James Schamus poses some interesting observations regarding his discomfort teaching pornographic texts in his classes. I think the questions he poses are key ones many of us confront as we try to encorporate new research in pornography, the insights of HARD CORE, CAUGHT LOOKING, DIRTY LOOKS, etc. into our teaching. I thought I would share a few experiences I have had dealing with porn in the classroom. I teach sections from Linda Williams in my Film Analysis seminar. The group is a mature one, mostly juniors and seniors, mostly students I have had in previous choices and nudged to take the course because of their serious interest in film. I teach the pornography fairly late in the term, after they have a vocabulary for talking about film style, after they have read Laura Mulvey for instance and worked there way through Bordwell and Thompson. I screen a tape of shorts made by Candida Royale and the Femme collective, which I rent from a local video store which has a porn selection. The tape, called FEMME, includes a variety of different sex acts, explicitly presented, but reflecting the feminist remaking of the genre which Royale and her collective members have sparked. In that sense, the selection is a fairly safe one -- aestheticized, without the most controversal aspects of porn, produced by a self-proclaimed feminist, although still well within the hardcore genre. I told the students a day in advance what we were going to be seeing and the context in which we would be studying it. I told them that they did not have to come to the class and that they would not be required to write on the material if they choose not to do so. (In two classes, I have never had a student choose to skip this particular class session, nor have I had a single complaint about its inclusion, except from the occasional student who knows the genre well and thinks I could have made a more adventurous choice.) We talk about the narrative content of the films -- the relations between the characters, the power dynamics and the subjectivity that is a central concern of Royale and Femme. We talk about the camera work and editing -- the dependence of this group upon long takes, fluid cameramovements which create a "full body eroticism" that contrasts sharply with the rapid cuts, fragmentation, and fetishization of traditional pornography. We talk about the production process and about the contexts in which the videos will be seen. We talk about the students' reactions and the political debates surrounding pornography. The students are encouraged to deal with the films like any other film as posing a range of aesthetic and ideological questions. The discussion is lively, frank, but it never has gotten out of hand. I take two additional precautions, primarily because I still don't have tenure and while I am following the university's guidelines in handling such materials, I don't want to raise too much public profile. I list the screening on the syllibus as TBA, since syllibuses tend to circulate beyond the class. And, I have the students get the tapes directly from me if they want to write about them, rather than checking them out through the usual library proceedures. I have found this a rewarding teaching experience that allows me to directly confront issues that matter in the students' lives. I recommend it to other teachers but I think you have to work through your own comfort with the images first. Screen the tape yourself several times until you have become quite dulled to it. You need to be there to provide support for students who may be more uncomfortable with the images. The second time I taught the course, I found that I had only a few women in a largely male group, so I asked a female academic friend of mine, Eithnee Johnson, who has written about the Femme collective, to join me for the discussion and that proved very helpful in allowing the women to feel more comfortable participating within the exchange. The other change I made the second time I taught the video was to include clips from more mainstream porn movies. I found that many of the students had no familiarity with any specific examples of the genre and it seemed important for them to see what porn often is so that they can understand how Femme is remaking it. We choose to show clips from a tape of the Adult Entertainment Industry Awards, to show mainstream scenes which were chosen as outstanding examples of the genre, and which display some of its dominant characteristics. Again, I stressed the academic rationale of the exercise and created a climate which was serious yet comfortable for discussing the images. I don't think it is helpful to deal with any aspect of popular culture in purely abstract or theoretical terms. If we are going to teach this new work on pornography, our students need to anchor it with specific images and we need to take some risks as instructors to insure a full exchange about those images. I think one needs to consider the context and the students involved before taking such risks. I think one needs to work through your own emotional relationship to the images first, rather than presenting your own discomfort to the students as a role model for how to thinking about such representations. I think you have to accept that students will have a range of responses, some emotional, some intellectual to the material, and you have to allow them to discuss those responses and discourage too much backlash against any ideas presented. --Henry Jenkins