men position themselves in relation to these textual resources, and how those ... masculinity experienced by white Western men who travel to Japan and work as ... Japan, Charisma Man finds easy employment as a language teacher in a ..... new teachers 'at the beginning' of their time in Japan: those same 'younger.
Textual representations and transformations in teacher masculinity Author: Roslyn Appleby Publication details: Appleby, R. 2015, ‘Textual representations and transformations in teacher masculinity’, in S. Mills & A. Mustapha (Eds.) Gender Representation in Learning Materials: International Perspectives (pp. 105–123). New York & London: Routledge.
Keywords: teacher identity, gender, masculinity, heterosexuality, intercultural desire, textual representations Abstract: This chapter focuses on the ways in which classroom texts and background texts mediate language teachers’ construction and performance of a gendered self and, in particular, the performance of a heterosexual, masculine self. The chapter draws on data generated in interviews with Western men in which they discuss their experiences of living and working as English language teachers in Japan’s conversation school industry. In this context, interaction between teachers and students is mediated by two different types of texts: on the one hand, prescriptive classroom texts that provide functional language lessons; and on the other hand, locally circulating texts that discursively represent Western men—including Western male language teachers—as desirable romantic partners for Japanese female language learners. Analysis of the men’s accounts demonstrates the various ways in which these two texts are perceived and deployed, and the ways in which they shape the men’s sense of inhabiting and performing a masculine self. Introduction This chapter aims to examine the ways in which classroom and background texts affect the construction of a gendered pedagogical self and, in particular, the performance of a heterosexual, masculine self. The chapter draws on interview
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data with white Western men1, and discusses their experiences of teaching English in Japanese commercial ekaiwa gakkô: private, for-‐profit, conversation schools situated throughout Japan that employ significant numbers of native speaker English language teachers, many of whom are men, for classroom and individual tuition (Bailey, 2006, 2007; Kubota, 2011). In this context, interaction between teachers and students is mediated by two different types of texts: first, the prescriptive classroom teaching texts and textbooks that guide the men’s performance as teachers; and second, the prevalent background texts that position white Western men as objects of romantic desire for Japanese female learners of English. Through an analysis of interview extracts, I consider how the men position themselves in relation to these textual resources, and how those resources are used to fashion a particular gendered, pedagogical subjectivity. The men’s negotiation of these textual resources raises a number of provocative questions that have, so far, received little attention in research literature focusing on gender representations in language education. These are questions to do with the ways in which male language teachers draw on both teaching materials and cultural texts to fashion an appropriately masculine self; and the ways in which language learning texts are deployed to express or deflect heterosexual desire that emerges in the pedagogical relationship between teacher and student. Before turning to the men’s interview accounts, I first describe the discourse of intercultural desire circulating in this particular context of language teaching, and contrast this with prevailing pedagogical discourses that prohibit romantic or sexual relationships between teachers and students. I then introduce the interview participants, and briefly describe the analytical approach adopted in this research study.
1
I acknowledge that ‘white’ and ‘Western’ are complex and contentious categorisations, but have
adopted these as the terms most commonly used by the study participants to refer to themselves and their colleagues.
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Occidentalist desire and English language teaching in Japan A discourse of Occidentalist desire – for the West, the English language, and Western men – has been a salient feature in recent decades of research on Japanese women as English language learners. Situated within a broader erotic politics of Orientalism (Said 1978), a discourse of Occidentalist desire casts Western men as the embodiment of an idealised, romanticised version of the West, offering access to English language learning, and symbolising an enlightened and liberated alternative to traditional gender hierarchies that are seen to persist in Japanese society2 (Bailey, 2006; Kelsky, 2001; Kubota, 2011; Piller & Takahashi, 2006; Takahashi, 2013). Bailey (2006, p. 106) argues that Japanese women’s Occidental desires have been harnessed by an eikaiwa industry that ‘market[s] the activity of English conversation as an eroticised, consumptive practice’ through the pairing of Japanese women students with white male teachers (see, also, Piller & Takahashi, 2006, for examples of advertising material). This pattern of consumption ‘produces and reflects the business interests of the eikaiwa industry which commodifies and exploits whiteness and native speakers’ by catering to the desires of certain learners for romantic, exotic ‘pleasure and fantasy’ (Kubota, 2011, p. 482) rather than ‘linguistic skills to increase cultural capital’ (p. 480). Corresponding to the discourse of Occidentalist desire is a discourse of enhanced masculinity experienced by white Western men who travel to Japan and work as English language teachers. In the conversation schools, Bailey (2007) observes that ‘male gaijin [foreign] instructors were often elevated to movie icon status’ (p. 598); and Kelly (2008), in his personal reflections on language teaching in Japan, recalls that ‘it was pleasant to have status, money, and popularity merely on the basis of being white’ and notes that ‘for Western men, the availability of 2 Professional and domestic gender hierarchies in Japan, and their deleterious effects on women,
have been extensively explored in a wide range of disciplines (see, for example, Charlebois, 2010; Kelsky, 2001; Ma, 1996; Nemoto, 2008) and are reflected in Japan’s low rating in international indices of gender equity, such as the UNDP Gender Empowerment Index and the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report.
