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?