Shifting Discipline in Women's Studies: Studies of Masculinities, Pornographies, and Sexualities

According to the Associated Press, when the University of Iowa put a course entitled Critical Pornography Studies in their catalog for fall 2005, the Speaker of the Iowa House, Republican Chris Rants, became involved and threatened, "Do they [the university] know that we're not done with their budget yet? I'm pretty sure we don't need to increase state funding by $40 million to teach critical pornography studies" (Spitzer 2005). The fact that the class is actually sure to be a moneymaker for the university—it is fully enrolled and taught by a graduate student—is not Rants's point. Rants simply asserts that he is willing to use a single course to hold higher education funding hostage, no doubt with the hope of pressuring university officials to alter curriculum. In contrast, the course was simply a joke for Jay Leno, who quipped, "Imagine how tired your hand would be after that final" (2005).

Women's studies programs are already acutely aware of the ways our courses regularly contain content demonized by right-wing politicians and are laughed at by the media. We study and discuss issues of reproductive rights, sexuality, critical race studies, critical media studies, and gender construction, occasionally in the jargon-filled language of the academy. In her nationally syndicated radio program, Dr. Laura Schlessinger counsels parents not to let their children attend colleges with women's studies programs. Columnist David Reinhard of The Oregonian condemns the University of Oregon's diversity mandate because it, among other things, promotes cluster hires in areas such as "critical race studies, critical gender studies, and queer studies" (2005)—areas of central importance to building an active and diverse women's studies faculty. In April 2005, an Alabama Republican, Gerald Allen, introduced a bill into the state legislature that would keep works by gay authors or about gay characters from being purchased by public school libraries. When it was pointed out that the ban would have included some works by Shakespeare, Allen revised the bill so that "classics" would not be included in the ban, though "classics" was not defined. The bill died without a vote (Gay Financial News 2005); University of Oregon's diversity mandate seems to be moving forward, in spite of resistance (Reinhard 2005). But these condemnations of content that are so typical for teachers of women's studies courses makes thinking about how and why we teach these issues especially important.

Among ourselves we converse about the directions of our programs, about what we should teach and who our courses serve. Are our courses Women's Studies or Gender Studies? Do we explicitly teach studies of masculinities? Who are our students? In this essay, I discuss three recent books on topics that remain contested within college curricula: studies of pornography, sexuality, and masculinity. I argue that although these books are not all appropriate for use in an introductory women's studies course, they are important subjects within a women's studies (or gender studies) program, and that these books could be part of a rich and coherent upper level curriculum in a women's studies program.

Pornographies

Porn Studies, a collection of seventeen essays and a good bibliography all edited by Linda Williams, is mainly a cultural study of pornography, examining pornography in terms of its production and consumption in a variety of cultures and subcultures. In her introduction to the collection, Williams argues for the importance of understanding pornography by asserting its huge economic impact on our culture. "Pornography revenues . . . total between 10 and 14 billion dollars annually" (2). This figure totals more than the total revenues from movies and professional baseball, football, and basketball. Pornography is...