Princeton to offer classes on 'Sex Work' 'Queer Spaces' during spring semester
Princeton University’s Gender and Sexuality Studies program will offer five courses in spring 2025 focused on themes like queer theory, sex work, and architectural histories through feminist and LGBTQ+ perspectives.
One course, taught by Anne McClintock, will explore global sex work and related social issues such as race, class, and stigma.
Princeton University’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies (GSS) will offer courses on sex work and “Queer Spaces,” among others, during the spring 2025 semester.
In total the department will offer five classes that mention the word “queer” in their course descriptions, according to the university’s website: “Love: Anthropological Explorations,” “Queer Spaces in the World,” “Power, Profit and Pleasure: Sex Workers and Sex Work,” “Disability and the Politics of Life,” and “The Poetics of Memory: Fragility and Liberation.”
The class on sex work seeks to interrogate the “intricate lives” and “intimate narratives” from the “perspective of sex workers themselves, as they engage in myriad varieties of global sex work: pornography, prostitution, erotic dance, escorting, street work, camming, commercial fetishism, and sex tourism.”
“Themes include: the ‘whore stigma,’ race, class and queer dynamics; law, labor and money; technologies of desire and spectacle; dirt, marriage and monogamy; carceral modernity; violence, agency and, above all, strategies for social transformation,” the description continues.
Its reading list includes “Revolting Prostitutes,” “Unequal Desires,” “Porn Work,” “Sex at the Margins,” and “To Live Freely in This World.”
The class on sex work will be taught by Anne McClintock, whose scholarly work is “foundational to gender and sexuality studies, engaging intersectional issues such as race, gender and imperialism,” according to her biography on Princeton’s website.
McClintock’s work also involves “rethinking fetishism,” sex workers and sex work,” and “postcolonialism, imperialism, and critical race studies.” She is currently working on “climate and environmental justice issues,” her biography states.
Previously, McClintock co-edited a book entitled “Queer Transexions of Race, Nation and Gender” and edited another book called “Sex Workers and Sex Work.”
Additionally, the university will offer a class on “Queer Spaces in the World.”
“How can feminist, gender, queer and trans* theory help us chart new avenues for writing critical architectural histories that are attentive to discourses of difference but also narratives of equity?” that class’s course description questions. “Which methods, beyond conventional modes of architectural inquiry, can we employ to uncover histories of groups and institutions that have actively resisted dominant regimes of power and their corresponding systems of knowledge?”
Campus Reform recently reported about a similar class at Stanford on offer next semester, entitled “Queer Electronic Music Composition.”
“Queer Electronic Music Composition is a creative course structured around the historical and theoretical contributions of composers from the LBGQT+ community with an emphasis on computer-based electronic music,” the course description explains.
Campus Reform has contacted Princeton University for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
