On the whiteboard in Steven Ruszczycky’s class, Anastasia Steele, Christian Grey and other character names from pornographic literature were written. The question the class pondered was: Is Anastasia Steele a pick-me girl?
While more light-hearted than most discussions in the class, this is an example of how the course aims to study pornography through an academic lens.
Over the ten weeks, students in ENGL 449 read and discussed the pornographic writings of Patrick Califia, Samuel R. Delany and E.L. James’ “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
“You tell people you’re taking this class and they’re like, ‘Oh God, they let you read that in school and they’re teaching that,’” English senior Olivia Dinis said. “But it’s an art form, and you have a community of people that are writing about it and it’s interesting to learn about.”
The goal of the course is not to say pornography is either good or bad. Rather, it aims to create an academic language to talk about sex and representation within the media.
“It’s not like any other English class,” Dinis said. “Not just because of the subject matter and what we are reading, but it just feels more intimate as a class because we trust each other to talk about this stuff.”
American culture, Ruszczycky said, is sexually explicit yet lacks a language to talk about it. He believes it’s important “to develop alternative frameworks to think about pornography because it’s everywhere,” Ruszczycky said.
People have approached him with questions about his course, but mostly, they come from a place of curiosity. His takeaway is that the topic “makes people uneasy or uncomfortable.”
With that being said, this course is not a new concept. Other universities, such as Temple University and University of California, Berkeley, offer similar courses.
Ruszczycky was hired several years ago as a part of a diversity cluster hire through the College of Liberal Arts, where a department hires several faculty who do not have overlapping interests. Rather, they aim to add different perspectives and areas of specialization within the department.
According to English Department Chair Dustin Stegner, Ruszczycky’s specialty in queer literature and theory was something the department wanted to add when making its decisions.
How Ruszczycky found his passion
During graduate school, Ruszczycky combined his interests in literature and culture, which drove him to explore forms of sexual culture within the arts, he said.
When it comes to sex and sexuality, Ruszczycky believes “it’s something that people hide behind their bedroom doors.”
He went on to describe how this can be a misleading belief.
“In terms of representation in movies, in novels, in public displays on social media, there is this intense publicness to sex and sexuality,” Ruszczycky said.
This curiosity led him to research and think about pornography as a form of culture.
“Pornography is usually thought of as a form of violence, as a form of public health problem, but if we talk about it as a form of culture it opens up a set of questions and makes it possible to think about pornography as a genre,” Ruszczycky said.
Due to its association with sex and sexuality, a lot of pornography’s history has been difficult to recognize, he explained.
“Just imagine the kind of things people say about pornography and switch out pornography with a term like comedy or the novel. There is something about that association to sex that makes it difficult to think about,” Ruszczycky said.
His research led him to publish two books. “Porn Archives” explores how the meaning of pornography has been tied to the ways people collect pornography. In his more recent publication, “Vuglar Genres,” he explores the history behind the role pornographic writing has played in helping to develop forms of gay public life in the 20th century.
Ruszczycky’s course “is not like an amateur fan club or let’s get together and talk the way we would if we were hanging out with friends,” Stegner said. “The design is to bring a kind of serious intellectual focus to try to understand not just a particular area of aesthetic or material, but how it works in a larger cultural sense.”
Ruszczycky is currently working on approving a course called Porn Studies within the Women, Gender & Queer Studies department to be taught post-semester conversion. This will be a 300-level upper-division general education course aiming to introduce porn studies as academic fields.
As for critics who find little value in such courses, “I think it’s important to be offering these classes though. I think students are fascinated by them. I think the people who react strongly to them are secretly fascinated by them and wish they could take them,” Ruszczycky said.
