The Pedagogy of Pornography: Teaching Hardcore Media in a Feminist Studies Classroom

Teaching pornography in the college classroom can be fraught with challenges. At least this is the view held by most professors, who see it as intensely problematic for one’s career by opening us up to charges of poor pedagogical practice or even to censorship (Curry 1996; Kirkham and Skeggs 1996; Kleinhans 1996; Lehman 2006; Reading 2006; Attwood and Hunter 2009; McNair 2009; Nguyen 2010). Beyond contributing to the vulnerability of professors, pornography in feminist classrooms is seen as an antifeminist invasion of “safe space,” the ethical and democratic environment many faculty work to create. Hence, to teach porn is primarily seen as to take risks and do harm rather than to create an opportunity for rethinking the role of sex in the classroom or to create new, transgressive pedagogies.

I teach pornography because it is, as Constance Penley has shown in her groundbreaking senior seminar on pornography,1 a genre of film and media that has been central to the development of technology, culture, and society over the last one hundred years (see Kirkham and Skeggs 1996). The students in my senior and graduate-student seminar, Sexual Cultures: Pornography, in the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), are aware of feminist debates about pornography and their continuing salience for interdisciplinary studies of feminism and postfeminism in popular culture and beyond. I see no better way to instruct students about the complexities of the feminist debates about the relationship of violence, exploitation, and misogyny to pornography than to show them examples of the very cultural production under discussion.

While my own research on race, blackness, and gender in pornography is situated within the liberal, anticensorship, and sex-positive camp of the porn debates, I encourage my students to read across ideological arguments, including radical feminist criticism, and to make up their own minds. Like Chuck Kleinhans, who teaches pornography at Northwestern University, I “cannot pretend I’m neutral” because my writing on the subject takes a position in the sex wars; yet “in the classroom I can try to create a space for discussion that allows frank expressions of difference on all sides” (Kleinhans 1996). Most students are not overly familiar with pornography, and some are viewing it for the first time in my classroom. Nevertheless, they often come to the course with strong opinions about pornography as singly sexist, gross, or deviant.

According to Wheelock College professor Gail Dines, pornography has “hijacked” sexuality, destroyed intimacy, and must be stopped; she’s founded the group Stop Porn Culture to reignite the feminist antipornography movement to eradicate pornography (Dines 2010). What this view evacuates in its notion of sexuality as ruined by pornography is that historically speaking, sexuality, sex, and intimacy have hardly been liberated terrain for women. But if we are to search for sites of women’s sexual autonomy and eroticism we might begin by looking at precisely the sites where they are involved in creating sexual cultures, including pornography. What might be more productive than situating pornography as inherently against women’s interests would be to study it as a setting where women are also contributing to its meanings, forms, and content.

Like University of California, Berkeley professor Linda Williams’s pedagogical approach to teaching pornography, mine is not to defend pornography against a narrow, problematic, and extremely sex-negative framework set out by feminist antipornography scholars and activists, but to show its diversity, complexity, and historicity. I too have held the premise in my classes that “since moving-image pornographies existed, we would not take up the question of whether they should exist before we had considered their form and content” (Williams 2004, 13). My aim is to educate students about pornography as a popular field of representation and a political economy informed by gender, race, class, and culture. I attempt to show that, as Susanna Paasonen argues, “In spite of its frequent use as a cultural symbol, pornography is not, and never has been, a monolithic entity” (Paasonen 2009, 597). Hence, I provide techniques for the analysis of pornography as a variant and historically contextualized visual culture, film genre, and sector of the sex industry. Prompting students to consider the technological, socioeconomic, and cultural context of particular images as they are produced, circulated, and consumed also means positing how sex functions as a site of desire, power, and knowledge through the specific textual forms.

In my class we consider aesthetic and industrial concerns and posit what can be learned about the workers and working conditions of sex labor, one of the largest industries in the world. Given the proximity of UCSB to the heart of pornography film production in the San Fernando Valley, ninety miles south, I invite my research contacts—mainly women and men working in pornography such as Sinnamon Love and Tyler Knight and feminist and queer pornographers like Tristan Taormino—to come to campus to speak to students about their experiences, views, and work. Students have an opportunity to address the real people from the images we see in class about an aspect of particular importance to them in the feminist studies classroom: the question of agency. How much agency do women and sexual minorities have in pornography and how do they, and we, define it vis-à-vis empowerment and survival?

My students struggle with the question of agency just as they wrestle with their own responses to seeing explicit images in the classroom. There seems to be, on the part of institutions, the professoriate, and even students themselves, an unspoken warning: Show explicit images and you traumatize and demoralize the minds of young people (Nguyen 2010). While it is of course crucial to be sensitive to potential trauma ignited by sexual materials—readings or images—in the classroom, this overwhelmingly cautious approach seems to be rooted in a sex-negative and phobic protectionism. This practice, according to experimental filmmaker and Bryn Mawr professor Hoang Tan Nguyen, instantiates hierarchies of pedagogy and knowledge that feminist and queer scholars have tried to contest. “Teaching porn is different from other modes of pedagogy,” suggests Nguyen, “because it activates and disavows bodily reactions from teachers and students, thus highlighting the fact that both are sexual subjects, [that] teaching and learning are both embodied practices” (Nguyen 2010).

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.