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Japanese women has been a big attraction’ (p. 268). Although the discourse of enhanced masculinity has not been fully explored in research literature, it is aptly illustrated in texts from popular culture, including the comic strip series of ‘Charisma Man’ (http://www.charismaman.com/). In the comic strip, Charisma Man is initially presented as a slightly built, rather doleful ‘average guy,’ employed in Canada as a burger cook, and spurned by Western women as an unworthy ‘geek.’ When transported to ‘planet Japan,’ however, he is miraculously transformed into a tall, blonde, muscular Adonis, and finds himself surrounded by an adoring mob of petite, pretty Japanese women. Like many Western men in Japan, Charisma Man finds easy employment as a language teacher in a conversation school, where his idealised embodiment flourishes in the company of young Japanese female students. A critical reading of these comic texts suggests that traces of Orientalism (Said, 1978) linger in the mutual constitution of an enhanced Western masculinity and an alluring Eastern femininity (Appleby forthcoming). The discourses of Occidentalist and Orientalist desire described above run counter to a set of discourses in the broader field of education that prohibit sexual relationships between teachers and students. As Gallop observes, educational work is conventionally viewed as appropriately disembodied and ‘sexless’ (Gallop, 1995, p. 83), and relationships between male teachers and female students are routinely ‘sexualized as harassment’ (p. 81). However, Gallop also insists that ‘all teaching takes place between gendered subjects’ (p. 81), and theories of feminist pedagogy suggest that gender and sexuality, rather than disappearing in the classroom, is merely performed differently in different spaces. Research on this topic indicates that the frisson of eroticised attraction can in fact emerge within the pedagogical relationship between consenting adults, and may even prove to be a positive experience for some teachers and students (see, for example, Bellas & Gossett, 2001; Gallop, 1995; T.S. Johnson, 2006; Sikes, 2006). Yet the consequences of erotic pedagogical relationships can also be personally and professionally devastating for those involved given the power relationships between teachers and students (Gallop, 1997; Sikes, 2010).
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In the case of English conversation schools, where Western men and Japanese women come together as adults with particular romantic and sexual desires, such attraction is reportedly quite common, and may even be encouraged by the schools’ marketing strategies (Bailey, 2007). Even in cases where schools explicitly prohibit ‘fraternisation’ outside the classroom, such policies are almost impossible to police (McNicol , 2004). Moreover conversation schools’ policies regarding the consequences of teacher-‐student relationships are not always unambiguously prohibitive, and can range from censure to benign approval or even implicit encouragement. Negotiating a path through these conflicting discourses and policies can prove particularly challenging for Western men working in the conversation school industry in Japan (Appleby, 2013a, 2013b). This study The interview accounts which form the basis of this chapter are drawn from a larger research project that examines the discourses of masculinity in global English language teaching, focusing specifically on the experiences of white Western men in Japan (Appleby, forthcoming). In this chapter, I draw on interview accounts which illustrate the ways in which the men in this study deploy their teaching materials and the background text of intercultural desire to construct and performed a gendered self. Each of the men in this study was interviewed once, during a 36 month period in Japan and Australia, either face-‐to-‐face or via Skype. The interviews lasted between 1 and 1½ hours, were semi-‐structured according to a set of guiding questions, but were also collaboratively constructed to maximise opportunities for discussion of issues and topics raised by participants (Mann, 2011). Interviewees were first asked to sketch their qualifications and work history, including the reasons for their travel to Japan. Interviewees were then invited to talk about their observations and experiences of gender and intercultural desire within their professional and personal activities in Japan. The men were all white, native speakers of English and came from one of the ‘Inner Circle’ countries of North America, Britain, or Australia (as defined by
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Kachru, 1997). In this sense, they embodied the racialised and linguistic ideal for foreign teachers employed by the conversation schools in Japan (McVeigh, 2002; Piller & Takahashi, 2006). Brief background information on participants is given in the table below, with each participant referred to by a pseudonym; however, the imperative to maintain participant anonymity means this information is necessarily limited. The age of the men at the time of interview is indicated as a decade, that is ‘30’ represents an age between 30 and 39; the men’s marital status is indicated as either ‘S’ (single), ‘M-‐J’ (married with Japanese spouse), or ‘M-‐N’ (marriage with a non-‐Japanese spouse). Name
