Talk:Pornography

The course outline raises a number of questions that, if taken seriously, would require fundamentally reconceptualising the whole topic.

1) The debate about pornography has been very wide ranging indeed and is not nearly adequately captured by a nod towards those who, like Darnton, still cling to the belief that pornography has the potential of being in any way subversive and a readership with an imputed collective identity of ‘feminist’. I thought we had all ceased a long time ago to use categories such as ‘feminism’, ‘woman’, ‘femininity’ etc. in the singular, acknowledging the multi-layeredness of each by using the plural! The feminist debate about pornography has been so diverse as well as so sophisticated as to warrant a whole course being devoted to unravelling the different strands of the debate.

2) On the basis of what criteria can pornography be classified as ‘satisfying’? And what gender would be ‘the modern reader’ who finds a book like ‘Fanny Hill’ ‘satisfying pornography?

3) I very much doubt that it makes any sense at all to read supposedly pornographic texts produced over the past 400 years. Pornography, like most cultural phenomena, is historically specific. So what would be the criteria for selecting the texts to be read?

4) Finally, I fail to detect any reflection on the gender composition of the class and the subject position of the lecturer. For this kind of topic to be at all teachable, the class would either have to be kept gender-homogeneous – with the limited insights this is most likely to produce – or else require a mixed-gender team of lecturers.