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Pornography: Aesthetics, Politics, and Pleasure

  • All levels
  • 21 and older
  • $315
  • Online Classroom
  • 12 hours over 4 sessions

Start Dates (0)

  • $315
  • Online Classroom
  • 12 hours over 4 sessions
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Class Description

Description

What you'll learn in this lecture class:

Pornography is one of humanity’s oldest, and most enduring artifacts. Variously celebrated and demonized, it has decorated sumptuous palaces and been furtively sold under pain of arrest. In the modern United States, it is kept studiously out of sight, and yet is simultaneously omnipresent and accessible in its most explicit forms with a simple click of the mouse. What is pornography? What does it do? Why do we treat it so inconsistently? Why is pornography legal in some countries and censored in others? What are the aesthetics of pornography? What are its narrative structures? How do we experience and represent sexual pleasure?

In this course, we will examine the history of pornography and how pornography as an expression of eroticism has developed over time. Reading texts from Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Drucilla Cornell, Carol Queen, George Bataille, Michel Foucault, Laura Kipnis, Jennifer Nash among others, we will explore pornography as a medium and genre from early print pornography to amateur and internet porn in order to better understand how pornography relates to desire, gender equality, race and class relations, freedom of speech, and sexual liberty. Does pornography objectify bodies and creates false images of sexual performance? Or, does it create pleasure and offer a medium to re-signify sexual relations by expanding the erotic imagination? In addition to theoretical and philosophical texts, we will read some pornographic stories and watch scenes from films which contain explicit material like In The Realm of the Senses and Nymphomaniac.

Remote Learning

This course is available for "remote" learning and will be available to anyone with access to an internet device with a microphone (this includes most models of computers, tablets). Classes will take place with a "Live" instructor at the date/times listed below.

Upon registration, the instructor will send along additional information about how to log-on and participate in the class.

Refund Policy

  • Upon request, we will refund less 5% cancellation fee of a course up until 6 business days before its start date.
  • Students who withdraw after that point but before the first class are entitled to 75% refund or full course credit.
  • After the first class: 50% refund or 75% course credit.
  • No refunds or credits will be given after the second class.

In any event where a customer wants to cancel their enrollment and is eligible for a full refund, a 5% processing fee will be deducted from the refund amount.

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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research was established in 2011 in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Its mission is to extend liberal arts education and research far beyond the borders of the traditional university, supporting community education needs and opening up new possibilities for scholarship in the...

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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

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