Age
Marital status
Work in Japan (6-‐9 years)
Paul (s) #
30
M-‐J
eikaiwa gakkô
Evan (f) #
30
S
eikaiwa gakkô
Greg (f) #
30
S
eikaiwa gakkô
Work in Japan (10-‐12 years)
Eddy (s)
30
M-‐J
eikaiwa gakkô > university
Phil (f)
30
M-‐N
eikaiwa gakkô > university
Work in Japan (13-‐16 years)
Blake (s)
30
M-‐J
eikaiwa gakkô > university
Dean (f) #
40
M-‐J
ALT + eikaiwa gakkô
* had returned to live in their home country at the time of interview # working in a conversation school at the time of interview (s) interviewed by Skype (f) interviewed in person ALT = Assistant (English) Language Teacher in Japanese school system Discourse analysis approach The analysis presented in this chapter is situated within a tradition of Foucauldian discourse studies. I am using the term ‘discourses’ throughout this
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paper in the Foucauldian sense3 to mean ‘practices which systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 49). Used in this critical theory tradition, discourses refers to the ‘finite range of things it is conventional or intelligible to say about any given concerns’ within any community (Cameron, 2001, p. 15). When individuals talk about a topic, they draw from these shared resources, and through such individuals’ talk, says Cameron, ‘reality is “discursively constructed”, made and remade as people talk about things using the “discourses” they have access to’ (p. 15). In keeping with this tradition, my analysis focuses on the ways in which spoken language, generated in the interview context, is used to structure a particular social world, give meaning to events, and offer particular subject positions for teachers to take up, or to resist (Cameron, 2001). The analysis also draws on understandings of gender as a discursive achievement, a ‘repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly regulatory frame’ (Butler, 1990, p. 32), rather than a fixed, pre-‐ given entity. The interviewees’ accounts are thus understood as discursive practices that produce and project the subject as a particular type of masculine self (Cameron, 2001; Edley, 2001), through talk that entails ‘social positioning of self and other’ (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 586), achieved by indicating identification, or disidentification, with relevant texts, discourses, institutions, and social categories. In keeping with this type of discourse analysis, the interviews discussed in this chapter are not intended to offer an unmediated access to the ‘real world’, if such a thing is thought to exist. Rather, the interviews afforded participants an opportunity to articulate a set of discourses, and to perform and project a particular identity for a particular audience: in this case, a female academic researcher and a wider population of research scholars and readers. My own identity, and outsider status, thus inevitably shaped the content of the men’s talk (for further discussion, see Appleby, 2013b).
3
See Pennycook (1994) for a comprehensive explanation of the links between Foucauldian ‘discourses’
as “systems of power/knowledge within which we take up subject positions” (p. 128), and ‘discourse’ in the linguistic sense of a text, or ‘language in use’.
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The twin texts of teaching and dating In this section, I focus on extracts from the interview data and consider the ways in which the men’s interaction with classroom texts and background texts shapes their identities as Western men and as English language teachers in Japan. Below are two extracts that pinpoint the typical effects these twin texts. In the first extract, Blake is describing his use of the teaching text stipulated by a well-‐ known chain of private English language conversation schools that operates throughout Japan. As a new recruit, the prescriptive learning materials dictated by his employer provided Blake with a sense of security by scaffolding his performance as a language teacher. Blake: A lot of language teaching situations [are] McDonaldised. […] Every lesson is virtually like every other lesson, everything’s standardised, everything’s controlled from the top, and deviations should be swiftly and quickly dealt with. And it was just the cookie cutter approach. I mean in some ways it benefitted me, I’ll have to admit, cos I had had no language teacher training. Everything I learned about teaching started from what I learned at [the English language conversation school]. In the second extract, Blake refers to a widely recognised discourse of Occidental desire by which white Western men are seen as objects of desire for Japanese women. In this account, the background text of exoticised, eroticised desire provided Blake with a renewed sense of masculinity and heterosexual potency as a consequence of his transmigration from the USA to Japan. Blake: In America I didn’t really get looked at so much. I mean I had girlfriends of course, but not that consistently. I was not that attractive on the dating market. [But] Western men do come here [to Japan and] you’re more attractive and you have more social capital than you did in your home country, and you know especially if you’re in your early 20s like I was, it’s not surprising that most men, most young straight Western men would take advantage of that.
