‘Porking Pippi Longstocking’ and other Erotic Stories: Illicit Bodies in the Classroom
Introduction(s):
'Hell is this Maths Room. Not a Biblical Hell: for that you require penitential flames, fallen angels and a man with the head of a goat. Nor is it the claustrophobic Hell of the city; for that to work properly you really need a carcinogenic atmosphere to choke on, too many people with too little understanding of the concept of personal space and a man dressed as a bat to save you at night. Nor the despairing Hell of a deep and forgotten dungeon; that entails scuttling rodents, damp brickwork and someone to forget you in the first place.
This Hell is worse; it is the aching despair of banal Mathematics on a Tuesday Morning. Gilroy was there of course, at the whiteboard, marker in hand, trying to explain (through diagrams) the intimate pleasures of quadrilateral equations. My head explored other intimate pleasures; his tongue between my legs, the saltiness of him in my mouth, the rhythm of his body on mine. But that was yesterday afternoon. This morning there was only Maths. Gilroy was now a unobtainable distance away as I considered the aching chasm of him as teacher and me as Year 11'
Extract from 1st Chapter of 'Gilroy Inside' (2018)
Serana is 18 and has been having sex with her teacher since the start of Year 11. Ok, for the sake of clarity, she hasn't actually been having sex with him, but she has been writing about it and sharing her thoughts and feelings with a group of like-minded students on a fan-fiction forum. Gilroy Inside is an episodic saga about the imagined relationship of a Year 11 pupil and her Maths teacher. It is written in the first person and has approximately 2000 followers that log in to catch the monthly updates of their developing relationship. Since its creation in 2018, Gilroy Inside has evolved into a collaborative fantasy in which its readership suggests future scenarios and, in some cases, their own writings about the characters. But around this fictive focus there is a much wider exchange as members of the forum share their own sexual thoughts and imaginings about the teachers and adults in their lives. What began as a piece of erotic fiction has expanded into a repository for the social fantasies of its young readership.
Such practices resonate with wider behaviours in similar 'affinity space' (Gee & Haynes 2011): 'thestudentroom' for example contains threads named 'rate your hottest teacher' or 'I fancy my teacher' in which users exchange their fantasies of what they would like to happen in the world beyond the social confines of school; Similarly fan-fiction site Archive of Our Own' offers stories and poems similar to 'Gilroy Inside' about illicit affairs between teachers and pupils; Until recently, social platform Reddit housed forums in which students could exchange (secret) photographs and erotic artwork about sexual encounters in school. It would perhaps be easy to dismiss such postings as childish scrawling (Bacharach 2015), the digital equivalent of the graffiti that I saw on desks and walls as a teacher and youth worker. Whilst I agree that some threads are akin to their material manifestations – 'I like Mrs Kennedy's tits', 'Miss Durham sucking my dick', 'How big is Mr Cliffords cock? Please guess (and explain your answer)' – in this piece I want to both demonstrate that, and consider how, these erotic and sexual fantasies have a sophisticated and creative undercurrent, allowing their young creators to explore aspects of their school experience that simply would not have been possible in their physical world.
Erotic Classrooms
Of course, the idea that there might be a sexual dimension to teacher-student relationships is not a new concern (Johnson 2004). Education Philosophy has attempted to explore this erotic connection through the idea of Eros, in which 'Love not only plays an important role in teaching knowledge, it plays the essential role' (Cho 2005 p81). Let's consider this idea for a moment in relation to Serena's story. Schwab notes that 'The aim of man is to destroy the mammal within us' (1954, p53) yet within such a context 'Education…cannot separate off the intellectual from feeling' (ibid). Here Eros is conceived as a students journey from anonymity to personality:
'For the Eros that appears in its most obvious guise as a hankering after externals is in deeper analysis a regard for self, a desire for selfhood. To experience another's recognition of one's self, is to receive a reassurance of that's self existence. Such assurance initiates further growth. Gratitude follows' (Schwab, 1954, p55).
Now, compare these ideas with Serena's sentiments as she describes in one of her early blogs how Gilroy had been her teacher from year 7 and how '[as that] classroom relationship developed, it seemed to me perfectly natural, inevitable almost, that it would become something more. That the 'we' would move beyond maths to become flesh, which is all I can give back for everything that he has taught me'. Here, Serena's 'gratitude' expresses itself in a symbolic giving of herself to Gilroy. Whilst it cannot be realised within the confines of the material classroom because 'I am not sure that he even noticed me in class, I wasn't one of the clever girls, although nor was I one of the worst, the anonymous average' her fiction allowed her to articulate (and share) an innate need to express Eros. Interestingly, Serena shows no interest in casting off the 'mammal' within her, but rather she actively embraces (as she describes it in a later chapter) 'the animalistic pleasures of being a girl'.
The erotic subtext of Serena's classroom experiences come as no surprise to Gallop (1997) who sees a direct connection between sex and pedagogy. In response to another blog, Rachel describes her thoughts about her Geography teacher Mr Carpenter:
'I watched Carpenter from my chair
Hands 'tween legs, I wished him there
As I laid back, I wondered if,
As I got wet, would he get stiff
And explore my shapes, my depths, as he
Mapped out
forbidden,
hidden,
geography'
In her accompanying commentary, Rachel talks about how in her poem she wanted to find a way of expressing 'the rush I felt whenever I was in Mr Carpenter's class'. Johnson (2004) describes the feelings of pleasure that she got from the classroom as being akin to a kind of sexual pleasure, arguing that 'teaching sans sexuality is impossible' (p6). Rachel seems to be expressing a similar pleasure to that described by Johnson all-be-it from the position of student. The 'rush' of being in the presence of a favourite teacher is reiterated elsewhere:
'As Mr Humphrey leant closer to explain the passage, I felt the warm glow beneath my skirt spread between my legs. How does he make History so hot' - Lauren B4Bad
'Sometimes I just get things wrong so he will spend time with me getting it right' – Jennifer F.
