Risky Lessons: Thinking/Viewing/Talking Sex in the Feminist Classroom
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By Carlos Ulises Decena

           Inevitably, demonstrating to my students that sexually explicit films raise many of the same questions as other classroom materials met the initial political and ethical challenges of viewing these images in the first place. Yet the lesson here is not one of the triumph of sex-positive perseverance against squeamish adversity. While the collective viewing and discussion were productive, my student’s avoidance in class of material and discussion she had engaged with elsewhere suggest how important it is to consider that experiencing these materials challenge students to think carefully about the boundaries they want to sustain with their teachers and classmates. Discomfort viewing these materials is only the starting point of the issues they raise.

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The density and richness of the link of sex to identity defy predictability, implicating the personal choices we make in the classroom with our students’ lives in unexpected ways. It is impossible to know exactly which of our choices impact students the most; moreover, it is impossible to imagine exactly how our words and acts will travel, what our choices will or will not do as they interact with a student’s prejudices, experiences, and hopes. However, what we say or do that link sex to identity may have a special (and powerful) resonance for students struggling with these linkages in their own lives.
      In a special one-credit seminar titled Sexuality and Migration we spent a session discussing the disjunctures between how we display our bodies and how others interpret our bodies in the world. To underscore the point, we went student by student and talked about our first impressions of one another. Toward the end of the exercise, students asked me to participate and I complied.
    After we had finished, I asked if anyone was particularly struck by the difference between how they saw themselves and the first impressions of others. One male student raised his hand and explained that he found it odd that others thought of him as a jock. “I was surprised,” he said in a 9 a.m. groggy baritone that never seemed to match his youth and slender build, “because I am a real theater arts person. I am also a well-known homosexual.” He seemed amused at this, and so did everyone else. The conversation continued.
      I looked his way and tried to assess, from a distance, what effect (if any) this utterance had on him or others. There was something in the air after this student’s statement that didn’t sit well with me. The affective texture of the room—the vibe, if you will—changed. Maybe my student’s coming out tapped my own anxieties about this issue in the classroom. I had never come out in a classroom before.     
    Was he regretting outing himself? Did some of the other students suddenly learn something they did not want to hear or did not like about the man they all imagined as a jock? Something had changed. I did not know what it was, and I had very little time to make a decision about the proper response.
     I came out. If anyone was going to mess with him, they would have to mess with me first. The immediate effect was that the atmosphere in the room became comfortable again. Still, I walked away from this situation feeling conflicted about my choices. Maybe I did this for myself and not for the student. But he was eighteen, while I was thirty-six, I ultimately decided. I wanted him and all the other students to know that he was not alone in that classroom, even if I was telling them something they already knew about me, even if I ended up annoying him or making him feel patronized.