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In the following sections I discuss in more detail, and person by person, the men’s accounts of their interaction with these two textual resources, and the ways in which those resources mediated the men’s construction of themselves not only as teachers, but also as gendered objects of romantic desire. Paul For Paul, the training texts provided by his conversation school proved to be a useful means of gaining both professional and interpersonal confidence. As Paul explained, his own lack of English language teaching credentials presented no obstacle to his employment within one of the largest conversation school chains whose recruitment campaign in his home country invited prospective employees to ‘live and work in Japan, no experience necessary.’ In place of professional qualifications, the school provided a routine script for classroom practice: each class had ‘pretty much exactly the same lesson structure and you’re expected to teach in that way. […] You have to learn those steps.’ With the steps and scripts under control, however, Paul described a sense of increasing confidence, and this meant ‘your personality comes through.’ The display of ‘personality,’ then, was perceived to be a valued characteristic of the ideal Western English language teacher, and each of the men described a particular performative style that was favoured by the schools: Paul: At work you do have to act like the stereotypical loud bright and happy Westerner kind of thing. […] It's just part of the company's image. […] it's a full profit business so we've got to keep the customers satisfied, keep them happy, make them want to come back, that kind of thing. Paul’s identification with this corporeal image, and the obligation to enact a particular performative style, not only served commercial interests, but also provided significant personal and professional benefits. In this sense, the discourses of masculinity were enabling and not simply regulatory. For Paul, who described himself as ‘a bit of a geek’ and ‘socially awkward’ before going to Japan, the requirement to ‘act’ the part of a ‘stereotypical loud bright happy Westerner’ became part of his personal performative repertoire: ‘I've just sort of learnt a lot about how to talk to people, how to deal with people through that job
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and I think it's sort of given me a lot of confidence and whatever to talk to people.’ Alignment with the schools’ embodied, performative ideal also afforded Paul and others greater confidence with Japanese women, and enhanced his masculinity by boosting heterosexual success. In this sense, the men described themselves performing – to themselves and others – a masculinity ‘not preconditioned by hesitation but by confident expression and a purposeful, outward intentionality’ that reasserts and reproduces gendered power relations (Whitehead, 2002, p. 189). Paul, for example, confessed that his social awkwardness had meant he ‘wasn’t dating much’ in his home country because he ‘wasn’t prime dating material’; but in Japan he had experienced increasing confidence with dating Japanese women, one of whom he eventually married. Despite this increased masculine, heterosexual confidence, Paul differentiated himself from his male colleagues by insisting that he preferred not to date his students: ‘I just wanted to keep the work here and the personal over [t]here’. The school’s policy in regard to teacher-‐student dating was, however, quite lenient: Paul: In our official policy manual and in the initial training session […] it's always quite blatantly pointed out, we don't prohibit relationships between teachers and other staff or students but be professional, keep it discreet, act maturely, don't go blabbing on about this or being silly, keep your personal and your professional life separate and number two, do not under any circumstances date anyone or go out with anyone under 20 because it's the age of majority. Given the leniency of this policy, Paul reported that administrative problems could arise in cases where male teachers ‘overstepped the line’ that defined the boundary between ‘personal and professional life’. This included cases where male teachers were inappropriately persistent in ‘propositioning’ their female students, and ‘then someone has to go out with the fire extinguisher and get rid of that problem’. Within the small world of the English language schools, this discourse of inappropriate heterosexuality amongst white Western men was 10
widely recognised and, for Paul, this was a discourse with which he did not wish to be associated. According to Paul, having a steady girlfriend, and then a wife, provided a cloak of masculine respectability that freed him from the suspicions that applied to single Western men, but also, ironically, allowed him a certain amount of interpersonal liberty in his workplace interactions with female students. Paul: There wasn't any sort of uncertainty, you know, ‘oh when he says [that], did he just try to pick me up? or is he sort of checking out women in the class?’ like there wasn't anything like that. And when we [got] married the school threw a party for us as well. […] So everyone knew I was married and so it was quite easy to talk to people after that. I could be myself, I could make jokes, I could comment […] on people's clothing or hairstyle whatever, ‘oh no you're looking really nice today’ or ‘it's a really cute top’ or something like that, and they know that I'm not trying to pick them up because I've got the wedding ring on. Perhaps not surprisingly, the confident interactions that Paul describes in this account illustrate conventional gender relations in which men are active participants (in complimenting and pursuing), and women are passive recipients (of compliments and pursuit). In this sense, the account suggests that Paul’s enhanced masculine performativity tends to reproduce a normative, asymmetrical heterosexual relationship within the pedagogical domain. As a result of these multiple enhancements in professional and personal identity, Paul described the conversation school experience – and the interpersonal confidence the school’s routines instilled – as ‘one of the best things to happen to me.’ In this regard, the hegemonic masculinity particular to the conversation school was an ideal with which Paul happily identified. Dean Dean worked in a conversation school that was part of a large global chain and, like Paul, acknowledged that on arrival in Japan, ‘not all of us have teaching experience, we arrive here raw’. On commencing employment, Dean described
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the conversation school taking on the formative role, and dictating the style of professionalism the ‘raw’ new recruits were required to display: Ros: [The conversation school] trains you to teach? Dean: Yes. They give us a five day course. Basically, I don't like to say it, but it's teaching by numbers. Our teacher's book-‐ we'll have the teacher's page here, a student page [t]here. Teacher's page, it says ‘say hello to the student’. ‘Hello’. ‘Introduce point number one,’ […] it's teaching by numbers. Ros: So it’s quite-‐ Dean: Regimented, scripted, yeah. Now, as you become more familiar with what they-‐ no, as you become more familiar you start branching out more. It starts getting-‐ it's not so regimented. But when you're fresh off the boat you don't know what you're doing. You tend to follow the instructions of what they want you to do. But once you've got a bit of experience under your belt, then you know where you can get away from it and start helping the students a bit more. Looking back from his present position some years later, Dean’s evaluation of the initial training and teaching text was rather negative and self-‐deprecating (‘I don’t like to say it, but it’s teaching by numbers’). From his present perspective, he distanced himself from those prescribed scripts and texts. And yet Dean’s account, like Paul’s, also indicates a reliance on those texts to scaffold his gradual emergence as an experienced teacher who has confidence in his ability to help students with their language learning. For Dean, Japan also represented a chance to develop greater confidence in his private life by offering an opportunity for greater success in heterosexual relationships. Dean came to Japan ‘just to get away from my life at the time, I guess, I had been married, I just got through a messy break-‐up.’ Dean’s unhappiness with his marriage break-‐up was presented as a reason for vigorously pursuing sexual relationships with Japanese women.
