Interview with Tara and Will (Couple interview 1)

W: Well…I can think of people…sort of ideologically certain kinds of people (2) perhaps certain kinds of American radical feminist, who were particularly prevalent in the sort of…mid-90s, and who are still…I think would still be very unhappy about it…I mean, I don’t know whether they’d think…we should be…put to death still [laughs]… but I think they would have thought this [his relationship with Tara] was a very…unsatisfactory way in which we’d ended up, and that…well, maybe we couldn’t do anything about it now, but nevertheless it was something that should not have happened. But anyway… we tend not to run into any…we run into plenty of feminists, but not feminists of that school of thought…I mean…we are feminists ourselves!

Will’s selection of the topic of feminism is prompted by a question I asked about whether the couple experience disapproval when people find out how they got together. Both Tara and Will reply that they haven’t experienced this much, at which point Will introduces a hypothetical scenario, presented to illustrate what a response from an ‘American radical feminist[in the]mid-90s’might look like. This is interesting, since it engages with the origins of harassment knowledge. The scenario runs along these lines: if the sort of American radical feminists who were prevalent in the mid-90s were to comment on Will’s relationship with Tara, they would likely be ‘very unhappy’.

Moreover, whilst they might not want to have the couple ‘put to death’, they would be ‘ideologically’ opposed to the relationship’s existence.

The idea that feminists might want to kill participants of F-S relationships sounds frivolous or satirical, and indeed Will’s laughter seems to orient to such an interpretation. However, it echoes Professor Swenson’s depiction of feminists as ball- breakers, and also some of the critical scholarly analyses of ‘victim feminism’ (e.g. Roiphe, 1994; Gallop, 1996). Roiphe, for instance, alludes to feminists with an interest in ‘beheading [male] professors’ (1994: 98). Such extremizations may be intended as humorous. Nonetheless, they index a ‘juridical and warlike conception of power’ (Lemke, 2010: 33) characterised by ‘censure and constraint’ (ibid: 32), and leading to trial and retribution for transgression. In other words, Will’s account reinforces the notion, emphasized in Blue Angel, that harassment knowledge and its feminist proponents can be just as aggressive and predatory as the male academics they seek to condemn.

In his account, Will aligns both himself and Tara with feminism in general; ‘we are feminists ourselves!’. This is a concession-making move, which heads off potential counter-claims that Will isanti-feminist. This DD also imbues his account with an air of reasonableness; his affiliation with feminism, but not its radical variant, makes his distancing from ‘that school of thought’ appear considered and moderate, simultaneously undermining radical feminism as extreme. Coupled with his categorization of radical feminists as ‘feminists-at-war’, Will’s account undermines the logic of radical feminism, rejecting its legitimacy. However, whilst Will’s repudiation of American radical feminism in the mid-90s is oppositional, his undermining of it appears altogether more considered, and less war-like, than Swenson’s approach.

Laughing at harassment knowledge

Both Blue Angel and Will’s account engage with harassment knowledge on a satirical level, and the humour in Prose’s novel is particularly darkly drawn (Showalter, 2005). In the penultimate extract analysed in this chapter I consider how relationships are handled in the much lighter US TV sitcom,Friends.

I suggest that Friends condenses a number of key tropes associated with harassment knowledge. However, it also opens the issue out in two important respects. First, it disrupts arrangements in which relationships are framed as transgressions of prohibitive rules. Second, it elucidates the productive capacity of harassment knowledge, already alluded to by Delia in Extract 3. This is achieved by poking fun at rules, and by highlighting the role of the norm in the policing of relationships. Consequently harassment knowledge’s configuration and manipulation of power as sovereign power, with its war-like associations, is joined by the more subtle and strategic mechanisms of disciplinary power. Under its guise, attempts continue to be made to restrict the ‘field of possible actions’ (Foucault, 1982: 790) of subjects, but the apparatuses used appear less coercive and more diffuse (see Hunt, 1999, 2003; Foucault, 2009; Lemke, 2010).

As noted in Chapter 2, Taylor (2011) contends that to understand the university as an institution suffused with juridico-legal or sovereign forms of power, as she argues feminist commentators on harassment have tended to, is to misunderstand both power and HE. The university is, for Taylor a fundamentally disciplinary institution, and this is evident in its constant assessment, monitoring, and surveillance of students and academics alike.

To take this Foucauldian conceptualization of power relations further, the de-centring of power through the mobilization of multiple techniques means that power operates in what Foucault calls a ‘capillary’ fashion (Foucault, 1978b: 96). By this, he means that

power permeates local relations in complex ways via networks involving the ‘extremities’ (ibid: 96) as well as the centre. Thus individuals are ‘the vehicles of power, not its points of application’ (ibid: 98). In such a system, Foucault suggests, the importance of normalisation as a vehicle for shaping the conduct of others comes to the fore, whilst that of the law or code recedes. These different modalities of power are illustrated inFriends, where they are applied within the context of the F-S relationship. In season six of Friends, Ross Gellar, a professor of Palaeontology at New York University (NYU), begins to date one of his undergraduate students, Elizabeth Stevens. The portrayal of the relationship is pertinent to my thesis for a number of reasons, and I discuss it further in Chapter 8, where I consider its construction of university students as children. However, it is useful to consider here because of how it juxtaposes regulation of relationships through the law and through the norm. In so doing it appropriates, modifies, and caricatures harassment knowledge.

In Extract 6, I follow an excerpt of dialogue involving Ross and his sister, Monica, taken from an episode in which Ross and Elizabeth go out on their first date. Earlier in the episode, when Elizabeth is introduced as a new character, she asks Ross if he’d like to go out with her after a lecture. As an aside, she jokes that she doesn’t need to date him since he has already given her an ‘A’ for her assignment. This joke relies on understandings of F-S relationships as a form of quid pro quo harassment, in which students are perceived as trading sex for improved grades. Having framed relationships in this way, the possibility of their relationship being construed as harassment becomes a recurrent theme in the show. With this in mind, Extract 6 hints at the subtleties involved in problematizing F-S relationships.

Extract 6:The One Where Ross Dates a Student, Friends,Season 6, Episode 18