In this second quote Jennifer vocalises a seemingly classic expression of Eros, the intrinsic connectivity between teacher and subject, a benign version of the 'rush' experienced by Rachel. Interestingly she echoes Schwab here, the desire to be noticed: for her, the visibility of 'failing' has more erotic capital than the anonymity of success (similarly expressed by Serena earlier). In contrast, Lauren reminds us that a subject is only considered 'hot' in so far as the teacher also conforms to that notion of 'hotness' and in her case, 'teaching is better understood as an emotional and erotic experience than as a cognitive, informative one' (McWilliam, 1999, p. 37). As if to confirm this, in a later post, Jennifer divulges that her teacher soon realised that she was 'getting things wrong on purpose, shit, what do I do now?', her response was the blog 'Pippi Longstocking - my train-wreck love-life' in which she probes a succession of encounters with Mr McCreedy:
'Shit, what do I do now? As I sat and listened, I realised that it wasn't just my interest in science. Indeed, the test tubes and glass flasks were just mundane. I wasn't interested in periodic tables, liebig condensers or bunsen burners, it was Mr McCreedy. He touched my soul as much as he touched my breasts, my pussy, shit I was becoming a chemist for him. Shit! Shit? Shiiit! My life was shit, well my grades were, but he wasn't. He was safe. He was warm'.
Later in the series, Jennifer, now a successful chemistry student, goes onto reveal that her success in the subject springs from her erotic connection to Mr McCreedy: 'At each encounter, my knowledge seemed to grow as much as my awareness of my body. As my imaginings about him taught me love, my teacher also taught me science'. Hull (2002) observes that the role of the teacher is to help awaken desire at its deepest level, which is perhaps what we see in Jennifer where her desire for Mr McCreedy is inextricably linked to her desire to learn more about his subject. bell hooks encourages such behaviours arguing that the role of teachers should be to stimulate such responses as a means 'to restore passion to the classroom... [so that teachers] … allow the mind and body to know desire' (1994, p199). For bell hooks this desire exists beyond a thirst for knowledge merely because one likes ones teacher (which is arguably how Lauren described things earlier), rather she sees it as truly transformative because it casts aside notions of propriety and established practices within learning. If the structures within school can be questioned, then students can be empowered to ask similarly difficult questions about the world around them. Transgression here leads to transformative knowledge, and it is from such liberation that a student's critical knowledge develops.
In her later writing, bel hooks is explicit in how she sees the erotic within this desire ' [it is] important for us to acknowledge the erotic as a site of empowerment and positive transformation. Eroticism, even that which leads to romantic involvement between professors and students, is not inherently destructive' (2003, p144). Interestingly, both Serena and Jennifer describe their writing as 'liberating':
'As the series grew, and my intimate imagines about Gilroy developed, I felt that for me anything was possible, that I could do anything I put my mind to. That the things that the world put in my way were no longer important.' – Serena [response to a blog posting]
'Exploring my relationship with Mr McCreedy, allows me to explore other parts of my life, things that I thought were beyond questioning, eventually even Mcreedy himself '
– Jennifer [from her blog 'Pippi Longstocking']
Both these posts hint at hook's thesis, that transcending a norm opens up the possibility for wider reflections. Bettelheim (1976) concurs, reminding us that dark, often forbidden, narratives provide a mechanism to make sense of our wider humanity. Jennifer's post is particularly salient here, notably her admission that eventually her writing allowed her to transcend her reliance on McCreedy. Gallop (1997) seems to foretell hook's later ideas regarding the influence of the erotic, arguing that it is not simply eroticism that sits at the heart of the relationship, but rather a form of sexualised 'love' since, 'Sexuality breaks down the power differential between a teacher and a student, and the teacher becomes for the student not a possessor of infallible knowledge but a mortal whose knowledge has limits' (Cho 2005, p85). Arguably we see this being played out in the writings of each of the girls. It is unclear whether Rachel's interest in geography was stimulated to the same extent as her' hidden geography' but Serena continued with a Maths A level as wrote her stories, and as I noted earlier, Jennifer attributes her later success in science to her earlier relationship with McCreedy. Eventually the fantasies run their course and the relationship with learning changes accordingly: Rachel no longer posts about Mr Carpenter since she 'moved on to Art and English and I had no need to call on him', whilst Jennifer discovers a new affinity with a female chemist who 'knows so much more than McCreedy ever taught me'. Serena is perhaps the most eloquent in her expression of this process:
'The next morning, I woke up late. Through bleary eyes I saw Gilroy sitting up next to me, sipping on tea from his favourite china cup. He was oblivious to me as he read some story from The Times about some girl who I had never heard of. He was deaf to me as he listened to, well something, through his EarPods. He seemed a world away from our maths classroom, from my life, from us. I sat up, swivelled my back to him pulling on first my trackies and then my T shirt, teasing him one last look at my breasts as the cloth slid over them. He seemed not to notice. I walked through the door and allowed myself a few seconds to look at the man who had offered answers to all my questions. Then I walked downstairs and out into the blinding light of my life. My future. Hell is that Room….'
