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

          When the semester ended, students were supposed to write an autobiographical essay about their journey with the themes of the class. One of them wrote the following: “when you ‘came out’ to our class for the first time, and you said ‘I’m gay,’ for some reason, I felt very proud as if those words came out of my mouth. One day, I will be able to say those words and not have to think twice about the consequences that may come of them."
     Reading these words made me feel better about having made that choice, yet I sit uncomfortably with the thought that many assumptions went into my decision to come out, and that such acts may produce “empowerment” in some (like the student who wrote about it in his essay) while producing discomfort in others who do not recognize or identify with this model. Is “pride” what is uniformly produced when one comes out? Pride in whom? In what? While many of my friends and colleagues in the profession see coming out in the classroom as something that benefits us and students, I am not so sure this is what it always does.
    Listening may have taken the shape, in one case, of acknowledging and respecting boundaries and, in another, of making educated guesses about classroom dynamics. But writing this piece became, itself, a practice that stored deeper lessons than I could have imagined in the meanings and challenges before us as we think sex. An earlier version of this essay had a part three, which recounted the most mind-boggling anecdote about deep learning and sex I have ever had in my years in the profession. Because this experience concerned one specific student, I asked for consent to address the issue, informing this person that this individual and collective experience had import for how many others might think about these issues.
     After an initial “no,” I requested that this person reconsider the decision and forwarded the draft of the piece with the pertinent section. A week later, the answer was a second, and definitive, “no.”
    Arguably, I could talk about the episode. It happened in the classroom, before more than twenty others, and could not be said to “belong” just to this person. But I don’t own it either. What kind of violence to the student would this writerly act perpetrate? Shouldn’t that “no” stand for that space where the student reserves the right to learn alone and refuses my transforming the use value of that experience into a narrative that will circulate and accrue me scholarly credit and give me a sense of ownership over an experience that is not, properly speaking, mine? Like giving the option of students to address (or not) a specific sexually explicit piece (visual or otherwise) in class, this withdrawal of consent highlights just how much is packed onto the movement of sex in the classroom.
     Pioneering theorists of sexuality such as Gayle Rubin, Jeffrey Weeks, and Michel Foucault have underscored that many social anxieties are negotiated and worked through the regulation of sex and sexuality. Part of what we need to understand, as we bring sex into the classroom, is that students engage it as they wrestle with their own values and normative investments. Producing “sex positivity” and “openness” might be the goal of many an intellectual committed to think sex. But the lessons I draw from the vignettes I shared here—about respecting silence and the boundaries students establish as well as about understanding that what we do in the classroom may have an impact on students’ lives in ways we rarely realize—suggest that there is not a singular lesson that can be drawn from bringing sex into the feminist classroom. Or maybe yes, there is one lesson: our job is not to tell our students how to think sex but to listen intently, fiercely to the transformations they experience as they begin (or not) to talk, view, and think sex. That, to me, seems like a profoundly feminist lesson.