Towards a Pussy Oriented Pedagogy

Sarah A. StevensOhio University

Intimate Engagements

Sex positivity as sex plurality

What does it mean to be intimately engaged with texts?

Bodily texts

Touching without touching—across mediums

Re-thinking texts as textures

Pornographic Engagement

Fucking Textually

Resisting Classic Pedagogical Models

The Allegory of the Cave

The 7th Book of Plato‟s Republic

Often used as THE pedagogical model

In which the subject emerges to a subjective “TRUTH”

Not unlike Freud‟s theory of the Oedipal matrix in which the little girl emerges towards “normal femininity”

The goal of such models are never having to navigate ambiguity

The Matrix Problem

Irigaray tells us that there are several issues with the matrix/cave model as THE pedagogical model

It relies on silence

Promotes a ban on resonances that do not echo a singular truth

Situates shame as an essential and pivotal part of forming a stable subject

Forgets the vagina---the transitory space between the cave and the Sun

Anti-sex Identification

Despite many founding thinkers of the ever present circulation of sex positive materials:

Betty Dodson, Anne Koedt, the Boston Women‟s Health Collective

The anti-sex model that emerged from cultural feminism appropriates this cave model in which women are trapped in a cave of social construction believing in the shadows and illusions of male identification

Can emerge to a proper, essential, and singular Truth of “woman-identified” feminist sexuality/subjectivity

Shaming: to project ones shame onto another, to say “Cover up your sexual imagination.”

Dismantling/Multiplying

Developing the pornographic imaginary

Using suggestion

Questions that encourage imagination

Fantasy: Embracing the Fantastic

Using feminism as a modality, an orientation towards the self

Rather than BEING a feminist, orienting one‟s body and contact with other bodies---as a mode of ethics/navigation/intimate engagement

Collective Sensibility

Both Nina and Tristan speak of utilizing a common sense

This common sense does several things:

Works towards a connection of mind/body through the sensual

Promotes a collective sensibility: one that is both deeply personal and informed by collective feminist modes that are ambiguous in that they can be contradictory, and allow for multiple voices to speak simultaneously

Rethinking the Masterbatory

Putting Grass in the Grill

“To rise above the interior chaosmos each one of us gives ourselves a spokesperson I, the social I who votes, who represents me. I have an I who teaches. I have an I who escapes me. I have an I who knows the law. The I who writes gives speech to all the other Is. We humans, in other words dreams by nature, we are almost wholly unidentifiable. It is what makes us surprising, diverse, unpredictable. Thus troubling. Thus frightening and conversely enchanting. In each one of us our own contrary slumbers. A „myself‟ which is the most intimate first name of you. I will never say without the other, and that the charm of difference (beginning with sexual difference) is that it passes. It crosses through us, like a goddess. We cannot capture it. It makes us teeter with emotion. It is in this living agitation that there is always room for you in me, your presence and your place. I is never an individual I is haunted. I is always, before knowing anything, an I-love-you” Helene Cixous