As philosophy teachers, how may we dare consider sexuality with and for high school students? This object, which is absent (banned) from the school curriculum and scarcely reflected upon, is yet a key issue to becoming an adult. May we legitimately transgress this taboo to participate in the construction of a sexuality education? Can intimacy be an object of common focus, be problematized and conceptualized in order to achieve emancipation and to build an ethical and political relationship with this dimension of experience? The philosophical approach to cinema allows a problematizing of affects linked to sexuality in particular. We offer a comprehensive study of this approach via the Kubrick film Spartacus. If the film focuses on social, normative and intellectual emancipation processes, it tackles numerous ambivalences related to sexuality. It questions the interconnections between sexuality and gaze, domination as well as certain norms (homosexuality for example). A shared experience of the sensory is therefore made possible by the teaching of sexuality via fiction as it provides a space for collective thinking. Allowing ourselves to reflect on a subject as structuring as sexuality helps creating a certain form of emotional rationality, an experience that is particularly absent from our teaching.
Keywords
- sexuality
- education
- teaching philosophy
- philosophical approach to cinema
- Spartacus
- emotions
- shared experience of the sensory
- normativity