Professorn och kärleken - Sexuella trakasserier i fiktion och verklighet

Abstract

"The professor in love: Sexual harassment in fiction and real life", by Cristine Sarrimo, senior lecturer in culture studies. Our scholarly and scientific ideals rarely allow the professional subject to be contextually situated; the researcher and teacher is supposed to have a strictly rational and objective approach, not only to his or her own profession, but also on matters involving passions and feelings. These rational ideals are based on the assumption that the division between reason and emotion, and the private and public, is possible to maintain. But academic institutions and their regulative authorities must handle emotionally charged conflicts. These disciplining procedures, meant to regulate the private and emotive sphere, are in reality a central part of how the academic subject is constituted. A comparative discourse analysis, based on J M Coetzee's novel Disgrace and an authentic case of sexual harassment, involving a professor and his student at a Swedish university, shows that it is necessary for the accused to embrace an emotive discourse, with religious and legal confessional traits, if he desires to protect his rationally constructed professionalism. Coetzee's heroe refuses to confess and is consequently disgracefully dismissed. Ethical dilemmas arise concerning the status of truth and the confessional, but power- and gender relations are also influenced in an intricate manner. The public and private, the emotive and rational, is intertwined in a complicated relational process, where professional and gender hierarchies shift. This leads to the conclusion thatthe professional academic subject is exposed to a discursively regulated disciplining process in which the supposed repression of emotion is essential, and therefore one of the subjecfs most constitutive traits.