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Dean: I came over to Japan a little bit bitter, so when I first arrived here dating was seen to be a lot easier. I can say that I hit it hard when I first arrived here. With the ease of dating Japanese women, Dean became ‘a little bit more confident in myself […] yes, it made me more confident in a social situation, it made me more confident to go up to women and say ‘hello’ and ‘how's it going.’ In this regard, the conversation school offered opportunities to rebuild his confidence not only by learning to teach, but also by offering opportunities to meet Japanese women, and to date female students. Ros: What about the situation here with teachers and students? Do the teachers date the students? Did you ever date students? Dean: I'm sorry to say I did. [The school's] policy is you can do it, but be careful because it can come back to bite you on the butt. […] So at the beginning, yes, we did, I did date students, yes. […] I guess most teachers are very careful to make sure that it doesn't become a problem. I've got two teachers who have dated students and have ended up marrying them actually. Here again, Dean’s account of his dating experience is apologetic – perhaps framed as such for the benefit of a female researcher and interviewer – and references a normative asexual discourse of pedagogic interaction. In an apparent accommodation to this normative discourse, Dean deployed a range of strategies to mitigate or deflect any potential negative evaluations of teacher-‐ student dating and sexual relationships. First, teacher-‐student dating was swiftly framed by a benign school policy – reiterated by several teachers at this same school – that openly acknowledges, and implicitly sanctions, the occurrence of such relationships. Second, the practice was framed as an experience typical of new teachers ‘at the beginning’ of their time in Japan: those same ‘younger teachers’ who ‘arrive here raw’, and find an outlet for the expression of their new heterosexual prowess. Third, it is legitimised by emphasising that the teachers are always ‘careful’ to ensure that dating a student ‘doesn’t become a problem’ by provoking a student complaint. And finally, the practice of dating is 13
naturalised by being absorbed into a heteronormative progression towards marriage. As with Paul’s account, Dean’s discourse of legitimacy through marriage appears to provide a convenient cloak of masculine respectability for Western men working as language teachers in Japan. Phil Phil, who identified as gay, had also arrived in Japan without teaching qualifications, and described a similar sense of invigorated masculinity as a consequence of the excitement generated upon his arrival at a smaller, private conversation school in regional Japan. In Phil’s account, however, the school’s formal language teaching texts were irrelevant as a focus for language learning. Instead, the body of the white Western male teacher – his body – became the language teaching text: Phil: It was funny for me because I arrived and I felt like such a superstar. […] I was popular, this is the thing, English conversation school is about people who want to sit down and look at you and try to talk with you. So I thought that that was really cool, and the woman who ran the school liked me and thought that this was great and she was flirting with me a lot which was really weird. But-‐ because I think the countryside of Japan the women really didn’t understand ‘gay’ ((laughs)). Although the white male body had become the text – to be read as such by both students and staff – Phil’s account suggests that the male body could only be read as heterosexual, and that homosexual masculinity remained illegible. For Phil, being read as heterosexual was described as liberating, in that it positioned him within a normative discourse of masculinity, and appeared to resolve the ‘sense of contradiction surrounding male homosexuality and masculinity’ (Edwards, 2006, p. 80). This ‘contradiction’ between being gay and, at the same time being ‘masculine’ is highlighted in the extract below. In this extract, Phil’s ‘cool’ new experience of being the object of heterosexual attraction, both inside and outside the language classroom, was illustrated by presenting two contrasting images of ‘uncool’ sexuality: first, in his home country, where his own masculinity had been
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undermined by stereotypes attached to homosexuality; and then in Japan, where he experienced a heightened masculinity in comparison with the stereotypes attached to Japanese men. Phil: Coming from the US where being sort of pointed out as gay right away really wasn't cool, I mean you wanted to sort of be that masculine guy who people didn't know who was gay. So suddenly here I was in a place where people didn't know I was gay and I thought that was so cool. I felt like I was more manly ((laughs)). […] Japanese men don't necessarily put out a lot of masculine vibes so, yeah, I felt like a bit of a tough guy. Overall, these accounts suggest that in the conversation schools, the men were recruited into a style of textually-‐scripted teaching and into a new style of masculinity. The men’s nascent sense of professional identity as teachers was scaffolded – shaped and supported – by the teaching texts mandated by the conversation schools: whether those texts were in the form of conventional lesson materials or in the form of the Western male body. Through the same process, the men’s accounts suggest that the conversation schools facilitated a libidinal pedagogy that not only served the schools’ own commercial interests, but also served the interests of men who were newly-‐arrived in Japan and found their sense of masculinity and heterosexuality rehabilitated, enhanced, and transformed. Resisting libidinal pedagogy A libidinal pedagogy was, however, perceived as a problem in cases where a female student indicated – through gestures or conversational strategies – a flirtatious interest that the male teacher did not reciprocate. The men’s accounts of these interactions, as discussed in this section, focused on the agency of Japanese women in demonstrating their romantic desires (cf. Takahashi 2013). In these circumstances, from the men’s perspective, returning to the safety of the conventional language learning text was represented as a means of defusing or deflecting unwanted desires.