Extract from 'Chapter 23: the end of the affair? Gilroy Inside'
It is not clear whether this is truly 'the end of the affair', since whilst I have been writing this chapter Serena has not posted another episode on her website. She has hinted in a blog post that 'I think my time with Gilroy has run its course. I have nothing left to learn from him'. Here Serena reminds us that although Gallop (1997) is right to point out how an eroticised rendering of the classroom infuses a degree of mortality into the student/teacher relationship, we must also remember 'that love can blind us to the imperfections of our lover' (Cho, 2005, p87).
Erotic (fan) Stories
Up until now I have been conceptualising these erotic writings within a philosophical, arguably Freudian, conception of Eros. I want now to open this up a little more and consider these fantasies from a slightly different angle. It is significant I think that the girls cited in this piece chose to explore their eroticised classroom through fiction, since as Cortazzi (2001) suggests, we make sense of our lives through the use of story. As I noted earlier, both Bettelheim (1996) and Jones (2002) have been quick to point out how storytelling allows children to explore areas of the taboo. In her work on early childhood education, Paley (1990) correctly observes that children have an innate ability to tell stories. Bettelheim explores this assumption in relation to 'Fairy Tales' arguing that this inherent understanding offers children a connection between the world of the story and the child's own subjective world. This argument draws on a supposition that social interactions and meaning-making activities combine to form complex interacting systems within distinctive 'learning ecologies' (Flewit et.al 2016). Since fairy tales are told to children by adults, and often contain a cautionary theme, we might see them as an example of a 'learning ecology' in which the child is required to face dark aspects of adulthood and through such confrontations resolve their own internal fears and desires. Elsewhere I have similarly examined how Bakhtin's notion of the 'carnivalesque' - in which ordered societies require sites of 'disorder' as a way of making sense of the world - is important in understanding young people's transgressive activities in fantasy space (Crowe and Watts 2015). I would like to suggest then, that forbidden stories, offer children a glimpse of an 'adult' view of the world (Moiré and Pearce 2008).
It is quite telling I think, that much of the work around the professional implications of Eros has been from a teacher rather than a student perspective. Tara Star Johnson laments the lack of research that focuses on the sexual dimension of the teacher-student relationship, arguing the difficulties of investigating something that most professionals, out of some sense of propriety, don't admit exists in the first place (2004). Although Johnson is more concerned with exploring teacher desire, her material is never-the-less salient to this chapter, in particular her methodology of encouraging her participants to consider their erotic experiences through the use of story. More widely of course, this is a well-established research method, but I feel Johnson reminds us of the possibilities offered by adopting a literary approach when exploring what are often difficult or sensitive areas for research. Rachel discloses in one of her blogs how her ode to Mr Carpenter was born from a desire to:
'…write something that sounded like Chaucer… even though I know that my poem wasn't really Chaucer, nor did Chaucer talk much about sex (well not that I read anyway), but what I learnt in English was that Literature could help us explore personal things about our own lives, so I thought I would try to imitate that'.
Similarly in her introduction to chapter 5 Serena notes how.
'I knew I couldn't come right out with my feelings for Gilroy, but my stories seemed an acceptable way of sharing how I felt'
Notice how in both cases their use of fantasy offers the girls a buffer from their real lives whilst simultaneously creating a safe space in which to explore feelings that were too difficult to express in other ways. In Johnson's study, similar to the girls, their stories offered the teachers 'a safe place for them to share, reflect on, and begin to theorize the sexual dimension of their teaching' (2004 p8). Rachel in particular shows us that the personal dimension of both reading literature and writing creatively, in which students are encouraged to explore connections, provide surroundings in which fantasy and everyday life can be blurred. Given the eroticism of the classroom environment, it is perhaps unsurprising that for some young people at least, it also offers an arena in which teacher-students dynamics become equally hazy.
This broader importance of story is not lost on the young writers. In one of her early Pippi Longstocking blogs, Jennifer talks about how her involvement in Harry Potter Fan Fiction acted as a springboard for her own creative writing:
'As I began to read what was being written in the Wizarding World, what people imagined were the secret things that Harry got up to at Hogwarts, it stirred my imagination. First it was what you might expect, Harry and Hermoine, Ron and Hermoine. Then things got darker, Ron and Ginny, Harry and Lucius (so many stories about those two). Then I came across stories involving the teachers, Lupin and Harry, Snape and Ginny, and I thought this is what I want to write about, something that I could relate to, something that I could feel. So, I wrote my first piece of fan fiction which I am reproducing for you here. It wasn't that good, but it felt like my life'.
