Spring 2000
Volume 26, Number 3

I have three points to make, two about Gallop and one about the professional environment we live in that validates her ideas as controversial. First, Gallop's defense of teacher-student sex rests on a number of mystifications that are identical to justifications commonly found in instances of boundary violation. Very often, a doctor, therapist, pastor, or teacher rationalizes having sex with someone in his or her care by adhering to one or another of the following ideas, which are self-deceptions: "the sexualization of our relationship will do you good and is really for your benefit"; "we're basically equals here"; and "in transgressing my role of professional detachment I'm treating you like a human being." Second, Gallop's book and the new article support these benign construals by using what one analyst has described as a "trance logic" characteristic of boundary transgressions, a quasi reasoning consisting of syllogisms whose logical flaws, though often glaring, are overlooked by both participants. My third point takes the form of a parting polemical assertion. Our profession, by exposing its young initiates week after week to articles and books whose theoretical daring or "exorbitance," whatever the content, is sustained by something that looks a lot like trance logic, conditions students to accept irresponsible thinking as a part of their everyday intellectual diet. This is not just an incidental failing of the discipline, to be attributed to the fact that we're a human community and of course will produce badly reasoned theoretical articles along with powerful and illuminating ones. I have come to believe instead that it is part of a largely unconscious regime of emotional violation by which we disqualify our students' intuitions about what is right and soften them up for an embrace of demoralized professional ideals and goals--itself a slow and almost imperceptible boundary violation, uncannily literalized and theatricalized for the moment in the spectacle of Gallop's eroticized relationships with students.

Of the three common rationalizations I've just cited, the one that is the linchpin of Gallop's theoretical position is "the sexualization of our relationship will do you good and is really for your benefit." Across the professions, this is a typical distortion used to rationalize violating a client's, patient's, or student's boundaries: "frequently, the behavior is justified by the professional who contends that his or her actions are for the client's benefit."1 Gallop's defense of her eroticized relationships with students rests on a claim that these relationships are essential for good pedagogy. According to Gallop, to banish expressions of sexuality from the pedagogical relationship is to let students down by banishing good teaching or, indeed, teaching itself:

At its most intense--and, I would argue, its most productive--the pedagogical relation between teacher and student is, in fact, a "consensual amorous relation." And if schools decide to prohibit not only sex but "amorous relations" between teacher and student, the "consensual amorous relation" that will be banned from our campuses might just be teaching itself. 2

Marilyn R. Peterson, At Personal Risk: Boundary Violations in Professional-Client Relationships (New York, 1992), p. 77; hereafter abbreviated PR.. This cognitive reversal happens, according to Peterson, in instances of boundary violation as diverse as a doctor's keeping patients waiting and a minister's sexually abusing a parishioner.
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Jane Gallop, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (Durham, N.C., 1997), p. 57; hereafter abbreviated FA.
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Lisa Ruddick is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (1990). She is currently working on a book on intuition and brutality in academic life. Her email address is lruddick@midway.uchicago.edu.