Professing porn or obscene browsing? : on proper distance in the university classroom

Anna Reading

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticle

    13 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    How should pornography be taught? When two English literature academics, Mark Jones and Gerry Carlin, at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, recently showed their students video pornography as part of an English literature course entitled ‘Unpopular Texts’, the case made the front page of one British Sunday tabloid newspaper. ‘What the Dickens Are They Teaching?’ intoned the headline, after a student had, apparently, boycotted the lecture in which a pornographic video was being shown and had gone to the local press (Jones and Carlin, 2004: 19). According to the academics, who teach video pornography in the context of a range of ‘eclectically offensive’ texts ranging from the white supremacist novel, The Turner Diaries, to the video nasty Cannibal Holocaust: Watching pornography in a classroom becomes a Brechtian experience, causing discomfort and alienation . . . to debate sexual objectification without examining a specific instance of it seems, in retrospect, ludicrous. (2004: 6) Their case raises several questions of importance for media and cultural studies. First, should academics show pornographic material to adults in a university classroom? Second, what is the significance of the University of Wolverhampton’s English literature’s students’ old-fashioned choice of video as the medium for examining the genre of pornography? Surely, as Roger Silverstone has pointed out, it is new media that ‘are challenging what it means to be human’ (2004: 474) and thus, I’d suggest, even more so new media pornography. Third, what are the implications for media studies of video pornography now being taught on an English literature course?
    Original languageEnglish
    Number of pages8
    JournalMedia\, Culture\, and Society
    Publication statusPublished - 2005

    Keywords

    • communication
    • cultural studies
    • education, higher
    • mass media
    • pornography
    • social aspects

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