Kaiser’s Class All About Sex

Red dominates his office. Red plush carpet, red pillows, red picture frame.

“Red stimulates the appetite,” says English Professor Matthew B. Kaiser.

But Kaiser’s not the only one with a large appetite. His Literature and Sexuality class has upperclassmen hungering to join. And after only its second year in the course catalog, English 154: Literature and Sexuality has drawn nearly 500 students this semester—a number normally associated with mandatory introductory classes like Social Analysis 10.

Students say they flock to the class, which is billed as a survey of 300 years of an “uneasy alliance between—and intertwining histories of—literature and sexuality,” for its distinctive curriculum, Kaiser’s charismatic lecturing style, and to fulfill a Core requirement.

But behind Kaiser’s subject matter lies a personal history of witnessing oppression that has led him to study Victorian literature as works that were written in a time of deep political upheaval.

“Sexuality is such a central organizing logic of human subjectivity in the modern era, that you need to know about it to make sense of oneself,” Kaiser says. “There’s a lot of violence and injustice perpetuated in the US because of sexuality.”

SEXUALITY

Kaiser began his path to English 154 as a student at the University of Oregon, where he observed homophobic acts against local gay teenagers and young adults.

At the time, the future faculty member says he was uninterested in academic work. He added that the University of Oregon was the only college to which he applied, in large part because of its one-page application. Fighting against homophobic activity became a focus during his freshman year.

That year, voters in Oregon debated Measure 9, which categorized homosexuality as “abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse” and would have amended the state constitution to provide legal protection for homophobic actions. The measure was eventually defeated by a margin of 13 percent, and the debate prompted violent homophobic acts of violence and harassment against gay youth.

“Young gay kids were being killed by skinheads,” Kaiser recalls. “Coming from San Francisco, I was startled by the violence of it and the vulnerability of, especially, gay kids in that environment.”

In protest, Kaiser says he joined the countrywide “queer nation”—a queer rights movement that grew in the early and mid 90s—to counter the violent acts, even taking it upon himself to surreptitiously spray paint “a queer was bashed here” wherever he heard of a homophobic act had taken place.

“I had a stencil cut out of from the bottom of the box,” Kaiser says. “And when no one was looking, I would set it down on the ground and take a can of spray paint and spray it inside the box. It just looked like I was fiddling around in the box.”

As his social activism continued, Kaiser says he began questioning

the reasons underlying the violence against which he was protesting.

LITERATURE

Hoping to make sense of his experience, Kaiser says he made a “productive and life-transforming connection” in the second half of his sophomore year to pursue academia in order to provide a theory behind both that violence and his attempts to stop it.

Kaiser says this love developed when he declared his major in English, the discipline in which he found answers in Victorian literature.

“Victorian literature is concerned with suffering and violence of social interest,” Kaiser says. “It provided a terrific laboratory in which to theorize the nature of violence.”

After graduation, Kaiser matriculated at Rutgers University, where he pursued a doctorate in English.

“He was always a brilliant graduate student,” says Rutgers Professor of English Carolyn Williams, who was on Kaiser’s dissertation committee.

Williams in particular praised the originality of Kaiser’s work on the “ludicrous,” which sought to discover what was funny, playful, absurd, or irrational in the highly serious Victorian period.

While at Rutgers, Kaiser taught three classes that served both as early versions of English 154 and as part of the expansion of the Rutgers’ Women’s Studies Department into gender studies. He says he hoped the course would make gender studies “palatable” to undergraduates.

Many students, according to Williams, say that Kaiser’s class on “Theory of Gender and Sexuality” at Rutgers was the best they took during their time there.

“I would recommend this course to anyone and everyone. I think it should be required,” one student wrote in his evaluation.

“The world is a different place to me now,” wrote another.

His class, which also included middle-aged students, taught Kaiser to treat his students like adults—a strategy he later brought to English 154.

THE ‘AND’

Most of the texts that Kaiser incorporates in Literature and Sexuality seem “vulgar for the sake of being vulgar,” he says.

“But beneath what seems crude is actually quite philosophically profound,” he added.

The course also attempts to uncover the deeper meaning of these texts, many of which are actually powerful reflections of the norms of societies, Kaiser says.

The Story of the Eye, in particular, was “pretty brutal and pornographic,” Matthew Rienzo ’11 says.

Not all of Kaiser’s students shared that sentiment. Kelly Bodwin ’11 questioned whether the novel was over-pornographasized.

“I don’t think the sex in the book was important to the meaning or the plot. It was just pornographic,” Bodwin says.

“I think it’s important to introduce students to erotica and pornographic texts, especially because we live in such a ‘pornographisized’ society,” Kaiser says. “If I talk about sex only using high-brow discourse, I would be doing the students a disservice.”

Rienzo says that Kaiser’s lectures are particularly engaging because of his ability to find the meaning in the graphic novels that the students read and because of his knack of presenting his thoughts accessibly.

“When I went into the class, I saw the graphic videos and texts as just titillating,” Iris Lee ’12 says. “It was novel. But later in the class, Professor Kaiser explains how sexuality was taking sex too seriously.”

Sex, Kaiser explains, is merely a “biological act.”

On the other hand, “sexuality is the cultural weight and meaning that is placed upon that act,” Kaiser says.

This difference, according to Head Teaching Fellow R.J. Jenkins, informs the curriculum of the class.

“The course is structured in such a way that you basically have novels that are pro-sexuality and novels that are anti-sexuality, and they are presented in that way,” Jenkins says. “However, Professor Kaiser states explicitly that he is anti-sexuality.”

“Sexuality as a concept is very detrimental has led to violence, injustice, prejudice,” Jenkins added. “That agenda is masked as Kaiser talks about pro-sexuality novels.”

Jenkins attributes part of the class’s success with students to its relevance, as “sexuality is such a common topic every day.”

“Sex makes for a great course material. Sex makes for great reading,” Jenkins says. “There’s a running joke in English departments—you’ll double enrollment if you put ‘sex’ in your title.”

—Staff writer Gautam S. Kumar can be reached at gkumar@college.harvard.edu.