Jennifer is clear that this sort of fan fiction offered her an empowering space, since it resonated with her reality beyond her fictive writing; it feltlike her life, or more correctly with the feelings that she wanted to explore. Tiven (2016) agrees, arguing that such fan fiction provides young creators an arena in which to explore multiple expressions of sexuality without adult surveillance or judgement. In contrast, Moore dismisses these stories as being akin to pornography, creating a distorted view of the world in which 'young adults slake their voracious hungers [that] might equally shock and disturb adults' (2005, p17). But, as Serena argues, this is entirely the point:
'I don't want my mum to read this, or my English Teacher, but if they do, I want them to say 'Oh God, what is going on in that girl's mind?' I want them to feel uncomfortable in ways that they can't when they mark my essays. I don't want a tame life; I want a true life' - Introduction to 'Harry and Snape'
It is perhaps not surprising that a seemingly innocent world of 'Harry Potter' would form the starting point for Jennifer's and Serena's exploration of sexual relationships, nor that it develops from fan fiction to a narrative drawn from their own world beyond fandom. The girls' words offer insight into the conflicting contexts that surround this sort of sexualised fiction. If we accept Foucault's thesis that 'there are no relations of power without resistances' (1980, p142) then their stories mirror a process of both constructing identity and dis-identification, or as Rose observes,they'find themselves resisting the forms of personhood that they are enjoined to adopt' (1996, p140). In their writing the girls expose their conflicting and pugnacious states, not as 'unified subjects of some coherent regime of domination that produces persons in the form that it dreams' but rather it reflects how they 'live their lives in a constant movement across different practices that address them in different ways' (ibid).. This resonates with Raby's (2005) notion of resistance, which is sanctioned as a rebellion on the part of those being judged, as an expression of human agency: a struggle between individual personal agency and dominant power relations (expressed above by Moore as adult notions of propriety).
Let's look a little more closely at what this might mean. I would describe Serena's and Jennifer's early fan fiction work as 'Slash': Jennifer writes about Harry and Rebus, whilst Serena's story concentrates on Harry and Snape. All three characters are straight males within canon, but in both of the fanfictions they engage in a series of sexual encounters which transgresses heteronormative aspect of the original series. There is a further sub-text of transgression since both the characters that Harry liaises with are adult; Snape is a teacher and Rebus a werewolf, which further layers the sense of taboo. Academic writers (for example Bury 2014, Elea 2012) have sought to explain this as a fan-attempt to subvert the canonical narrative, which in turn challenges wider adult notions of acceptability: had one of the characters been female (and not adult) then within canon there was the possibility for them engage in a sexual relationship, but Slash Fiction allows fans a freedom to navigate the less-defined spaces within a source material whose narratives are constrained by 'adult' values of sexuality, gender and heteronormativity, and thereby creating new fictive possibilities.
But Gender is also an interesting factor here. Slash Fiction, indeed fan fiction more widely, is predominantly a female domain (Jenkins 2013) perhaps because creative women found themselves marginalised in male-owned 'conventional' space (Bury 2014). We might then broadly see Slash Fiction as a narrative created by women for women, often adolescent girls as Serena wryly observes:
'It was a good place for us fanfic girls to come together to create something for us, just us, away from the boys. I don't think they really got it anyway, they saw it as a bit pervy, but to us it was something more, beautiful perhaps'.
This reflection by Serena is particularly telling. Her fictive space offers an affinity that simultaneously embraces the initiated (the 'fanfic girls') whilst excluding the boys (and presumably other girls) who lack the understanding of what she is trying to achieve in her work. This is a deliberate act. Although she doesn't explicitly state it, Serena hints at how transformative nature of Slash casts aside traditional values partly by excluding those who don't sign up to her view of the world: the boys cannot glimpse her 'beauty' because heteronormativity requires that the taboo is dismissed as 'pervy'.
It seems to me that Slash in this context is a transgression rooted not just in a desire to open up literary canon, but rather an attempt to explore something much deeper. In reply to a blog post, Jennifer explains this further:
'When I realised the popularity of 'Harry and the Beast' I thought if people could accept a story about Harry having sex with a werewolf, then they might also be open to something more personal. So, I started Pippi Longstocking. Enter McCreedy'.
Jennifer's shift in focus is interesting. It is perhaps one thing to explore sexual taboos in the relative 'safety' of a pre-existing fantasy narrative – the diegesis of 'Harry Potter' facilitates all sorts of transgressive acts, including the pedophilia and bestiality that sit at the heart of her story - but it is quite another to transpose similar illicit acts into one's lived environment. Izberk-Bilgin (2010) conceptualises resistance as, 'a personally enriching and liberating lived experience' (in Fry, 2012, p359) which is arguably what is being expressed in Serena's earlier desire for 'a true life'. This desire to articulate the 'personal' has been a recurring theme of the girl's writings cited in this chapter.
Rose (1984) has considered this personalised resistance in reference to the role that literature might play in allowing children to explore and celebrate aspects of their lives. Of particular concern is the way that apparent power relationships are articulated within such texts, explicitly the assumptions regarding childhood and how it is positioned against sexuality. Tosenberger (2014) argues that children's fiction is referenced through a discourse in which lack of sexuality and lack of sexual desire is considered paramount because it embodies not only our perceptions of the child (innocence), but also an adult need to control and police that innocence. So, rather than having the freedom to explore how youthful sexuality might actually be expressed by a teenage readership, young adult fiction is required to maintain an adult fantasy of what adolescence should look like. Put another way, it performs a pedagogic function in which acceptable expressions of sexual behaviours are instilled in an audience seen as somehow lacking. Jennifer explains further. Having just had sex with McCreedy for the first time, fictional Jennifer contemplates what it will be like for her in school the next day:
'As I sat on the bed, his bed, my mind slipped forward to tomorrow. I was going to have to face the world, my ordered world which was a million miles from these now rather dirty sheets. This wasn't like the stories I had read, the dead texts we studied in English or at the library. This was living and breathing and sweaty and loud'.
- Extract from 'the morning after'.
