Risky Lessons: Thinking/Viewing/Talking Sex in the Feminist Classroom

The question prompting the essays in this roundtable centers on the repercussions of the display of sexually explicit content in the feminist classroom. My answer is to link the implications of the visual displays of sex to the pedagogical and ethical “troubles” of taking sex seriously in our teaching. Addressing sex in the classroom demands the reconceptualization of the rules of engagement between teachers and students. Sex also implicates us (and often our identities) in wanted and unwanted ways as teachers and mentors, challenging us to grapple with the consequences of our pedagogical choices in the lives of students. “Thinking sex” in the classroom includes negotiating the glimpses of its thick density, its power to alter socialities in unpredictable ways, its ability to surprise us as we encounter boundaries that crumble and boundaries that emerge in our teaching and mentorship. Despite how much “sex positivity” may appear to be a laudable goal to feminist educators, “going there” in our classrooms has consequences we cannot always anticipate.

1

Taking sex seriously requires listening for those boundaries negotiated around it. One of our jobs as educators is often to provoke, but it is also to create the conditions for students to grapple with issues on their own. Silence can sometimes be a sign of respect and consideration for students as they engage the issues they are encountering in the classroom.

The course was called Research on Sexualities. It was part of the Critical Sexualities minor in my department, and it was my first time teaching it. Despite my having made clear on the first and second day of class (and in the syllabus) that sexually explicit materials would be shown and discussed, showing Shortbus (2006), a film about the vicissitudes of a woman’s search for an orgasm in New York City, happened late in the semester. My main objective in showing this film was to illustrate how we could entertain questions about race, class, and gender relations once we got over the “shock” value of viewing sex itself as shown in the film. Nevertheless, I was freaking out.

I sought the advice of my department’s undergraduate director, who recommended that I offer students the possibility of being excused from watching this film, doing an alternative assignment, or having both options. I advised the students they could be excused if they so wished.

The viewing and discussion were productive. It would have never occurred to me beforehand to think I had accomplished something when I did not hear nervous giggles as we watched together. But the utter seriousness and commitment of my students reassured me that we had reached a level of trust and rapport that allowed us to talk about these issues and that helped us engage the explicitness of the sex but also see how many issues we confronted which were similar to other materials we had already discussed.

Nevertheless, one of my most outspoken students asked to be excused. She did not object to the showing of the film—in fact, she had already seen it and discussed it with friends. Her concern was with viewing it in class among her peers. Something about viewing and discussing this sexually explicit film pushed against her comfort zone, regardless of how outspoken she had been until then, how well we knew one another (she had taken other courses with me), and how much she may have trusted my facilitation of the discussion. Ultimately, she did very well in the course, but she and I never broached the topic again. We may have had a good relationship, but it was clear to me that I had to respect the boundary she was setting.

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.

2

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.

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.