Porn's pedagogies: teaching porn studies in the academic–corporate complex

Abstract

The explicit study of porn in university Sexuality Studies programs poses challenges to the classroom as framework for pedagogy. Mid-way through a federally funded study of feminist porn and porn cultures, this paper begins to interrogate the challenging and difficult knowledges, methods and pedagogies that can be put into motion in the undergraduate classroom as porn. Detailing the work of one such undergraduate course, this paper argues that porn as a pedagogical method raises but also reconfigures the spectre of embodied learning as it occurs in two other places: the 1981 anti-pornography feminism documentary Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography; and, conversely, through the pedagogical work of sex educator Tristan Taormino. Such differently configured bodies of knowledge work against the desiring-to-know ‘bad’ bodies put on display in anti-pornography feminist films such as Not a Love Story, still taught in many undergraduate classrooms as the feminist anti-porn text exemplar. This project asks can the body caught looking and, indeed, caught wanting – that is, the body desiring-to-know and desiring-to-unknow through porn – exceed both the pedagogical body and the body subjected by the imagined affect of ‘anti-woman’ violence? Of what kind of public might such an edgy body be generative?

Keywords::

• feminist porn
• Tristan Taormino
• pedagogy
• counterpublics
• reparative porn

Acknowledgement

For d …

Notes

1. I characterize anti-pornography feminism as what I describe as a kind of gender fundamentalism in Noble (2012, 282): ‘gender fundamentalism [is] (not unlike that of nationalism, military-state, white supremacist, Christian, to name only a few) [and] functions to ground both a feminist imaginary and its methodology of social, moral, and biological coercive normalization’. In the case of anti-pornography feminism, such fundamentalism emerges as its primary methodology: binary thinking; a belief in unmediated and transparent realism; rhetorical strategies of describing such realist practices as self-evident and, again, unmediated; rigid anti-intellectualism; and often accompanied by raging trans-phobia and fantasies of rescuing, speaking on behalf of, and otherwise routinely dismissing, the voices of sex workers.

2. This paper is part of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded (Canada) collaborative study of feminist porn called the Feminist Porn Archive and Research Project. We are a Sexuality Studies professor (Noble) and a faculty librarian (Lisa Sloniowski) documenting, studying and archiving queer and feminist porn as a counterpublic.

3. One should note here that such strategic assumptions of a female reader signaled by the use of ‘her’ in feminist theory can, at the same time, performatively index a series of problematical reductions between feminism and cis-female-ness (see note 6). Not only can they suggest a series of linkages between female-ness and feminism (or female and affect, for that matter), they also close out trans-masculine, transgender, and gender-queer readers for whom male pronouns are equally as strategic as transfeminist identifications. Moreover, in the context of the extremely helpful reader reviews of this paper (for which I thank anonymous reviewers), my own subject position was assumed similarly as a ‘her’; that is, as cis-female. As a female-to-male trans scholar, it is curious to note the moments where assumptions about reading publics of feminist pedagogies, feminist porn and so on might unintentionally stabilize gender regimes rather than troubling them. For an analysis of these feminist stabilizations between sex, gender and feminist practice for many subjects of masculinity, not just transmen, see my monographs: Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-queer Cultural Landscape (Noble 2006) and Masculinities without Men?: Female Masculinities in Twentieth-century Fictions (Noble 2004).

4. This strategy of poaching images to recontextualize their meanings is evident in many anti-pornography feminist documentaries. Recent anti-pornography films follow a disturbingly similar formula: The Price of Pleasure (directed by Miguel Picker and Chyng Sun, 2008) is especially troublesome on two fronts. It is without a doubt very questionable to see it as a ‘feminist’ text claiming harm done against women, especially when that text itself does harm to recognizable feminist porn workers with public profiles by including their images in a documentary without their consent and against their own political articulation of feminist self-location. But not only are such recognitions problematic, they lead one to ask about the ethics of such projects that use footage under the Fair Use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976, which states that the use of copyrighted work ‘for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.’ While perhaps ‘legal,’ such an alibi of ‘fair use’ continues to raise questions about feminist ethics and best practice, the likes of which I raise here about Tracey's condemnation of Not a Love Story. See ‘The Price of Pleasure Feedback’ (accessed October 12, 2013; http://thepriceofpleasure.com/feedback_qa.html).

5. The Feminist Porn Archive and Research Project project took three students to several conferences on panels about the course and its research outcomes. During the Q&A for every conference, someone invariably asked the question ‘was it hot to watch porn in the classroom?’ The students almost always turned that question back onto the questioner by referencing, in part, the physical intimacy that this particular group developed as a classroom ‘norm.’ The question and its various iterations are very curious. It misses the way that ‘hotness’ emerges in context-specific moments. But it also cannot think the way its own logics continue to be bound by an assumption that porn is going to be ‘hot’ regardless of context, setting, design, intention, and so on. In part, what the question also misses is the way that queer and feminist porn communities come to constitute their own kinship system in which sexuality, sexual intimacy and relationality are organized very differently – a re-organization that this group of students seemed to duplicate. Each time the question is posed, the students emit telling laughs about what they later described as its ‘un-porn-y banalities’.

6. ‘Cis’ refers to genders where there appears to be no discrepancy between birth sex and chosen gender (i.e., non-transgendered genders).

7. Accessed October 12, 2013. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC32folder/PornWomenInt.html

8. Editor of eight books on sex; editor of 25 anthologies of erotic writing; co-editor of the significant The Feminist Porn Book; The Politics of Producing Pleasure; columnist for the Village Voice for nine years; director and producer of 25 adult films; organizer of The Feminist Porn Conference (Toronto, 2013); founder of Smart Ass Productions; host of Sex Outloud, a radio program talking about sex; winner of Feminist Porn Awards, AVN awards, at least three Lambda Literary awards; and if this list was not already long enough, highly sought after speaker and lecturer, to date having given over 75 lectures and presentations at top colleges and universities across North America (including Yale, Cornell, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, University of California Santa Barbara, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and NYU) on subjects ranging from erotic empowerment to challenging the social construction of monogamy (puckerup.com). Taormino's contributions and accomplishments to date are substantial and have longevity across the spectrum.