pages Essay. Urgent! Thank you!
Sex, Writing, & Pornography Paper Topics
Papers should be 8-10 pages long, typed, double-spaced (i.e. 2000 to 2,500 words). Please discuss at least two of the books we’ve read in this class.
Fifty Shades of Grey
Fanny Hill
The Sluts
You’re welcome to cite and discuss books, films, etc. outside this class, but clear it with me if large parts of your paper will be dedicated to outside material. You are welcome to come up with your own paper topic – just email me to clear it, [email protected]. If you want to submit work of your own (writing, video, art, etc) you can, but you still need to write a paper on it – check with me in advance on how to do this.
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Sex and truth. Many of these books are a kind of “educational” texts, leading the reader down a path of sexual liberation. While they seem only to discuss sex, do any of these books talk about something else? In many of the works in the class, sex comes to represent freedom, truth, or power (or the other way around, the claim that freedom, truth or power are best found through sex). Be sure to define the types of freedom/truth/power each book discusses, and focus on what each book ultimately thinks sex is and how it works.
Prostitution. The word pornography literally means “the writing of harlots.” Discuss the relation between pornography and prostitution. Is it possible to eliminate this connection between sex and money? What is the role of money in human sexual relations? How are the two connected in the works we have read?
Sex and Selfhood. Many of the books we’ve read have expressed ideas about the self: finding the self, losing the self, expanding the self, etc. What role does pornography (as a major form of writing about sex) have in the thinking about modern selfhood? How are selves defined sexually? Does sex work for or against forms of self-definition?
Queer Sex. What do pornography and the sexual revolution have to do with gay liberation? Using texts we have read in this class, or bringing in outside texts, discuss whether pornography has a special role in gay liberation. Does the depiction of queer sex differ from the depiction of heterosexual sex?
The darkness of sexuality. Why have so many of the books in this class taken a dark turn? Are they telling us that sexual liberation is doomed, or are they trying to complicate our view of sex, desire and power? Can you imagine happy pornography? What would it look like, or how would it work?
Bodies. The “pornographic imagination” in these books often depicts the human body in ways that you may have not seen it depicted before. Each text, for example, “re-maps” human bodies and re-organizes what’s important. What kind of body and its potentials does porn evoke? What is the relation of the language of pornography with the language of the body? Is there a kind of ‘sex writing’ that is different from other forms of writing?
Pornography and power relations. A lot of the pornography we’ve read highlights the power relationships between individuals, especially between men and women. Some readers of pornography are critical of porn’s tendency to dwell on power differences and feel that for this reason porn has a dangerous or repressive tendency. Do you agree? Does porn invent power relations or does it depict those that are already there?
The politics of pleasure. What is the role of pornography in the sexual revolution? Many of the books in this class focus on our individual freedom to engage in any and all sexual behavior. Is this “right” related to other ideas of liberation and political revolution? What forms of social good does pornography promote?
Written pornography vs. visual pornography. Pornography generally represents the visible: human sexual interactions. How do visual porn and written pornography work differently? How has the rise of the technologies of visual representation changed the meaning or the functioning of written pornography? (Please run your visual examples past me to be sure I already know them!)
Feminist anti-porn positions. In the 80’s, several feminists opposed pornography as a violation of women’s rights and a precursor to rape; porn is the “undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda,” said Susan Brownmiller, while according to Robin Morgan, “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.” Andrea Dworkin (author of Pornography: Men Hating Women) and feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon drafted a proposal for a law that defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women. What is your take on their position vis-à-vis the books we’ve read in this class?
Or, address the questions above from the quote below: “Pornographers are the enemies of women only because of our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers, as if sexual relations were not necessarily an expression of social relations, as if sex itself were an external fact, one as immutable as the weather, creating human practice but never a part of it.” (Angela Carter, “Polemical Preface,“ The Sadeian Woman).
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