"She Seems Nice": Teaching Evaluations and Gender Trouble

by Alison Bartlett

Despite two decades of affirmative action, in the late 1990s Liz Stanley still writes about the position of women in academia through a trope of "passing," of seeming to be the imagined authority figure. She writes, "For those of us who are not men, passing is a necessary condition of entry into the academy as a member: behaving as though we are safe, tamed, reasonable, collegial . . . we apparently pass as one of that 'they' that we are other to" (3). Jane Gallop uses a similar trope in her collection of essays, Pedagogy: the Question of Impersonation (1995), in which she regards "impersonation" as a "productive category of analysis" (4). Barbara Brook convincingly argues that anyone other than a straight white male is ineluctably alienated from the figure of authority imagined behind the lecturn (190). But although these analyses make sense of the epistemology, philosophy, and institutional histories in which women academics work, they offer little practically for those of us who are still obliged to take the stand and deliver lectures. The aim of this paper is, in some ways, to work out what I need to do to pass with more success, and how students' evaluations of my teaching may or may not indicate this. In doing so, I draw on the literature of feminist pedagogy and on anecdote, or gossip, as a counter-discourse or a mode of talk that destabilizes the official versions of evaluating teaching bodies. Jane Gallop observes that "while the impetus for theorizing is often the need to think through a life occurrence, the occurrence is generally not included as part of the theorizing" (Anecdotal 16). And yet, as she continually writes, and observes of Nancy Miller's writing, anecdote is an inherent component of "theory situated": of "theory in the flesh of practice" (qtd.in Gallop, Anecdotal, 158). Critical attention is thus paid to those aspects of anecdotal narratives that become emblematic of normalizing paradigms of gender in higher education, in an effort to bring together gender and evaluation.