The Pedagogy of Pornography: Teaching Hardcore Media in a Feminist Studies Classroom
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By Mireille Miller-Young

           Indeed, “image material can cause visceral reactions”: as Kleinhans suggests, “pornography is a ‘body genre’— one that is supposed to evoke a direct physical response” (Kleinhans 1996). The ethics of teaching pornography in the classroom includes acknowledging this and allowing teachers and students to experience and process the viewing of provocative images. It also means taking seriously our studies of the popular, the low brow, the taboo, and the underground, even if it disturbs our sensibilities, upsets our values, or makes us physically uncomfortable (Ross 1989; Wicke 2004). In my pedagogy of pornography I aim to be honest about my own sexual subjectivity and to allow students to discover, question, and articulate their own. In this way, teaching pornography feels very much like the courses I teach on gender, race, and class, in that I ask students to become sensitized to the connections between “academic knowledge and everyday life, and to use those connections to help make sense of ourselves” (Waskul 2009, 660).
       The methodology I draw upon to support this self-reflexive analysis is journaling. While the original goal was to substantively address the wide array of bibliographic sources used and images screened in class, along with any personal reflections about the genre, some students used the journals as springboards for deeply personal discussions of their sexual subjectivities. Other students created dynamic blogs and were fascinated to think through the ways in which they became unwitting pornographers by posting explicit images embedded in their essays, which were then censored by the blog’s hosting site.
    I encourage speaking during screenings as another method to confront our own subjective responses to the images. Realizing that viewing explicit images in a classroom setting may create anxiety, embarrassment, or even trauma, I always issue a disclaimer about the potentially offensive or shocking nature of the course material on the very first day. I repeat this disclaimer each day and describe the kinds of images they can expect. Only once has a student chosen to leave because the topic was particularly sensitive for her. Through giggles and groans, jokes and sarcastic asides, the students are able to process the explicit as well as the repetitive, boring, surprisingly witty, or frank nature of the images.
        While watching vintage pornography from the 1920s students were actually shocked that people had nonmissionary-style sex that long ago. When we screened 1970s classic theatrical pornography films Deep Throat (1972) and Behind the Green Door (1972) they both laughed and vented about the focus on male pleasure and the multiple representations of “money shots” as rockets launching, bells ringing, and colors exploding. Students found frustrating and one sided the documentaries and exposés we watched about the pornography industry, such as Chyng Sun’s The Price of Pleasure (2008) and CNBCs Porn: The Business of Pleasure (2009). They, being knowledgeable about and invested in new social media, were fascinated with amateur pornography created by everyone from retired seniors to rural young men on popular Webcam and video sites XTube, YouPorn, and PornHub. As feminist studies majors they found compelling self-described feminist and queer porn, including sex education films like Tristan Taormino’s Expert Guide series and Shar Rednour and Carol Queen’s Bend Over Boyfriend (1998), Jackie Strano’s lesbian S.I.R. Video production Sugar High Glitter City (2001), and Shine Louise Houston’s queer/genderqueer The Wild Search (2006). As the students watched pornography made by feminists and designed for sex education and women’s viewing pleasure they confronted not only their expectations about what porn is and does (especially to women) but what the battle over these images means for a range of sexual subjectivities and practices.
    In final research papers students produce original projects on any aspect of the pornography industry. They have employed a nuanced feminist criticism of gender and other hierarchies while thinking through the possibilities for radical sexual dissent, play, transformation, and transgression. One student completed a research project on the fetishism of Real Dolls, even going to the factory where these life-sized sex toys are produced and bringing back a rubbery skin sample from a model doll as part of her presentation. These projects show a real awareness on the part of students about the productive complexities of sexual culture.
     Teaching pornography does not have to be dangerous. My goal is to show that, and to promote an understanding that it is the ethical responsibility of the feminist classroom, and in particular the instructor, to have the courage to deal with sex.  

Mireille Miller-Young is Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies and Affiliate Assistant Professor of Black Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Earning her Ph.D. in History from New York University, she researches and teaches about race, gender and sexuality in media and sex economies in the U.S. She is currently working on a manuscript titled A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography which examines black women’s representations, performances and labors in the adult entertainment industry.