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Teach me today: finding the censors in your head and in your classroom - We're Here: Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art and Art History
Art Journal, Winter, 1996 by Erica Rand
In the past few years, I've had various professional encounters with censorship. I've spoken and written against censorship. I've been advised by the lawyer at Bates College, where I teach, to protect myself from harassment charges based on retroactive censorship ("you shouldn't have shown us that") by warning students in advance on my syllabi that courses include sexually explicit material. I've been described on Maine Public Radio, in an angry letter from someone who heard an interview with me, as a reason to discontinue government funding for public broadcasting. I was even censored in San Francisco.
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That's how I most like to think of myself in relation to censorship: as an anticensorship person whom others want to censor. But this Self-flattering picture of a bad girl in good company omits a few details. For instance, I got censored in San Francisco merely for trying to use the word fucking in a lecture title at City College there - not even to designate sex, but in the phrase "fucking with culture." This sorry example of censored street vernacular is bad enough, and worth mention as a reminder of the levels at which public speech is controlled. It's hardly a sign, however, of any daring bad-girl move on my part. Despite the much-touted increased queer visibility - and within this visibility, of dykes as sexual beings who don't just hug and process - censorship and its advocates are at work all the time.
More importantly, perhaps, my censorship resume also omits a series of items that I didn't originally realize belonged there. Besides being censored, I've also been a censor, particularly in syllabus and class preparation. The catalyst for this essay was the realization that I needed to put that word to some of my deeds.
This essay concerns censorship in the anticensorship classroom by way of a course I taught in 1995: "Doing It, Getting It, Seeing It, Reading It," a writing-intensive seminar for first-year students on representations of sex and sexuality, in which I discovered both my students and myself to be acting as censors and self-censors. I offer this narrative with limited expectations about what readers can extrapolate. Censorship issues, as I will argue, vary among institutions, from course to course within institutions, and from one version of a course to the next. I did, however, encounter some problems that seem far from unique, and suggest directions of thinking that can be brought to bear in many contexts as we try to make courses that are both pro-sex and against the perpetuation of privileges and prejudices based on class, skin, gender, and sexual orientation.
When I discuss my own role as a censor, I have in mind actions (or nonactions) to which others might not apply that label. I refer, not to attempts to prevent someone from producing or circulating material, but to decisions I have made to withhold certain work from my students. Of course, every teacher decides to omit materials, and for reasons that might not seem to deserve the odious term censorship. For instance, in planning "Doing It," I tried to avoid perpetuating certain stereotypes. I deliberately assigned nothing to imply that women really do mean "yes" when we say "no" or that teacher-student sex is a good idea. I tried to mix straight and queer material so that the kinkier material wasn't all queer or the queer material all kinky. I designed the syllabus so that both dominant and minority cultural producers addressed all the subjects. Instead of seeing "sex in general" as being produced by white heterosexuals and "minority perspectives" as being produced by others, students, I hoped, would view the work of minority producers as integral rather than tangential to the study of sex. Thus, for instance, the section on sex and money included both the mainstream film American Gigolo and an article from the 'zine Brat Attack in which working-class SM dykes discuss class issues. I also tried to avoid perpetuating stereotypes that certain people were more sexual or more defined by sexuality than others, which might happen if, say, the syllabus had white people portraying only "sex in the context of a meaningful relationship" and black people portraying what might be taken for "just sex." I tried to set the stage against such views by beginning with a novel, Benoite Groult's Desire, that, on the one hand, portrayed a primarily sexual relationship between white heterosexuals and, on the other hand, revealed quite clear stereotypes that could be readily deconstructed about racial primitivism and working-class sexual rawness.
Starting with a straight text had another rationale. The course had a lot of material with queer content and/or by queer cultural producers. In fact, it had more than I had originally envisioned. However, when I sat down to plan the course, I discovered that a large percentage of people whose work thought sex, as well as portrayed sex, were queer. This is hardly surprising, since queers are called to examine, second-guess, and explain our sexuality a lot, while heterosexually identified people are rarely asked to consider how they got that way. But I didn't want to lose students early on by wrenching many of them out of their comfort zone immediately, or by generating the suspicion - which takes little doing - that I was trying either to recruit or to ram homosexuality down their throats. I wanted to generate some good will and benefit of the doubt, and also to defer certain dilemmas or declarations: having queer students struggle over whether to come out; having straight students self-protectively announce "I'm heterosexual"; having students who were questioning their own sexuality think that the course was going to be too much to handle.