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Greg In our interview, Greg represented himself not primarily as a teacher, but rather as a person of sophisticated tastes and stylish physical appearance who had his own business interests that were quite separate from his work at the conversation school. He reported that he had worked as a model for famous fashion brands in his home county, and that he had been employed as a ‘poster boy’ in a successful marketing campaign for the chain of language schools in which he was currently working as a teacher. In this sense, he appeared to be more heavily invested in an image-‐driven notion of masculinity encapsulated in the discourse of the style-‐conscious New Man (Benwell, 2003; Edwards 2006; Nixon 2001), rather than a masculine identity invested in pedagogy and the work of language teaching. Greg also displayed a very confident sense of masculinity that was tied up with his success in heterosexual relationships in his home country where ‘to be honest with you, I rarely or never have been on the chasing end, it sounds really conceited but it's true’. In Japan, although Greg had dated numerous students he insisted that ‘when it comes to actually establishing a relationship or having a relationship with a student […] in my experience it's always been them approaching me’. Greg: I've never once approached or gone after a student. They have shown interest, they have been asking, eager to go out or to start-‐ yeah, so I accepted and things have happened. By way of illustration, Greg explained that a typical female student who was interested in him romantically would attempt to shift the conversation away from a singular focus on the textbook in an effort to engage him in a personal relationship that might extend beyond the classroom. Greg: They often try to ask about what I do in my free time or my hobbies. Then I'll say something and they would say, ‘oh, I've always wanted to try this or that. Can we try sometime together?’ […] They've picked up
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on things that I've said, kind of about-‐ not me personally, but in general about myself and hobbies, interests, and then they'll try to, yeah, pick from that and include themselves with me doing something, darts or, you know, cooking or going out to some park in Shinjuku or something. Hobbies, interests and leisure time activities are, of course, common enough topics in a language lesson, but in this account, from Greg’s perspective they afford an opportunity to shift the relationship from a pedagogical one between teacher and student, to an interpersonal one between a white Western man and a Japanese woman. In Greg’s description of such events, the textbook once again served as a textual diversion, a device or decoy to deflect the flirtatious approaches of students in whom he had no romantic or sexual interest: Greg: Actually the text book, it is kind of like a safeguard or safety net because as the instructor or teacher we can focus on this or keep the focus on this. If the student wants to start to wander off or start to talk about something else we can do that for a minute and then, because we have this [textbook], we could say, ‘okay, well, let's go to the next part’ or ‘let's do the next thing’. So it is kind of, yeah, a way to keep things going the way you want it as in lesson focus, instead of drifting off into some conversation that might lead to exchanging contact information, which might lead to something else. Greg’s account points to the indistinct boundary between the two texts at play in the language lesson: the overt language-‐focused text(book) and the covert text of romantic desire, immanent in the conversation that ‘might lead to something else’, including the eventual exchange of personal ‘contact information.’ The lack of clarity in this boundary is evident in Greg’s image of the student’s ‘wander[ing] off’ and ‘drifting off’; but there is also a sense in this extract that he is the one who ultimately remains in control: he acts as a regulator, and determines how far off course the conversation will be allowed to go. In this sense, any threat that his masculinity may be jeopardised by being the passive object, rather than the active agent of desire is quashed. As the active agent, he maintains his superior status in the hierarchy of gender relations by positioning 17
himself in the role of a powerful gatekeeper who retains the authority to accept or reject his female students’ overtures. Evan Despite the frequency of teacher-‐student dating, in several accounts dating students was represented as problematic, particularly in circumstances where the relationship ended, and the student continued on at the school. For several teachers, entering into a sexual relationship with a student also represented a threat to the teachers’ sense of professionalism. Evan, for example, was reluctant to get involved in an intimate teacher-‐student relationship not only because it might ‘get messy, especially during a break-‐up’, but ‘also [because] it does sort of lack a bit of professionalism’. For Evan, the professional identity to which he aspired required emotional, sexual, and physical detachment: Evan: [The] point of professionalism is that you separate. You are the teacher, you have to embrace that sort of ideology of being the knowledgeable one and the one that's separated from-‐ I don't know, just being the guy speaking English. In this extract, Evan differed from Greg in drawing a clear distinction between the identity of a professional teacher with specialist knowledge about language teaching, and an identity based on the Western male teacher’s body: ‘just the guy speaking English’. The fraternisation policies in his initial place of employment, which ‘did not allow you to spend any time privately with students’, helped to secure the detachment he saw as central to his teaching identity. Evan: It was in your contract that outside a [lesson] time you were not-‐ and in a lot of cases that was beneficial to the teachers, because if students invited you out it was easy as anything to turn them down, ‘I'm really sorry, it's something I'm contractually not allowed to do’. However, at Evan’s current school, the policies permitted teacher-‐student relationships to develop. At this school, students could pay for individual tuition by a teacher of their choice, could pay to attend parties where they were able to