In her introduction to this chapter, Jennifer reveals how she wanted to create something that 'I couldn't find elsewhere. Like Jennifer in the story, I couldn't see my life in the story's I read, none of those girls had the feelings and desires that I felt. I thought that my Harry Potter stories would help me with this, but they felt equally constricted as the characters could never be me'. Her audience shared these sentiments with many postings expressing similar dissatisfaction with the fiction available to them. One post on Serena's page speaks of how:
'[in young Adult Fiction] even if there is sex it is always so brief. I want long, messy, disgusting sex. Perhaps things I can't do, or people or things that I cant fuck. That's why I read these chapters. Thank you for creating this for us' - SnApWilloW
Here the girls articulate a resistance that is personal and liberating and one that is grounded in their everyday lived contexts rather than a fictional narrative. Research of fan fiction has often stressed its symbolic dimension, its ability to help its readers and creators experiment with aspects of the world (Jenkins 2013). As children and young adults cannot explore these things in the stories that are 'provided' for them (by adults), they are required to create their own, often in spaces not subject to similar censorship and control. When challenged on her website, Serena's justification for Gilroy Inside is that she wanted to tell 'the whole truth of what it is like for me at school', similarly Rachel reveals a desire 'to have something more than I got in English Classes or on MTV'. Both suggest that for some young people, adult provision falls far short of their 'needs'. But with Serena and her respondents, we see not just a frustration with adult-sanctioned fiction, but also how a pre-constituted diegesis (in this case J K Rowling's 'Wizarding World') is for some young people too far removed from the things they see around them. Highlighting this, Serena says of her fan fiction 'Harry and Snape', 'Hogwarts was a school, but it wasn't my school. Snape was a teacher, but he wasn't Gilroy'. Her fiction removes the dangers and complications of sex in material space creating an arena in which both she and her readership can explore a myriad of sexual interests and situations, yet she also reminds us of the porosity between the fantasy and the everyday. To fully explore one's desires there has to be an element of 'realness', which for Serena means 'I have to be able to see myself in my stories – they are about my desire after all'. I am reminded of a meme that was posted on one of the girl's Facebook pages which read 'All of the stories are true, some of them actually happened'. Just because something is a fantasy, does not make it any-the-less worthwhile (Crowe 2011) so in this respect, the girl's sexual fiction allows them to explore the nature of fantasy itself (sometimes its inadequacies), including the fantasy of childhood, and what it means for them to grow up – even if that means giving up one's innocence to do so.
Erotic Bodies
Perhaps echoing hook's earlier ideas about the classroom, Hodges stresses the transgressive sub-text of such digital fiction and how it has the potential to 'interrupt numerous discourses, including those of the body, of gender, and of power… [then] actively wield these discourses as they challenge, interrogate, or accept mainstream ideologies and beliefs' (2011, p14). Serena and Jenniferhave used their stories tochallenge discourses around childhood and adolescence, namely its innocence, and the idea that sex is solely the domain of adults. Kincaid identifies problematic nature of such a discourse since 'the idea of innocence and the idea of 'the child' became dominated by sexuality – negative sexuality, of course, but sexuality all the same' (1996, p55). If the attribute itself is desirable, then so to must be those who posses it. The girls do not sit outside of this and are well aware of their desirability and the potential power enshrined within it. Jennifer blogs how her posts 'give me power over shitty teachers and shitty lessons' and whilst her initial writing sprung from feelings of invisibility in Gilroy's class, later Serena came to see 'how my story gives me and my audience some power in school. It's like a shared secret that no one knows but us'.
So why might their fiction evoke this feeling? It would be easy to reduce this eroticism to simple pornography, a construct that offers faux representations of teenage power. The 'sexy schoolgirl' is an established image system, 'Uniform schoolgirls have appeared in novels, erotic manga, illustrations, photo magazines, and videos, and on Internet sites' (Kinsella, 2002, p. 4), and within both fan fiction and digital fiction more widely there are numerous stories and posts that reflect this type of erotica:
'Hermione stood in the classroom doorway. Harry could see by the way that her nipples poked greedily through her school blouse that she wasn't wearing a bra. As he lifted her short grey skirt, he found that she wasn't wearing panties, her excitement glistened between her legs. 'I am ready' she whispered, 'lie down on the desk and do exactly as I tell you'.
– Extract from 'Harry's Hard Wand' (author: Haven)
In Haven's story above, Hermione is not just willing, but excited to bend to Harry's sexual desires. Her mode of address – her sexualised school uniform which she wears without underwear – supports this. The image system it draws on is situated in wider discourses of sexuality and power. Haven's use of Hermione's school uniform creates a 'fantasy of the sexually precocious schoolgirl' (Read 2011 p. 11) partly because it is juxtaposed against our not being told what Harry is wearing but also because Haven uses it to signify 'virginity, the untouched, the ideal, the romantic notion of pure' (Durham, 2009, p. 114) or the innocence that Kincaid outlined earlier. But this representation of the schoolgirl is not one of power but rather of submission (Stanley, 1986).
Foucault (1978) reminds us that sexuality has never been stagnant nor a universal facet of life, accordingly power does not originate from sexual repression, but rather from a prescribed construct of sexuality and as such can be negotiated, sometimes in conflicting ways. Haven's story reaffirms how bodies are emblemic, so whilst some bodies are afforded legitimacy others are not. In much the same way, the spaces occupied by certain bodies, and the meanings ascribed therein, are subject to similar scrutiny and validation; Hermione's uniform is 'acceptable' her lack of underwear is not. The extract highlights – as does all the fiction cited in this piece – that sexual bodies do not belong in the classroom. If childhood offers innocence, then the classroom is arguably one of the settings within which that innocence is played out, which of course is what makes Hogwarts an attractive location for Slash. A sexual body therefore offers a challenge to this arena of innocence.
