Sex, Writing, & Pornography

Sex, Writing, & Pornography
With the exception of pornography, our sexuality, our sex lives, our sexual fantasies, rituals, and practices are rarely represented or examined by writers. We might start by asking what is more fundamental and universal to humans than sex? In writing and images, a pivotal distinction arises between the pornographic, whose goal is arousal, and sex writing, whose goal is representational: to capture in words a circumstance that exists largely outside language, a phenomenon transacted in bodies and minds, whose specific gravity rarely survives its lived moment. Writing sex, writing about sex. But to ignore the pornographic would be foolish. Literally "the writing of harlots," pornography has ancient and primal roots in kindling lust, working as both a substitution for and supplement to actual sex. Often belittled for its crude goal of arousal, the "low form" of pornography offers writers a chance to interrogate Western culture's hostility to bodies and pleasure. It's laboratory of gender difference and gender expression, on the workings of power on innocent (and transgressive) bodies. Basically a workshop, this class will also read a few prototypes of sex writing and pornography. This is not a class for the faint of heart. Our frank and robust conversations will plunge into erotic content with equal relish as in our discussions of clauses, punctuation, and syntax.