Censorship Class: First Thoughts
One of the fun things about being a professor is designing courses around what you find fun and hoping that students enjoy it too. Since I started doing censorship work about 7 years ago, I had toyed with the idea of a censorship course. This semester I am finally teaching it. Here’s the syllabus. I decided I would share some weekly thoughts on both the design of the course and how it is going.
I decided to focus on censorship in the U.S. from about 1920 to today. I designed weekly readings around types of censorship in specific historical eras to understand the evolution of the practice. A key purpose of the course is to analyze the way that censorship discourse develops to justify censorship. Topics include old favorites of any censorship scholar - one can’t avoid teaching about the Hays Code for example - but also less known instances - I doubt many folks teach about Russ Meyer and his sexploitation films. Course material draws upon my archival research and will often include court testimony, legal arguments, decisions, news coverage, activist publications, film and audio recordings, and pretty much anything else fun I can get in there.
Students are assigned to explore the censorship of some “thing.” I won’t talk much about these projects on here due to privacy policies and the like, but when I’ve done a spin on similar topics in the past I’ve gotten all kinds of things from looking at Dungeons and Dragons to Deep Throat to the targeting of YA novels. Already students are pitching fun ideas that I hadn’t even considered.
So what did we do with the first week? As any teacher will tell you, the first day is always weird because no one is really prepared to do anything too deep or strenuous. So I just assigned a few short readings covering similar pro-censorship arguments but offered decades apart from each other: Anthony Comstock’s preface to his attack on evil literature for youth, an educator in 1966 defending censorship as a duty in education, and Bob Dole complaining about TV and film in the 1990s. We spent the day riffing on word association around censorship and what the term connected to in their thoughts about the world. Then we drew upon these readings for some fun starting tropes of censorship. Students immediately gravitated to Comstock’s declaration that obscenity was akin to smallpox; both were treated in his mind as a communicable disease that if left unchecked would spread and corrupt human society. Where smallpox targeted health and the body, obscenity targeted the moral wellbeing of individuals and society as a whole. This is exactly why I like teaching this stuff. I’ve become inured to such arguments because I see them all the time. They don’t even make an impression on me anymore but hearing students react to it reminds me how foreign these arguments are to most people.
So the first week is done and so far it has been a fun seminar to teach. Next week we get into 1920s/30s era censorship of books and written material for daring to talk about sex, even in clinical terms.