Foucault (1980) notion of 'Biopower' is useful here. In school settings, students perform 'student', in much the same way that Butler (1996) argues that men and women perform gender. In this sense, a student body is discursive, subject to a range of values and beliefs about what a student is; what they should look like, how they should behave. But whilst this 'defines' a student, it simultaneously constrains, since any expression is regulated by these ideological assumptions. In this sense, schools can be seen as highly regulated environments in which the 'performance' is enforced by a framework of control that would not sanction the sexual behaviours detailed in these stories. Jennifer and Serena represent a 'docile body' (Foucault 1995) defined by both social norms and school rules. However, as Walseth and Tidslevold (2020) point out, bodies always offer potential for resistance to the power of the 'ideal' since they are docile not to disciplinary power but to desire. Sexuality is potentially one site in which such power becomes dispersed, and there is a thrill in challenging a taboo, particularly one that is so heavily regulated. This perpetual spiral of power and pleasure' (Foucault 1990 p. 45), the process of conforming and resisting, is what underpins the girls 'fiction and elicits the feelings that they described earlier.
In 'Harry's Hard Wand' Hermione's body is required to perform a particular expression of transgression, in this case for sexual gratification. In this storyit is the act of transgression itself, of experiencing something forbidden, that offers the audience power; as one post observes 'I love it because it is so wrong in a classroom', it is only by experiencing the power structure that one can experience pleasure in transgressing it. Similarly, the 'how big is Mr Clifford's Cock' thread works because it explores the equally forbidden (and in this case hidden) teacher body. Here though, power is articulated through a subversion of classroom practice: Mr Clifford is presumably a maths teacher because the instruction to 'show your working out and explain your answer' mimics the language of a Maths assessment. Mr Clifford's teacher body is central to the transgression partly due to the focus of the problem, and partly because the answer is accompanied by an animation that grows or shortens 'his' penis according to the answer.
In Gilroy Inside' and the Pippi Longstocking posts, Serena and Jennifer's fictional bodies perform a slightly different role. Foucault (1990) recalls that power is relational, it doesn't always flow just from the top down, thus 'the power of the teacher is only relative to the power which the students themselves grant' (O'Brian 2000, p. 47). Whilst there are hints at this in 'Mr Cliffords Cock' it is Jennifer and Serena who illustrate how this occurs at a symbolic level. In the two narratives it is clear that power resides in both Gilroy and McCreedy. They are both teachers so within the classroom they embody disciplinary power by virtue of their position, but the narratives also hint at more symbolic power: Gilroy has the power to 'notice' Sabrina, whilst McCreddy is a gatekeeper to the knowledge that Jennifer desires. However, power also resides in the two girls: to fantasise about the teachers and to choose what the fantasy should look like and if and how it might be shared. This is of course symbolic, although in one sense the girls 'power to choose whether they act on their fantasies carries real consequences for the two men. Their earlier remarks reveal that this shift in the power balance of the classroom is a conscious act: for Jennifer, it helps her get through the school day, whilst for Sabrina there is spill over into the experience of the young women who read her work. For Johnson (2004) this circulation between legitimate and illegitimate classroom power represents a 'function of their desire to possess or subdue their teachers' power over them' (p. 93) but I think it is more than a simple transference, given the relative authoritarian approach of most education institutions in which little overt power is afforded to the student, these stories offer their audience a covert taste of empowerment.
However, the context of such empowerment cannot be ignored. That the sexualised body cannot exist in the classroom necessitates that allowing it in – even a glimpse – carries ramifications for those that choose to act on it, so it is something to be quelled and legislated against. But as hooks (1994) reminds us, the erotically charged nature of teaching and learning will not allow what is desired to remain suppressed. Whilst desire for one's teacher is expected to be reconfigured into a desire for their subject (arguably what Jennifer initially attempts to do with McCreedy) such realignment cuts across both the circulation of classroom power and the pleasure(s) of learning. Serena's description of her desires as a 'secret' is echoed in Rachel's comments about her 'hidden geography'. The covert nature of fantasies about a teacher within the context of school, is contrasted with the very public way that this is shared through their postings. Towards the end of the Pippi Longstocking narrative, Jennifer writes of her imagined relationship with McCreedy:
'I realised of course that this could never be realised, but creating a fairy tale was better than the reality of how I felt in his class. I know that changing our names and writing on here is not the same, but it was, it is, an outlet for how I feel and the sharing it helps'
Jennifer's assertion that the anonymity of her blog offers a surety not possible in her everyday world points to the power of such desires. Digital space has enabled the unprecedented option of interacting in a both an actual and perceived anonymous environment, and online fiction sites allow young people to construct and rehearse a range of identities and behaviours. Sideman (2003) argues that language sits at the heart of sexual development, so it is not surprising that she turns to her writing to help her make sense of the feelings that she experiences in school.
Whilst Taboo behaviours are exciting and help us rationalise what is acceptable, the desire for one's teacher interrupts the norms of the girl's performance of 'student' (and arguably of 'adolescent girl'). The sharing of a 'deviant' act could be construed as an attempt to realign a sinful body to one that conforms to societal expectations (Foucault 1990) but Serena reminds us that there is a pleasure in a shared secret. Their fiction offers an affinity space that excludes those that do not buy into the transgression (in much the same way that she dismisses the boys who thought her 'pervy') and it is through this that a reconfigured performance of 'sexualised student' can be normalised. This sort of erotic fiction offers creators and consumers a mechanism to define themselves in new and different ways. More importantly, the girl's work pushes at the boundaries of what is unsayable and untellable in particular contexts so it is not surprising that the girls attempt to re-appropriate culturally acceptable expressions of sexual legitimacy. It is through such re-appropriation of 'being a student' that the girls desire transcends the boundary of the classroom discourse and establishes itself as something both powerful and desirable.
