To Be Punished or Not to be Punished: Gender Relations and Instructor-Student Relationships
By Mridula Sharma
A few months back, one of my peers mentioned that her gender identity provided her with a privilege that she felt was denied to men. As a woman, she realised early on that she wasn’t penalised in the same way as the men in her class were. Her instructors, for instance, didn’t retaliate with prevailing forms of physical abuse, ranging from a slap on the back to a spank on the buttocks, when she failed to respond to questions on account of lack of preparedness.
The conversation to which I am referring took place in a moderated group discussion on intersectionality. Participants were asked to reflect on privileges and biases to which they were subject as a consequence of different markers of identity that defined them. To put it simply, they were solicited to consider how their gender or class, for instance, affects them. The facilitator encouraged everyone to consider how distinct aspects of their identity presented them with opportunities and injustices in their everyday encounters.
Returning to my fellow participant’s response, the idea that an instructor’s unwillingness or inability to enact punishment on a woman in the same way as a man provides women with ‘social privilege’ is, in my opinion, preposterous at best. When I use the word “preposterous,” I do not intend to obliterate the experiences and encounters that have shaped her understanding. Instead, I hope to critique and examine her comment, one made in a largely informal conversation, because of a sincere concern for its larger implications on the vocabulary that it fosters in quotidian interactions. In this piece, my objective is to illustrate how the assumptions that guide her way of thinking may be inadequate for contemporary social realities marked by patriarchal influence.
I claim that the statement is not appropriate because the manner of interpersonal communication to which my peer alludes isn’t a standard to which people are accustomed by default. Rather, the instructor-student relationship is influenced by the operationalisation of gender relations and extant gender biases.
An instructor’s failure to reprimand women students is an outcome effected by gendering because it designates authority to legislated definitions and assumptions about gender and gender relations. At the same time, it effects gendering because it reinforces the very norms upon which it is founded. In no way is such an instructor-student relationship an advantage premised on gendering.
The primary reason why such a comment is worrying is that it contributes to the reinforcement of patriarchal norms. Patriarchy is an interlocked network of practices and ideas that systematically impact everyone by mediating social exchange through gendering. However, the consequences of patriarchal ways of thinking and acting tend to differ. While men continue to be subject to its idiosyncrasies, they can sometimes become beneficiaries of such ideological and cultural climates.
When an individual claims that an instructor’s biases attribute to women a set of privileges that men cannot claim, they ignore the mechanism through which privilege functions. Though clinical definitions are rarely adequate, one way to understand privilege is to view it as an exemption or an entitlement that gets repeatedly transacted across individual exchange with the society at large. Not getting slapped on the head by an instructor fails to qualify as privilege because it tends to originate from an implicit disbelief in a woman’s intellectual capability.
Punishment, disciplinary and otherwise, is certainly not an acceptable measure to encourage learning, but its enactment remains typically grounded in personal belief in a student’s capacity to actualise their intellectual merit. Women are not recipients of such demonstrations of punishment because the instructor’s consciousness of socially permissible behaviour with young women is generally complemented by their private suspicions of women’s aptitude. In what universe is that a social privilege? To emphasise the absence of physical punishment is to ignore the broader realities in which the absence persists.
Institutional and public suppression of women’s writing is a great example to understand the devaluation of women’s intellect. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf remarks that women’s writing was a product of intellectual and financial labour by “women so poor that they could not afford to buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write.” One such example is Tillie Olsen. A working-class woman writer, Olsen states in “Silences: When Writers Don’t Write” that her family survival was contingent on her domestic work, full-time employment, and writing. Her experience of navigating three parallel commitments provides a cursory insight into persistent hurdles for women.
In short, women writers found it challenging to begin and maintain their commitment to the process of writing because absence of financial capital was accompanied by restricted systems of social support. Joanna Russ aptly explains the impacts of social dimensions of sexism on women writers in How to Suppress Women’s Writing.
When an instructor doesn’t reprimand women students in the class, it is pertinent to scrutinise the fundamental assumptions upon which their lack of action and accompanying lack of expectation are grounded. Internalisation of patriarchal codes of conduct may be subconscious, but a committed endeavour to introspect and unlearn needs to be uniformly streamlined to prevent everyday sites of social interaction from reproducing incorrect conclusions based on problematic speculation.
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The author’s views are personal
About Mridula Sharma
Mridula Sharma is a research scholar and a writer. She has received a range of fellowship and grant awards in both research and creative writing. Her work on developing postcolonial visions is informed by intersections of gender, class, and caste. She hopes to bridge the gap between theory and practice in her personal and professional capacity.
