Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Reading Emily H.'s post on the 50 Cent/JT song "Aayo" and Spencer's comment reminded me that if we were teaching this program over a semester, instead of a measly old quarter, we'd have to move to pornography next. How could one teach a program with this title and not cover that material, once we all got comfortable enough with each other? It's amazingly hard to figure out how to teach porn studies well or without shocking or enraging various people on campus, but that's all the more reason it would need to be done. I've taught gay porn in the past, briefly, in a class on Queer Film/Video. The crossing over of the classroom space into porn viewing space is impossibly complicated but fruitful.

If you are interested in further reading, start with the brilliant Linda Williams' book, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible , the Porn Studies Reader, edited by Williams, and Laura Kipnis' Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America

-julia