Conclusion(s):
Towards the end of Chapter 12, Serena writes:
'Gilroy, lent over and turned out the light. Tomorrow is another day, we can deal with real life in the morning, let's just enjoy now. As I lay there listening to his breath slowly recede into the shallow rhythm of sleep, I held on tightly to the joy of my fantasy. I would share it with my diary when I got home. That thought gave me comfort and I caught myself smiling'
This episode is entitled 'What do I do now?' and in some ways it is her question that maps the focus of this chapter. Over the previous pages, I have considered the ways that these girls have struggled to to make sense of their classroom desires and how they have created a sense of presence through their writing and posts. Elsewhere in this book, writers have considered transgression as an expression of sub-culture. I am not sure that Jennifer, Serena and their followers could be seen as a sub-culture in any popular sense of the concept, rather they seem to me to be more akin to a community of practice, in which representations of the school adolescent body are configured and reconfigured. At one level this occurs through a resistance to the restrictions of adult-created fiction. Digital fiction offers a space to create imaginations and desires beyond what might be considered legal or appropriate in more established mediums, thus creating new forms of discourse that transgress what adolescent fiction should look like – how adolescence should be expressed in fictive form. But such discourse spills over into a challenge to the wider stories that adults create about adolescent bodies, school and how youthful sexuality should be expressed. By calling into question how we view and value the 'student body' the girls highlight how a resistance to 'adult' notions of the school environment is expressed through a transgression. In this sense their postings offer other young people an affinity of resistance, a means to re-examine, and potentially reconfigure the power relationship of the classroom. This proposes an expression of agency in which the sexualised body becomes the medium through which new identities of adolescent sexual beings can be articulated and reinforced.
Whist the desires expressed here are taboo and secret, there is also a communion in sharing with those who foster similar passions.
As an erotic classroom and the sexualised dimension of the teacher-student relationship is seen as problematic, instances where such desires become visible are often repressed. Jennifer's blog had it's hosting removed, presumably because its content was seen to somehow challenge community standards, and more widely sexual fan fiction, particularly stories that address the 'taboo' have been frequently challenged and marginalised. Sometimes this occurs through direct action as in the case of Jennifer, but more often such content is labelled 'immoral' 'risqué' or 'perverse'. This reconfiguration serves to make such content invisible. Galbraith (2017) has outlined the difficulties often faced by those seeking to understand challenging sexual material, particularly when these arise from a misunderstanding of the representations under scrutiny. The range of writing around Eros has shown us that the classroom is an erotically charged space inhabited by sexual bodies. New technology offers scope for young people strive to create new forms of symbolic expression about aspects of their lives which would be impossible elsewhere. The girls writing offers us an opportunity to see how young women make sense of their transgressive experiences and thoughts. More importantly these postings and stories provide unique observances of the ways that sexual beings create narratives about their bodies. For this, their stories should be celebrated by us as educators and researchers, not repressed.
A version of this article, appeared as a book chapter in Hoskins, K., Genova, C. and Crowe, N. (2022) 'Digital Youth Subcultures Performing 'transgressive' Identities in Digital Social Spaces'. London: Routledge. ISSN 10: 1-003-12968-4 ISSN 13: 978-0-367-65470-2
(For those that are interested)
References:
Bettelheim, Bruno. (1976) The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales,London: Thames and Hudson.
Bury, Rhiannon. 2005/2014. Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online. New York,
NY: Peter Lang Publishing.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1996) `Gender as Performance', in P. Osborne (ed.) A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals . London: Routledge, pp. 109—26.
Bacharach, S. (2015). Street Art and Consent The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 55, Issue 4, October 2015, Pages 481–495,
Cho, D. (2005), "Lessons of Love: Psychoanalysis and Teacher-Student Love," Educational Theory 55, no. 1: 79–96
Cortazzi, M; Jin, L; Wall, D.; & Cavendish, S. (2001) Sharing Learning through Narrative Communication, International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, vol.36, supplement 2001, pp. 252-257.
Crowe, N.(2011) "We die for the glory of The Emperor": Young People and Symbolic Experimentation with the 'Darkside' in On and Off-line Role Playing Games. In: J Marshall Beier. (ed). The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking Beyond the Global South.. Palgrave Macmillan
Crowe, N. And Watts, D.M. (2015) 'The Geography of Trolls, Grief Tourists and 'playing' with digital transgression.', in Horton, J., Evans, B. and Skelton, T. (eds.) Play, Recreation, Health and Well Being. Singapore : Springer Singapore. , 9. pp. 387 - 404.
Crowe, N. and Watts, DM. (2014) ''When I click "ok" I become Sassy – I become a girl.' Young people and gender identity: Subverting the 'body' in massively multi-player online role-playing games'. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 19 (2). pp. 217 - 231
Durham, M. G. (2009). The Lolita effect: The media sexualization of young girls and what we can do about it. Woodstock, NY, USA: Duckworth Overlook
Dowdall, C. (2009). Masters and critics: Children as producers of online digital texts. In V.
Carrington, & M. Robinson (eds.), Digital literacies: Social learning and classroom practice
(pp. 28–43). London: Sage.
