The Ethics of Teaching Pornography from the Eighteenth Century

Last semester, I presented a paper on what I call the “Great Lesbian Panic of Eighteenth-Century France”. As part of my presentation, I chose to show an engraving from Sade’s Juliette ou les prospérités du vice, in which several lesbian couples are having sex on a stage, performing in front of a man sexually stimulated by the spectacle. Because I did not want to potentially unsettle people with pornography – even if that pornography is from the late eighteenth-century – I chose to use my great editing skills and went on Paint to add lavender-coloured circles on the characters’ genitalia. Let me just say that there were quite a lot of circles on this engraving.

Being a Praxis fellow has shed a new light on this paper I presented, and on the choice I made to show sexually explicit content in a conference. Especially, as someone who’d like to pursue a career in academia, the discussions around DH pedagogy made me question the way I would envision my future teaching. How can we present undergraduates, or even graduate students, with sexually explicit content (in this case, engravings depicting not always consensual sexual intercourse)? Putting aside the pertinent but limiting argument of tradition and memory (“This content is a significant portion of eighteenth-century French literature, which is why you should learn it: it is part of literary history”) and engaging with scholarship on care and trauma-informed practices, why would we choose to do so, and what methods should we use?

In his article “Presenting Potentially Harmful Images in College Classrooms”, Connor Kenaston reflects on his pedagogical practice to discuss what it means for a professor to choose to show potentially harmful images in class. Although the gravity of the discussed content cannot, in any way, be compared to what I am reflecting on here – as the author talks about photographs of lynching, that is, the representation of the lived and real suffering of black men – I would like to draw on his analysis of the potential physical and emotional response of students to being shown harmful images, asking myself the same questions: “Should teachers use potentially harmful images in their classroom? Is choosing to do so a form of “pedagogical violence”? And for teachers who do decide the benefits of presenting an image outweigh the potential risks, what are ways to ameliorate the harmful effects?” Connor Kenaston proposes different solutions to this last question:

1. allowing students to opt out of the class when harmful images are being displayed,
2. prepare students and provide them with ample context, and
3. maintain a posture of care.

One could add to this list that showing potentially harmful images to students is always a conscious choice on the teacher’s end. Consequently, it should never be gratuitous: there should always be an intention, evident to the students, behind this decision. Why did I choose to show this eighteenth-century engraving to an audience of graduate students and professors? I wanted to reveal, in obvious and undeniable terms, that lesbianism was solely presented by the author (and by the engraver) as a stimulant for straight men, making my later argument about late eighteenth-century women authors refusing to show lesbian sexuality, hence creating a space of lesbian resistance and counter-discourse through silence, all the more convincing.

I take no pleasure in looking at this particular engraving – it even hurts me, to a certain extent. My lesbian identity is negatively challenged by this representation, as old as time, of lesbianism as a stimulant for straight men. But there is something healing about deconstructing the work that this engraving is doing; about showing it in order to disrupt the intended effect (sexual stimulation for the reader). This all goes back to the idea of care. In her work Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks explores the figure of the professor as a healer, the one who can heal students. But the healing goes both ways, as she argues that “when our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to the process of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice” . Keeping this in mind, one can argue that, with the appropriate parameters (allowing students to consult the material before class; allowing them to opt out; preparing them and giving them content; maintaining a posture of care; setting a clear intention), presenting students with hundred years-old pornography is not antithetical to envisioning the class as a space for healing. Just like within oppression, one can shape archipelagos of resistance, within what harms us, there is room for recovery.