Teaching Sexuality through Media

A central project of feminism has been raising awareness of the role cultural formations of sexuality play in women’s inequality (Ritzenhoff and Hermes 2). Feminists who regularly include discussions of sexuality in their teaching are familiar with the pedagogical challenges of the subject as well as its importance. This article is intended for those with experience teaching the politics of sexuality who would like advice on how to incorporate visual materials into their classroom discussions. Visual texts can be a dynamic resource for any subject in the classroom, and because the media is so heavily sexualized and sexuality so heavily mediated, they are vital for teaching about sexuality as well. While the use of visual texts to spark discussion is common, those who are not formally trained in media studies may have received little guidance in how to use them effectively. In addition, the pedagogical issues that arise when students experience moving images of sexuality in the classroom are both similar to and different from teaching sexuality through discussion alone. As a feminist who often uses images of sexuality in my teaching, I offer here my own experiences and advice.

I have taught courses on gender and sexuality in television and film for the last twenty years, and work at a large US public university that attracts a high proportion of first-generation college students. These small discussion courses (twenty-five to thirty-five students) range from introductory courses on cultural studies, comprised of a wide variety of students, to upper-level specialized courses on feminist media studies that include majors and nonmajors. In the introductory courses, discussion of sexual representation is usually the focus of one or two stand-alone lessons, as part of a larger consideration of the social construction of gender and sexuality. In the specialized courses, it is more typically a running theme throughout the course. Because these are interdisciplinary cultural studies courses that cover a variety of media (including television, film, magazines, and the Internet), basic media literacy skills are taught and practiced early in each course. In addition to learning how to read visual texts, class time is spent distinguishing the differences and similarities among different media.

This article is divided into two sections. The first, “Beyond Content,” summarizes some of the primary concepts and techniques of visual analysis to provide a foundation for sophisticated classroom discussions of media images. Appendix A includes recommended resources on media literacy. The second section, “In the Classroom,” provides practical advice on teaching challenges that emerge in discussions of sexual representation and offers suggestions for classroom activities and resources. Appendix B is an annotated bibliography of recommended scholarship on objectification.

Beyond Content

Media texts can be highly effective in the classroom, but they must be used with care. The meaning of television shows, films, or magazine ads might seem to reside primarily in their content, but there are many aspects of their construction as visual images that provide interpretive contexts that shape meaning. Some of the most important of these are described below, along with suggestions for how to apply the concepts.

Gaze is a central concept in media analysis. The idea of a “male gaze” was proposed by Laura Mulvey in 1975, and it continues to be a common approach to studying film. The term suggests that the way the camera moves encourages beliefs about and emotional reactions to the characters looked at, shaping our identification with or distance from them. Mulvey’s perspective was bleak; she suggested that a “male” way of looking at women (based in voyeurism and fetishism caused by castration anxiety) was encoded into the look of the camera at the characters, the looks exchanged between characters, and the look of the audience at the characters on screen (33). Although her specific conclusions about the sexual politics of film have been widely criticized as essentialist (for example, see de Lauretis 249; Gaines 65; Straayer, Deviant Eyes 3), feminists have widely adopted Mulvey’s general method of analyzing the politics of camera movement (Mayne xi).

Cameras can look from various perspectives (from the point of view of a victim or a killer, for...