Pedagogy Seminar: Teaching Sexually Explicit Texts 
 

Featuring: Dagmawi Woubshet (Ahuja Family Presidential Associate Professor of English), Jonathan Katz (Visiting Associate Professor, Gender Sexuality and Women's Studies), and Jess Shollenberger (Doctoral Candidate in English)

 
Conversations about sexuality as a topic of theoretical, social, and affective interest are at the core of many courses in Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies. And many of these courses teach literary and cultural texts as case studies in dialogue with their core critical and theoretical texts. This workshop will create a forum for discussion around how to negotiate teaching sexually explicit texts in a way that makes those texts available to all students. In the workshop, we will explore strategies for equitably presenting and managing sexual explicitness in both assigned material and class discussion with the goal of neither making some students feel unsafe or alienated by the material, nor talking around rather than about representations of sexuality in courses for which the study of sexuality is an important focus. We will explore, too, how to frame sexually explicit texts in order to guide student comments and observations and to give students the opportunity for self-care.