I added to the issue an article that had not caused trouble with my board, John Rodden's description of how Isabel Allende turned one genre, the interview, into another, autobiography. A carnival experience ought not scare the customers away right off the bat, and the Rodden piece introduced the process of genre-bending that every other article would further. And I concluded it with a photo essay the board never saw, because I wanted, after all the voices of that issue, to end in silence. Of all the pieces that attempted to honor the knowledge of the body, this was the only one to explore desire. And, last, but by no means least, it was the only one to push the envelope into that other discourse of our time the farthest removed from the language of the academy, pornography.
Pornography is the obsession of our postmodern times.
And what a powerful discourse it is. Just 528 words out of an issue of 108 pages brought us to this event. We've force-fed it to undergraduates and measured the results, we've attacked it as dangerous to women and praised it as analogous to ethnography. We've done just about everything with it but actually quote it. Like medieval scholars ready to argue into the night about how many teeth in a horse's mouth but not to actually check out the horse itself, the porn wars rage in our journals fueled by nothing more accurate than the vaguest descriptions of its content.