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Transcript of FP Conference Presentation
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