Thanks to henry jenkins for sharing his experiences. If I were to teach such texts in the classroom, my feeling is that i would probably follow something of the same course of action. Still, some nagging questions: I wonder if there isn't a "class" -- at least "culture class" -- issue at work here, in that the careful precautions, mentorship, and "aestheticisation" of the primary texts, as well as the chaperoning, etc. all work to privilege the students in constructing a very specific context for the consumption of the texts -- something I'm not at all against in theory (nor practice), but...To give an example, one of the things I tried hard to do in the B movie course I taught was to, over the course of the semster, make the students comfortable with "fun" responses to the films, such as The Tingler (where the class yelled so loudly we had people running into the room to see what the problem was), so that in discussion it would be difficult for anyone to "stand outside" what the films were soliciting in terms of embodied response. This was, for me, a criticaly important part of the *epistemological* questions I wanted the course to pose -- i.e., what is the *object* (or objects) of study that could be constituted within the classroom, and could we, through a certain kind of collective action, change that object in significantly troubling ways? Atempting the same thing with a pornographic text simply seems beyond the pale to me, but to work so diligently to do the opposite, to inure the students as a collectivity to the affectivity of the films, to throw them back on institutionally sanctioned discursive responses (while still respecting fully their opinions -- and I don't mean this cynically or in any way negatively -- this seems to me to beg many of the most interesting questions. But then, the most interesting ones probably should be begged, at least temporarily, and certainly in those theaters of instruction where the professor's power is all the more palpable simply because he or she seems to be encouraging transgression (and grading students on the quality of such -- intellectual -- transgressions). --James Schamus