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socialise with teachers, and could even buy a ‘package’ that included private lessons and a restaurant lunch with the teacher. As Evan explained, in private lessons, some ‘clients’ appeared to show a romantic interest in the teacher, with signals that required a carefully crafted response on the teacher’s part. The strategic response that Evan described were similar to those in Greg’s account, and entailed a retreat to the safety of the textbook. Evan: You get sort of the giddy-‐ the hair toss, the quick return to personal questions and then you start to feel that-‐ and you sort of guide them, you sort of say ‘oh, you know let’s aahh-‐’, you answer the question, you laugh and you try to return to the textbook, and they're constantly trying to sort of pull back to something more-‐ find a form of connection, ‘oh, you like [that], oh I really like that too!’ It's like okaay. […] I feel that the textbook has a sort of ah-‐ the textbook represents sort of the learning of the language by the methodology which they paid for and which the school-‐ it's got the [school] symbol on it, it has all these language elements on it and that's separate from-‐ now necessarily to learn the language better you should make connections with the student and usually it's quite, the textbook it doesn't really help for making those connections. So yeah, actually using it is a bit of a shield in some cases. Evan’s description points again to the two texts at play in the language lesson: on the one hand, the textbook text, with its emphasis on a unique ‘methodology’, its specialised coverage of ‘all these language elements’, and its symbols of institutional authority. Competing with that assemblage was the covert text of a student’s romantic desires for an interpersonal connection with her Western male teacher. The interplay of these two texts, in Evan’s account, points to a crucial dilemma for the white Western male teacher as an object of desire in Japan. From his perspective, successful language learning requires an interpersonal ‘connection’ between teacher and student, but the conventional textbook materials – with their emphasis on ‘language elements’ and ‘method’ – do not facilitate such connections; at the same time, too much interpersonal ‘connection’ can threaten the professional relationship between teacher and 19
student, if that relationship crosses the invisible boundary into an expression of romantic or erotic desire. Eddy A more explicit move towards boundary crossing between language learning texts and sexually suggestive texts was evident in Eddy’s account of his students’ behaviour during his first lesson at a conversation school. In our interview, Eddy had posited that the style of communication in a typical English language classroom differed from that in a Japanese classroom, in that communication with English speakers was ‘much more open and engaging’, and communication with an English-‐speaking teacher was ‘more touchy feely’ than with a Japanese teacher. As a consequence, Eddy concluded that Japanese women may feel ‘liberated’ in speaking English (as found in Ryan’s 2009 study), and may ‘misinterpret’ the teacher’s actions as indicating sexual interest. In the particular example that Eddy retells, the language learning text is not a conventional textbook, but instead a classroom wall map around which the lesson talk revolves. Eddy: I mean if they are used to a certain interaction with a teacher, and this is suddenly changed to this very open, sort of, you know, freestyle conversation style, then perhaps that girl, that woman might think that the teacher is interested, I don’t know, it can be misinterpreted like that. Ros: So did you have that sort of experience? Eddy: Yeah I do. Yeah I have had that experience certainly in-‐ I’ve been really cautious. I mean you know, I remember the first class that I taught at [the school] I walked into this classroom. There was only one student there. You know she-‐ she did the strangest thing, the moment I walked in there she got up and walked over to the wall where there was a map and she pointed at Australia. She said ‘is this Australia?’ You know she stuck out her bottom in a really suggestive way, she was turned around. I was just standing there looking at her, going, what are you doing? ‘Yeah, that’s Australia, of course it’s Australia’. Why are you sticking your bum out like that? You know I’ve-‐ you know, that’s one in
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thousands of classes I’ve had. But I avoid it, I mean I just, you know, I’m really not interested in allowing other interests to get into the language learning dynamic at all. I just think that, you know, while I will try not to offend any of the students, let’s keep this not suggestive at all. Here, too, Eddy draws a clear distinction between the two texts that circulate in the classroom: the ‘language learning dynamic’; and the ‘other [eroticised] interests’ that can distract from language teaching and learning. In his account, Eddy, like Evan, strongly aligned with the identity of a professional teacher, and rejected what he presents as an enticement into the role of a heterosexual man who is tempted by a provocative female student in the classroom. However, negotiating the boundary was not always easy and, as Eddy went on to explain, closing off the possibilities for interpersonal engagement could also present problems if it also shut down a language lesson based on oral communication. Eddy: Yeah and you know, I’m always very clear about the limits of the conversation. I mean I’ve told students ‘it’s none of your business’ if they are asking me questions, ‘do you have a girlfriend, do you have a wife?’ [I’ll say] ‘Let’s talk about something else’. Ros: Yeah, does that generally stop that line of conversation? Eddy: It does but it can sort of shut them up for the rest of the class too unfortunately, so you know you’ve got to be careful with that. I mean I’m a bit strict as a teacher I suppose. Presenting himself as ‘a bit strict as a teacher’ focused on the language lesson, Eddy continued to align himself with a professional identity, rather than a masculine identity with heterosexual desires. The two remain, in this account, mutually exclusive. Paul In closing this series of vignettes, I return to the story of Paul and his account of scaffolded teaching and enhanced masculinity in the conversation school. Despite the initial excitement brought about by these personal transformations, Paul – like many of the men in this study – eventually tired of classroom teaching
