Chapter Text
Still no audio from her laptop. Her lecture featured film clips, which would be difficult to discuss if nobody could hear them. Eloise could see the little audio bars bouncing frantically, which meant the ancient laptop she'd inherited as the department's most junior faculty thought it was doing its job. She traced the audio cable to where one of her less technologically savvy colleagues had pulled it out from the projector panel. She plugged it back in, tested the volume and nodded with satisfaction. There. She had anticipated this. She’d gone through a complete dry run of this class on Saturday, including imaginary questions from imaginary students, and discovered half the classroom tech was running on spite and hope. But she had figured out workarounds.
She checked her presentation. The slides loaded properly. Canvas was even cooperating, her reading links opening seamlessly. The syllabus was open in another tab. She'd stacked her favorite theory books on the desk - Butler, hooks, Haraway - even though everything was digital now. But having them there felt right. Solid. Grounding.
This was it. Her first class as real faculty, not a TA, not a graduate student teaching the intro class with hundreds of bored faces drifting off in front of her.
She had practiced this opening until she could recite it in her sleep. Until it felt natural, not rehearsed. Confident but approachable. Rigorous but not intimidating.
She was Professor Bridgerton. Dr. Eloise Bridgerton, Ph.D. Well, once she filed her dissertation. And she was ready.
The classroom door squealed open.
She glanced up, readying her welcome smile for her first student. And forgot how to breathe.
The woman in the doorway was…
Eloise quickly looked back at her laptop before she could be caught staring. Blinked to clear her eyes. Looked up again. She was still there. Still devastating in a short pink dress that should have looked cheap but didn't, not with legs like that, not with the kind of bone structure that made Eloise think about Italian Renaissance paintings and also about things she absolutely should not be thinking in her classroom five minutes before her first class of the semester.
The woman walked closer. Gray duster swinging. Her hair was blonde and shiny, held back with a pink headband that matched the dress, cut with the kind of precision that screamed expensive salons. Eloise felt her ragged fringe tickle her forehead.
Grad student, probably. English department, maybe. Possibly a new adjunct? Definitely not Biology. Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies shared this building with Biology, but no one in that department dressed like this.
"Hi." Eloise heard warmth color her own voice, the slight drop in register. "I'm Eloise. This is my classroom, but can I help you find yours?"
The woman smiled, and Eloise discovered she'd been wrong about the breathing thing, because apparently she had been doing it before, and now she had stopped entirely.
"I'm Cressida." The woman pulled a creased schedule from her bag, squinting at it. "I'm looking for Professor Bridgerton's Gender and Visual Culture seminar. Room 212?"
Oh no.
Oh no no no.
The floor should open up. That would be helpful. The floor opening up and swallowing Eloise whole would solve several problems right now.
"That's…" Eloise's voice cracked. She cleared her throat. Professional. She was a professional. She had a PhD. Almost. "That's here. This class. I'm Professor Bridgerton."
She watched the woman process this. Watched her expression shift (surprise? amusement?) before smoothing into polite attentiveness.
"Oh." Cressida moved forward, and Eloise caught the scent of something expensive and floral as she passed. She slid into a front row seat because of course she did, settling less than five feet from the lectern. "So should I call you Eloise, or...?"
"Professor Bridgerton." It came out too fast, too sharp. Eloise tried to soften it. "I mean, that would be better. More professional. For the classroom."
Cressida's eyebrow rose a fraction of an inch. "For the classroom. Professional. Right."
God, she thought Eloise was hitting on her. Which, fine, Eloise had been, sort of, in the sixty seconds when she'd thought this was a colleague she might run into at department drinks. But now Cressida probably thought her professor was some kind of predator.
"Not that I was…I thought you were…" Eloise gestured vaguely at nothing. "Another faculty member. I didn't realize you were a student. You look… you look old for your age.”
Oh my god, Eloise. Stop. Talking.
"Oh, I do?” Cressida said. Her mouth twitched into something that might have been a smile. “Well, I guess I am a little older than most students.”
Eloise turned back to the safety of her laptop to do anything but continue this conversation. She must have hit the key that started a film clip, because then the menacing opening of The Birds blasted from the speakers at full volume. She lunged for the controls, stabbing at keys until the shrieking gulls subsided into silence.
“Sorry about that,” Eloise muttered.
Other students were filing in now, chattering and finding seats. Eloise watched them in her peripheral vision, not trusting herself to look directly at Cressida, who was pulling a notebook from her bag. Pink, naturally. Everything matched. She was the kind of person who had her life together enough for color coordination.
