The idea of a play involving but not dealing exclusively with sex, however, is important.  In many HRDC productions, sex is not so much the subject of the work as a tool. “[Sex] is a physical way of embodying and performing love, and I think that’s most often how it’s treated in [‘Cleansed’],” Stone says. “To me, it’s more a play about love than sex.”

Yet this tool also contains the potential for abuse. Though sex is the basis for a number of great plays, as Stone notes, not all works engage with the topic in a substantial manner. For this reason, student directors must take pains to avoid exploitation in shows that involve sex. These concerns are especially important for Katherine L. Price ’14, the director for HRDC’s spring production of “Hair.” Upon its Broadway premiere in 1968, the musical’s use of nudity caused much controversy and is still one of the most salient aspects of “Hair.” “People can use [nudity] to create more of a spectacle,” Price says. “I’m pretty much going to let my cast decide what they’re comfortable with.” Though Price considers the nudity in “Hair” an important part of the play’s ’60s philosophy, she acknowledges that elements such as nudity may be overused. “It’s done a lot at Harvard, which is why I’m tentative about it in ‘Hair,’” Price says. “I think at Harvard we all want to do something different, so oftentimes people want to do the most daring pieces, which typically involve nudity.”

McTaggart agrees that nudity can be overused, noting that full frontal nudity is not the only or the best way to represent sexual intimacy onstage. “Hot Mess” will only feature a brief moment of partial nudity. “It’s not a prudish thing, just a poetic thing,” McTaggart says.

ABSTRACT SEX

McTaggart and Stone’s opinions create the impression that sex’s universality is what makes it such a durable subject. However, Patrick W. Lauppe ’13, fiction editor of The Harvard Advocate and a Crimson arts editor observes that many of the short stories published in The Advocate make use of a distinctive sort of sex. “Lots of our pieces tend to be about incest for some reason,” Lauppe says. “It just comes up a lot.”

Lauppe’s insight may have some depressing implications about the sexual habits of Harvard students. However, Lauppe made it clear that the incest was employed not to evoke familiarity but to challenge accepted norms. “It’s focusing on deviancy as a theme,” Lauppe says. “They’re [ironically using] the classical model of the love story or the love poem by focusing on something that would be recognized as sexual deviancy.”

Lauppe connects this usage of incest in The Advocate to greater trends in both modern and postmodern literature; in these forms, deviant sexuality has been employed as a way to challenge societal norms. Indeed, this method of provocation has even surfaced in artistic projects at Harvard—namely, James’ thesis on pornography. “Pornography is a way of potentially challenging what we’re used to. It can confront someone with the things they’re scared of, and it provokes self-analysis,” James says. This is particularly true for Bataille, a French surrealist and Marxist author, who James considers as one of the main figures in her thesis. Bataille’s erotica is transgressive, exploring the breaking of societal norms in shocking and explicit ways. His writing frequently examined the complex relationship between sex and death, a theme that comes up in one of the short stories James is writing for the creative aspect of her thesis.

This short story, which is modeled on the aesthetics of pornography James observes in Nin and Bataille’s work, is particularly interesting because of how it displays another element of pornographic writing: a distinct attention to subjectivity. In James’ story, this is emphasized by the fact that some of the sexual episodes take place during dreams; the characters’ carnal experiences are the product of their own consciousness.

For English professor Matthew B. Kaiser, who teaches English 154: “Literature and Sexuality,” this subjectivity associated with erotica is practiced by many contemporary authors. “Because modern literature is invested in representing the machinations of modern subjectivity to readers, and because sex is so central to modern subjectivity, it therefore follows that representing sex is at the heart of so much of modern literature,” Kaiser wrote in an email.

For Lauppe, the stylistic implication of this subjectivity is the reason sexually focused writing rarely appears in The Advocate. “There’s a precedent set by post-World War II writers like John Updike to use the sex scene as the place where you really deal with extended subjectivity and put into practice modernist techniques where they elsewhere might be frowned upon. Heavy experimentation and even egotistical stylization can occur,” Lauppe says. “But The Advocate isn’t really looking for modernist projects.”

Lauppe’s emphasis on the stylistic pitfalls of this type of fiction is representative of the larger predicament of sex-based art at Harvard. Similar to the visual art projects that aren’t widely seen due to their lack of dissemination outside of the VES community, sexual artworks fail to gain an audience not because of their actual content, but because of the circumstances surrounding their creation. The fact that art about sex does not attract students by its very nature is intriguing.

SHOWING AND TELLING

That reality of Harvard life—that sex is not enough to guarantee an audience—can be seen in the plight of the now-defunct sex magazine H-Bomb. The magazine, founded in 2004, was already experiencing financial difficulties by the spring of 2005. James, who wrote for the magazine as a freshman, feels that the magazine can only experience a resurgence if it rethinks its approach towards sex.

“H-Bomb needs to envision a future where it’s not a sex magazine that just talks about sex as if no one else is talking about sex,” James says. “We’re in college, and tons of people have sex, and it’s not that big a deal. It’s about talking about sex in a way that matters.”Sexual art, ranging from Stone’s “Cleansed” to Rodriguez’s “SEX, America” to James’ thesis, are committed to engaging with sex in a critical fashion. Yet there is another obstacle to widespread attention on campus—the simple fact that, aside from theatrical productions, the many artistic events on campus receive little attention.

Rodriguez, whose senior thesis lacked a wide audience, might be seen as exemplifying this trend.  At the same time, she does not necessarily consider the show’s attendance a grave failing. Though she remains proud of the show, she does not believe its status as an artistic thesis makes it inherently more attention-worthy than a thesis in any other concentration. “Just because VES students work in a visual medium that is made to be seen doesn’t mean it’s different than anybody else’s homework. Some people might be doing really flamboyant experiments in chemistry,” Rodriguez says.

Indeed, it is not very often that an exceptional problem set answer gains a wide audience. Even so, it’s odd that such provocative and relevant artwork lacks a wider audience. They don’t quite constitute a subculture, but indifference from the student body does keep them underground.

—Staff writer Petey E. Menz can be reached at menz@college.harvard.edu.