Abstract
This chapter explores the gendered narratives and ideologies, and their implicit moral-political pedagogies, of relevant film case studies centred on filmic teachers from the 1990s through the 2000s, such as Good Will Hunting (1997), Bad Teacher (2011), The Faculty (1998) and Gross Misconduct (1993). Through close, critical textual analysis, including framing and feminist analysis, this chapter analyses the visual, discursive constructions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ teachers in mainstream commercial cinema across a variety of genres from horror, thriller, drama to comedy. This chapter argues that these moral pedagogies are sexualized and gendered with female bodies and female sexuality constructed as problematic and non-normative in the form of the bad or monstrous teacher. These films commonly foreground the figure of the gendered, low culture, unwieldy ‘monstruous-feminine’ who, in the case of Bad Teacher (2011), for example, ‘drinks and gets high’ and gives her students ‘an education like no other’. Similar themes are evident in the Faculty (1998), wherein students learn ‘their teachers really are from another planet’. Unlike the comic or villainous monstrous-feminine figure of the ‘bad’ female rule-breaker teacher, by contrast the masculine rule-breaker teacher type is typically constructed as ‘good’, moral and heroic, or as a ‘University Professor adored by his students and the envy of his peers’ (Gross Misconduct 1993). As we shall see, these films reveal not only gendered constructions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ teachers but the shifting socio-cultural climate of the 1990s and into the 2000s, particularly around the sexualised bodies of fantasy teachers and professors.