Princeton to offer classes on erotic dance, sex work, and ‘queer spaces’

Princeton University’s Gender and Sexuality Studies (GSS) program will offer classes on topics like “sex work” and “queer spaces” during its upcoming spring semester, incorporating topics like “erotic dance,” “pornography” and more, according to the university’s online course listing.

The Ivy League institution will offer five total courses that contain the word “queer” in their course descriptions, according to a Campus Reform report published Tuesday, including “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 university’s course dedicated to sex work appears to focus on the stigmatization and controversies surrounding the topic as well as power dynamics and societal expectations.

“Why does sex work raise some of the most fascinating, controversial and often taboo questions of our time? The course explores the intricate lives and intimate narratives of sex workers 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,” the course description reads in part.

The program’s “queer spaces” course similarly analyzes institutional and historical power dynamics through the lenses of gender-related theories. 

The course description poses questions like “How do sources determine the histories we can tell about architecture, urban space, and the agents that enliven it?

“How do we reconcile seeming absences and actual acts of erasure that stare back at us from the archive? 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?” and “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?”

Reading lists of materials that will be incorporated into coursework were included on the webpage containing information for each class.

Other universities across the U.S. have similarly offered courses related to queer studies.

The University of Chicago, for example, posed the question “is God queer?” while previewing a “Queering God” course last year.

Texas Christian University also offered a “Queer Art of Drag” course that asked students to create a “drag persona” last year.