They’re Buying SDSU Sex Journal for the Articles

Fiction International, now in its ninth year at San Diego State University, is no stranger to the cutting edge.

A journal of alternative fiction published by SDSU Press, “FI” has tackled American intervention in Central America, among other topics, and commissioned the work of such writers as Joyce Carol Oates, Edmund White, Robert Coover, William Kennedy, William Burroughs, Edith Wharton and Ernesto Cardenal.

But its latest issue is, in the words of its editors, its most daring and fiercely provocative. Not to mention the most sought-after.

Even before being released, more than 2,000 copies, at $11 apiece, had been requested, with many more orders expected. Duke University Press plans to publish an expanded version of the same issue sometime next year.

The reason for the widespread interest? The 401-page issue, No. 22, is all about sex. And not just sex, but the highly charged debate surrounding the roughest contemporary arguments concerning sex.

Specifically, it deals with censorship and pornography and their increasingly twisted relationship in a culture that seems highly repressive on the one hand while offering best-seller status to Madonna’s book, “Sex,” on the other.

As the editors so eloquently point out, how does one explain the coexistence of “phone sex” and such risque television as “Studs” in the same environment as Phyllis Schlafly and the Rev. Pat Robertson?

Harold Jaffe, co-editor of the quarterly Fiction International, which is available in bookstores, is a professor of English at SDSU and the author or editor of nine books, including four collections of fiction and two novels. Jaffe says the impetus behind the latest issue was merely the times we live in.

Jaffe calls the mood in the country “the most virulent and repressive” since the 1950s. A generally fatal disease, spread largely through sexual contact, is the talk of the country. So-called “family values” are the sudden province of America’s right wing.

“Arguments about abortion and euthanasia have never been more intense,” Jaffe said. “The body itself is suddenly in the center of a lot of politics. A great many young people nationwide are even using their body as a kind of canvas--tattooing, piercing, scarifying and even amputating.”

Special cult magazines, called “fanzines” or “zines’ ” have sprouted up to chronicle the phenomenon. Fiction International decided to do its part, Jaffe said, by contributing essays and fiction to the currently hot topics of pornography, obscenity, “generalized repression” and censorship.

And by examining the trend of “the body as canvas.”

As the editors wrote in the introduction:

“The body is in pain. The collective body is in agony. As much as the isolated inner cities, as much as U.S. foreign policy, as much as institutionalized voodoo economics, it is the flesh and bloody body which is a site of oppression and potential rebellion in the United States.”

“You take a healthy body, female or male, and undress it, and immediately it has pornographic potential; that is, you cannot represent it in movies, on TV, in journals, books . . . . But mutilate this same healthy body in an accident or war, and immediately you can represent it with impunity.

“Why is the representation of the healthy body deemed pornographic and prohibited, but the luridly mutilated body not pornographic and widely available? Who, we ask, is responsible for defining what is pornographic? It occurs that the definition of pornography is itself in question, or should be.”

Ashley Phillips, executive director of Womancare, a feminist health center in San Diego, says that “complicated questions” are at the center of the national debate surrounding censorship and pornography.

“My position for a long time has been that I’m ‘anti’ a good amount of the pornography out there, but I’m also anti-censorship,” Phillips said. “I don’t think the two things are mutually exclusive.

“The question I would pose is, ‘Is it an accident that so many pornographic images are of women being violently abused in some fashion or other--sometimes in the name of sexuality or sexual freedom?’

“It occurs to me that if the images of women on MTV, for instance, were of any other minority group, those images would not be tolerated.”

Phillips alluded to a recent article in which a prominent feminist puzzled over the furor surrounding Ice-T’s controversial song, “Cop Killer,” and wondered why a similar outcry is rarely heard concerning songs that seek to demean women.

“Songs about killing or mutilating women have been prominent in popular culture for the last 20 years,” Phillips said. “Those are the kinds of questions we need to ask ourselves: What kind of people are we to tolerate these violent images against women? We seem intolerant of people speaking out strongly against those images merely as a critique against censorship.”

Such “complicated questions” and the uneasy alliance between the right and a large number of feminists are part of the fabric of the latest issue, and, the editors say, the reason for tackling the subject.

Harry Polkinhorn, the director of SDSU Press and the managing editor of Fiction International, said he welcomed the idea behind the issue largely because it dared to be daring.

“We knew we would be taking some risks, especially at this time,” he said. “It is a very repressive time, but we’re affiliated with an institution where I believe academic freedom still has some meaning. So we just went ahead. We devoted twice as many pages as we normally would.”

Jaffe said the project was funded through the journal’s own budget. He said the editors have received funding in the past from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, “but none for this project.”

Jaffe, co-editor Larry McCaffery (another SDSU professor) and guest editor Mel Freilicher, who teaches at UC San Diego, solicited the work of 70 contributors, many well known and two-thirds of them women.

A question throughout is to what extent pornography has heightened fears of censorship, and how serious is the threat in an era Jaffe calls the most chilling since “the McCarthy scare” of the ‘50s.

Despite the cutting-edge nature of the work and the application of some of the country’s best writers, Polkinhorn calls the end result “mixed. . . . They put in some pieces based less on their literary value that made the cut largely for other reasons. Some pieces were more innovative, some more traditional. But in all cases, the relationship to the reader is quite direct.”

Polkinhorn acknowledged that the likelihood “of getting slapped down is great”--after all, someone is bound to send a copy to archconservative Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.).

“Although we got no funding from the NEA, Helms is the kind of guy who likes to get on his high horse and go after people,” Polkinhorn said.

Polkinhorn defined the intent of the issue, as “highlighting the ongoing significance of the subject of sexual repression as a political phenomenon in our culture. That’s really what joins this together. Pornography and censorship as concepts are linked, and that’s something we as citizens have to confront on some level at some point.”