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in the conversation school industry. In large part, this was due to the eroding effects of his continual engagement with the regimented texts and performative style required by the conversation school. Ros: You said yourself it was good to be out of English language teaching, out of the classroom. Paul: Yeah, mostly because I just got a bit tired, I thought oh-‐ I mean teaching is nice but especially the way that our company's set up, you teach the same lessons over and over and over and over and over, so it gets a bit repetitive and also because of the nature of the work being sort of bright and friendly and funny in front of the class. Having been a classroom teacher for five years, and now married to a Japanese, Paul ‘did make it known to my bosses and that-‐ that I was looking to move up in the company’. Ironically, ‘moving up’ entailed a move ‘into the textbook department’ of the company, designing the very texts that had initially scaffolded his gendered and teacherly transformation, but had eventually become so tiresome as a regimented, performative script. Those teachers who had moved on from classroom teaching in the conversation schools and taken up positions in Japanese colleges or universities were more likely to look back on their experience with dissatisfaction. From their perspective, the two texts that shaped conversation school teaching were presented as increasingly problematic and asymmetrical: the textbook lessons came to be seen as trite and repetitive, and were overshadowed by the background text of teachers’ commodification and sexualisation. In combination, the two texts tarnished the reputation of the conversation school industry, and the reputation of Western men who taught there. From the perspective of those men who had now left the industry, an identity that was both sufficiently masculine and professionally recognised – marked, at least in part, by specialised qualifications, expert knowledge, and engagement educational texts – was not readily available in the conversation schools.
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Discussion and implications For many of the men in this study, particularly those who had no prior language teaching qualifications or experience, the prescriptive language learning materials dictated by the English language conversation schools provided an initial sense of security by scaffolding their performance as teachers and, in turn, imparted a level of confidence in the teachers’ gendered interactions with female students. These libidinal interactions were seen to be permitted, or even encouraged by many of the language schools, which, for commercial purposes, provided a site for exoticised and eroticised encounters between Western male teachers and Japanese female students that superseded the learning materials’ conventional boundaries. For many of these men, the effects of working in this site, and with these texts, proved to be transformative in terms of their enhanced sense of masculinity and heterosexuality. Whereas in their home countries they may have seen themselves as occupying a subordinated (geek) or marginalised (gay) masculinity that fell outside the boundaries of successful, normative masculinity and heterosexuality, in a teaching role in Japan they were able to identify with a desired ideal that functions as a localised form of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 1995). In this case, the hegemonic masculine ideal was white and Western, and displayed a performative style that was ‘loud, bright, and happy’. Nevertheless, over time many of these men wearied of the scripted and embodied performance required by the conversation schools, and articulated – within the context of our interviews – a desire for recognition as a professional language teacher with expertise that encompassed, but eventually exceeded, the elementary steps of the textbook scripts. For most of these men an aspiration towards a professional identity indexes a desire for an alternative hegemonic masculinity anchored in the public world of work and career. In this regard, they positioned themselves squarely within a normative, adult male role in which professionalism and masculinity are mutually constituted (Whitehead 2002, p. 135). In this context, the men’s pursuit of a professional identity could at times be threatened by their female students’ demonstration of interpersonal heterosexual desire, expressed by leveraging the scripted conversations
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encountered in language teaching texts. In these circumstances, the men’s accounts indicate a struggle to police the pedagogical boundaries by deflecting romantic or sexual overtures, and refocusing on the prescribed learning materials. Amongst this small sample of participants, Greg was exceptional in showing little investment in developing a professional identity in teaching. In Greg’s account a powerful masculinity was carefully crafted and readily articulated through his self positioning as a style-‐conscious, heterosexually potent man who could always easily attract the romantic interest of women, both in his home country, and amongst his female students. Greg, it seemed, was happy to perform the part of the teacher as object of desire and, in his narrative, used the textbook as a means of opening or closing the door to sexual relationships with his students. But for Greg, too, a professional identity – one that lay beyond teaching, and in the world of business – was integral to his account of a successful Western man in Japan. Several implications can be drawn from this study. Analysis of the men’s accounts demonstrates, first, that regardless of institutional policies and constraints, the ideal of the sexless teacher (Gallop, 1995; Sikes 2006) is, at least in this context, a fiction; and that engagement with textual representations affects not only learners’ but also teachers’ sense of gendered and sexualised subjectivity. Second, these accounts suggest that gender and sexuality – with all their attendant misinterpretations, contradictions, vulnerabilities and anxieties – can come to the fore in language teaching and learning through engagement with both prescribed language learning texts and locally available cultural texts that position teachers and students in force fields of desire. Third, the vectors of power that arise in these force fields are unstable and unpredictable: assumptions about male dominance or female passivity can never be assured, and any patterns that do arise are impacted by personal histories, and inevitably shift from time to time and place to place. In effect, an assemblage of language learning texts, institutional policies, cultural discourses, and individual circumstances combine in an assemblage through which masculinity and sexuality emerge in the social context of language teaching. 24
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