Eloise had a stain on her cuff where she had spilled her coffee. She was wearing mismatched socks. Her 100% hemp pants were only a little shiny.
She counted heads. Twelve students. A good size for discussion. She could do this. She'd taught before, as a TA, as an adjunct. She had a whole dissertation on fourth-wave feminist theory and digital culture secure in her head. She knew this material backwards and forwards.
She absolutely could teach a two-hour seminar without looking at the front row.
"Alright." Eloise turned to face the class, fixing her gaze on a spot just above everyone's heads. "Welcome to Gender and Visual Culture. I'm Professor Bridgerton, and this is…well, you know what this is, or you wouldn't be here. Hopefully."
Weak opening. She'd practiced this. Where was her practiced opening?
"This course will examine the intersection of feminist theory and media representation, with particular attention to how gender is constructed, performed, and challenged across various platforms."
Better. That was better. She clicked to the first slide, which appeared correctly on the screen, turned in momentary triumph, and found herself looking directly at Cressida.
Cressida was writing something in her pink notebook, head tilted slightly, hair falling forward over one shoulder. The headband had slipped back a little. There was something about the curve of her neck…
Eloise jerked her eyes to the back wall. At the clock. At literally anything else.
"We'll be looking at everything from Hollywood's Golden Age to contemporary social media activism. Beyoncé, bell hooks, the Bechdel test." She was talking too fast. She slowed down. "The question we'll be asking throughout the semester is: who gets to tell stories about women? Who gets to be seen? Who gets to look?"
In her peripheral vision, Cressida crossed her legs.
It shouldn't have been loud. The whisper of fabric, the small adjustment of a body in a desk. But Eloise heard it like a gunshot. She lost her place in her notes entirely. She caught that floral scent. Something with jasmine, maybe. Did people still wear jasmine? Apparently Cressida Cowper did.
"So. Um. The syllabus." She fumbled with the mouse, switching to the syllabus tab. When she gestured to the screen she bumped the desk and her stack of theory books, the security blanket she’d hauled from her office for no practical reason, slid off the desk with a thud. She crouched to pick them up sideways, because bending over in front of twelve students felt like a bad choice. This was the opposite of commanding professorial presence. She was a disaster.
When she stood back up, her face was burning.
"The reading load is heavy," Eloise continued, as if nothing had happened, eyes focused on the screen. "This is a 400-level seminar. I'm expecting graduate-level work. You'll be writing response papers, leading discussion, and completing a final research project on a topic of your choosing."
She clicked to the next slide. The projector made an ominous humming sound but cooperated.
"Today we're starting with some foundational concepts. The male gaze, for instance." Eloise clicked through to an image from Hitchcock's Rear Window. "Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' argues that classical Hollywood cinema structures looking in gendered ways. The camera typically assumes a heterosexual male perspective, and women on screen exist primarily as objects to be looked at."
Cressida shifted in her seat again. Recrossed her legs the other way.
Eloise's mouth went dry. She soldiered on.
"Mulvey draws on psychoanalytic theory, mostly Freud and Lacan, to argue that narrative cinema is built around scopophilia. The pleasure of looking. The woman on screen is simultaneously the object of desire for the male protagonist and for the camera itself, which means for the audience."
A hand went up… in the back. Thank god.
"Yes?"
"So is Mulvey saying we can't enjoy old movies?" The student looked genuinely worried. "Like, I love Hitchcock."
"No, she's not saying that." Eloise leaned against her desk, grateful for something concrete to discuss. "She's giving us a framework for understanding how those films work. How they position us as viewers. You can still love Hitchcock and also recognize that his camera has a thing for tall blondes in peril."
The words left her mouth, and her gaze went straight to Cressida before she could stop it.
Tall. Blonde. Right there in the front row.
Eloise's brain performed some sort of twisting Olympic-level gymnastics routine, landing on: You're literally describing the Hitchcock heroines while staring at a student. This is exactly the predatory dynamic Mulvey is talking about. You are the problem.
She wrenched her eyes back to the student who'd asked the question, but it was too late. She'd hesitated too long. A few students laughed at her Hitchcock comment, oblivious, but Cressida had noticed, a small smile tugged at her lips.
"The question becomes," Eloise said, voice strangled, "once you see how the apparatus works, can you ever unsee it? And what do we do with that knowledge?"
Stop staring at your students. That's what you do.
Cressida was writing again, bent over her notebook. The dress had a relatively modest neckline but from Eloise's angle… Don't look. Do not look.
Eloise turned back to the screen in desperation. She clicked through several more images. Grace Kelly. Tippi Hedren. Blonde, blonde. Shit. She was going to stop talking about blondes now.
