Why I hate Boston Public (and keep watching it anyway)

Multicultural Education, Spring 2003 by Warren, John T

How do I get painted in those strokes? How do I get constituted when a grad student comes into my office: "Hey, did you see this week's episode? What do think about that one?"

Or do I watch to fulfill some sort of sexualized desire? To watch those beautiful bodies, those beautiful young teacher/ student bodies transgressing, crossing lines? Is it surprising that once the queer student comes out and develops as a sexualized figure, he suddenly appears socially secure, good-looking, comfortable, and well-- adjusted? Is it really surprising that his history of questionable behavior is erased as he becomes an object of desire?

It is not surprising that this young man (and the other student/teacher bodies) can serve as old enough for my (and other's) eyes, while remaining believable as a character in this school context-these figures must be both young and innocent, all while remaining possible sites of desire.

It is the erotics of schooling that make these bodies desirable, as possible sites of educational eros. Except for those bodies that are clearly marked as not-sexual (the older teachers, often characterized as out of touch, out of the field of desire), the bodies in Boston Public bubble with sexual tension. Bodies, highlighted by tight clothes, smooth curves, and female-sexual appeal or boyish good looks, create an educational atmosphere that is always about sex, always about the possibility of touch, always about the potentiality of contact, which is, of course, often actualized as sex between and among the teachers and students. So, do I watch to also become seduced by this contact? To be included? To be, potentially, touched? Or is it just to watch?

I think these things as I pick up the VCR tape and push it into the machine. I think these things as I rewind, just one hour. I think these things as I hit play. I think these things as I hear the opening credits and am slowly pulled into the show, the world ofBoston Public. I hate this show, but in it I am. In it I will be next week. It is a pull that is not easily subsided.

Boston Public as Pedagogy

(what this show does to us)

We cannot assume that a show such as Boston Public does nothing-that it is simply a TV show that just tells a story. I want to shift any conversation of popular culture from text to social context-to shift from the story to the ways the story functions within the social. Adapting Langellier's (1986) work on oral interpretation:

[T]he shift from text to context does much more than offer [media] new settings for performance, new performers and audiences, or new texts. For not only can [media] participate in the social world, it cannot avoid social ramifications. Understood in their theoretical implications, social perspectives clarify how [media] constitutes action in the world. (p. 68-69)

Here, Langellier's essay reminds us that any form of performance always does more than simply enact culture's wishes, reflecting the world we live in-these media texts constitute what is possible, what these kinds of social settings are like. In this way, Boston Public does more than represent a possible educational world-it makes and remakes education, affecting how we, as social actors, will think of this enterprise.