Elea, Ilana. 2012. "Fanfiction and Webnovelas: The Digital Reading and Writing of Brazilian Adolescent Girls." Pp 71-87 in Ross, Karen (ed) The Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Media. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell
Flewitt, Rosie; Cremin, Teresa and Mardell, Ben (2016). Paley's approach to storytelling and story acting: Research and practice. In: Cremin, Teresa; Flewitt, Rosie; Mardell, Ben and Swann, Joan (eds). Storytelling in Early Childhood: Enriching language, literacy and classroom culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: The birth of a prison. New York: Random House/ Vintage.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books
Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality. Volume 1: An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume I: An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books
Gallop, J. (1997). Feminist accused of sexual harassment. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Galbraith, PW (2017) 'The lolicon guy': some observations on researching unpopular topics in Japan. In: McLelland, M (ed) The End of Cool Japan: Ethical, Legal, and Cultural Challenges to Japanese Popular Culture. Oxon: Routledge.
Gee, J. P., & Hayes, E. (2011). Public pedagogy through video games. Retrieved February 16th, 2021, from https://www.gamebasedlearning.org.uk/content/view/
Hodges, A. (2011). Crafting Fictions and Subjects: Examining the Discourses, Practices, and Communities of Adolescent Fanfiction Writers. PhD Dissertation, University of Georgia, Athens.
Hooks, B. (1994), Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom New York: Routledge
Hooks, B. (2005), Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope New York: Routledge
Hull, K. (2002) "Eros and the Role of Desire in Teaching and Learning." In Thought and Action The NEA Higher Education Journal, 18, no. 1 & 2, (2002): 19-32.
Izberk-Bilgin, E. (2010). An interdisciplinary review of resistance to consumption, some marketing interpretations and future research suggestions. Consumption Market and Culture, 3, 299-323
Jenkins, B. (2015). "I Love You to Meaninglessness: From Mortal Characters to Immortal Character Types in P&P Fanfiction." Journal of Popular Culture 48 (2): 371–84.
Jenkins, Henry. (2013). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York, NY: Routledge.
Johnson, B. (2016). Live Long and Prosper: How the Persistent and Increasing Popularity of Fan Fiction Requires a New Solution in Copyright Law. Minnesota Law Review 100 (4): 1645–87. doi:10.1525/sp.2007.54.1.23.
Johnson, Tara Star. (2004). 'It's Pointless to Deny That That Dynamic Is There': Sexual Tensions in Secondary Class- rooms. English Education 37 (1): 5–29.
Johnson, Tara Star. (2004). "I Secretly Relished that Delicious Feeling of Excitement": A Rhizoanalysis of Teacher-Student Attraction, Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education, v8 n2 p83-95 Fall-Win 2004
Jones, Gerard. (2002) Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, New York: Basic Books/Perseus.
Katz, C. (2001). Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction. Antipode, 33(4), 708–727
Kincaid, J. R. (1998) Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Kinsella, S. (1995) 'Cuties in Japan', Women, Media and Consumption in Japan, pp. 220-254.
Kinsella, S. (2002) 'What's behind the fetishism of Japanese school uniforms?', Fashion Theory, 6(2), pp. 215-237.
McWilliam, E. (1999). Pedagogical Pleasures. New York: Peter Lang
Moore, R. C. (2005). 'All Shapes of Hunger: Teenagers and Fanfiction.' Voice of Youth Advocates 28 (1): 15–19
Morie, J and Pearce, C (2008), 'Uses of Digital Enchantment: Computer Games as the New Fairy Tales',Presented at the Vienna Games Conference: The Future of Reality and Gaming, October
O'Brien, S. (2000). The lecherous professor: "An explosive thriller about naked lust, perverted justice and obsession beyond control". In C. O'Farrell, D. Meadmore, E. McWilliam, & C. Symes (Eds.), Taught Bodies (pp. 39-55). New York: Peter Lang.
Paley, V. G. (1990). The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter: The Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Raby, R. (2005). What is resistance? Journal of Youth Studies, 2, 151-171.
Read, B. (2011). Britney, Beyoncé, and me: Primary school girls' role models and constructions of
the 'popular' girl. Gender and Education, 23, 1-13
Rose, J. (1984) The Case of Peter Pan or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984.
Rose, N., 1996. Identity, genealogy, history. Questions of cultural identity, pp.128-150.
Saxena, Vandana. (2012). 'And the story goes on...': Harry Potter and Online fanfiction. Technoculture. 2.
Schwab, J. (1954). Eros and Education: A discussion of one aspect of discussion. In I. Westbury, & N. Wilkof (Eds.), Science, curriculum and liberal education: selected essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Seidman, Steven. 2003. The Social Construction of Sexuality. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Tiven, L. (2016). "The Surprising Way Erotic Fan Fiction Is Helping Young Women." ATTN: Accessed 30/12/21. https://www.attn.com/stories/5234/how-erotic-fan-fiction-helps- young-women?utm_source=email&utm_medium=direct-share&utm_campaign=shares.
Tosenberger, C. 2014. "Mature Poets Steal: Children's Literature and the Unpublishability of Fanfiction." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 39 (1): 4–27.
Walseth, K. and Tidslevold, T. (2020). 'Young women's constructions of valued bodies: Healthy, athletic, beautiful and dieting bodies', International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 55(6), pp. 703–725.
Weber, S. and Mitchell, C. (2008). Imaging, keyboarding and posting identities: young people and new media technologies, in D. Buckingham (ed.) Youth, identity and digital media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.25–47.