"Hitchcock's basically making the same movie over and over," Eloise said. "And it's always about looking. Watching. The erotics of surveillance."
Her own voice sounded strange. Husky. She cleared her throat.
"But here's where it gets interesting. Later feminist film theorists pushed back on Mulvey. They argued she was too narrow in her thinking, that she didn't account for female spectators or queer readings or the possibility of resistance."
Cressida's hand was up.
How long had her hand been up?
Eloise's stomach dropped. "Yes? Cressida?"
"I'm curious about the queer readings part." Cressida had her pen poised over her notebook, expression genuinely interested. "Mulvey's whole argument is based on assuming a straight male viewer, right? So what happens when women are watching women on screen? Is that the same kind of objectifying gaze, or something different?"
The heat kicked on with a rattle. Eloise became acutely aware of the temperature in the room. Why was the heat on? Was it hot? It felt hot. A trickle of sweat slid down from her temple.
"That's… yes. Great question. Awesome… awesome question." She was stalling. "Theorists like Teresa de Lauretis and Jackie Stacey have written about lesbian spectatorship and how it complicates Mulvey's framework."
She should not be having this conversation. She should have assigned different readings. She should have gone to medical school like her mother wanted.
"The question of female homoerotic looking is complicated," Eloise continued, because apparently she hated herself. "Is it inherently different from the male gaze because it comes from a position of shared embodiment? Or can women objectify other women in similar ways?"
Cressida was watching her. Just watching, waiting for her to continue. There was nothing inappropriate about it. It was a student listening to her professor.
So why did Eloise feel like her every thought was written on her forehead?
"Some theorists argue that when women look at women, there's potential for identification and desire to coexist," Eloise said. Her mouth was dry again. "You're simultaneously seeing someone as like you and as other. As subject and object. It's not the same power dynamic as the male gaze because it's not structured by the same hierarchies, but it's also not simple or innocent."
"So it's still objectification," Cressida said slowly, "but it means something different?"
"Maybe. Or maybe the whole framework of subject-object, looker-looked-at is too binary." Eloise was gesturing now, her hands moving of their own accord. "Maybe when we're talking about queer female desire, we need entirely different language. Jackie Stacey talks about fascination rather than objectification. A kind of wanting-to-be and wanting-to-have that's more fluid."
She was lecturing to the back wall again, to the peeling corner of the fire exit plan someone had taped up years ago. Anywhere but at Cressida.
"The point is," Eloise said, "Mulvey gives us a starting place, but it's not the ending place. We have to keep interrogating who's looking, who's being looked at, and what looking means in different contexts."
"Even in everyday contexts?" Cressida asked. "Not just in movies?"
Eloise made the mistake of looking at her.
Cressida's expression was perfectly neutral. Curious. Academic. But there was something in her eyes that made Eloise's pulse spike.
"Especially in everyday contexts," Eloise said quietly. Then, louder, to the whole class: "That's what makes this work relevant. It's not just about analyzing old films. It's about understanding how we navigate the world."
Another student raised their hand, bless them, and asked something about the syllabus. On any other day, Eloise would have been annoyed - read the document, people - but today she answered with excessive gratitude and then pivoted back to the lecture, clicking through slides on autopilot, talking without fully tracking what she was saying.
When she finally dared to glance back at the front row, Cressida had returned to her notes. Writing something. Underlining it.
Eloise looked down at her own notes. She was somehow three pages ahead of where she should be. She had no memory of how she'd gotten there."
"Let's… let's break into small groups," she said abruptly. "I want you to discuss the Mulvey reading. What resonated? What felt dated? What pissed you off?"
The students rearranged themselves with the usual scraping of desks and shuffling of bags. Eloise retreated to her desk, gripping the edge of it.
She had two hours of this. One hundred and twenty minutes.
She was going to die.
From the front row, she heard Cressida laugh at something another student said. It was a nice laugh. Warm and unguarded.
Eloise pulled out her phone and texted Benedict, the only person she knew would understand, and also be free in the middle of the workday.
911
class?
class
scale of 1-10
Eloise looked up. Cressida was leaning forward in her group, animated, gesturing with her pen as she made some point. The dress rode up slightly.
102
oh no
front row
OH NO
blonde
eloise
i told her she looked old
WHY would you say that
i don't know i panicked
i'm praying for you
pray harder
She shoved her phone in her pocket before she could elaborate.
Class wasn’t even halfway over.
She had thirteen more weeks of this semester.
She was absolutely, completely fucked.