest taboos of humankind: the incest taboo. For media audiences in the United States, teacher/student sex is the flipside of incest; we are titillated because screwing your teacher is like doing mommy or daddy. Of course, this facile reading of the force of taboo (thank you Mary Douglas) flies in the face of the critique of the "repressive hypothesis," Foucault's term for the belief that cultural "no's" lead to irresistible sexual urges to violate taboos (the net effect of this discourse is the restriction of sexuality to heterosexist norms, as well as its universalization as a explanatory mechanism).

I think Foucault is (essentially) right about this, which would come as a shock to some people. Indeed, I'm also persuaded by Guattari and Deleuze's critique of the Oedipal as a misleading magic of three (their beef is not simply a critique of the family model, but of the notion of symmetry, of trinitude). Desire may very well be a flow among and through machines. I think the point is, however, that we are interpellated to think in terms of repression, that we are reared in the Oedipal and that a condition of citizenship is currently an enfoldment of the guilt apparatus (initially in terms of the incest taboo). In other words, psychoanalysis as a discourse is a mechanism that perpetuates these fantasies of prohibitive subjectivity. Guattari—himself originally a Lacanian psychoanalyst—was interested in developing a theory of the psyche that did not perpetuate the Oedipal mechanism of cultural subjectification. Against the hydraulics of metaphysics and the restrictive (that is, repressive) logics of the Victorian episteme we have schizoanalysis. Even so, Pamela's "Hot for Teacher" script still has explanatory power for her transgression; she is victim of the fiction of "lack."

As a brief aside: one of the most annoying aspects of being an academic in the humanities (and I suspect in the human and natural sciences as well, though I don't speak from experience) is the prohibition against theoretical promiscuity. Because I'm interested in psychoanalysis, my finding theorists critical of the enterprise is not allowed. This is, especially, the irony of scholarly allegiances in my field (Communication Studies), where theoretical consistency is policed with a rigor that bespeaks the kind of sadism only possible with a deep-seated feeling of inferiority (thank you Dr. Adler): Freud and Foucault are two "Fs" not to be fucked with on the same page. The only compelling argument for theoretical consistency is the political/ethical argument offered by Marxists and feminists (and I guess the more I think about it, continental philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger . . . well, shit, I guess most of our scholarly superstars, like Richard Weaver): ideas have consequences that get people killed.

I guess I just answered myself. Even so, I think a little promiscuity is not a bad thing if we defend roving in terms of academic freedom and free-thought (and that means I don't have to have a tidy essay for every blog too!). Well, I digress, but I guess the overall point this morning is that there is no way to read the "Hot for Teacher" fantasy (or alternately from the view of the countertransference, the "Phaedrus Phantasy") outside of the coordinates of the Oedipal and the taboo of incest. You may not buy psychoanalysis, but this discourse is as much a part of the popular imaginary as microwave popcorn and neo-liberalism. You can critique the mediated portrayal of the fantasy from the angle of schizoanalysis, but motive—now that's fantasy, and fantasies are the scripts we live by. Indeed, I've consistently argued that fantasies are all we've got.