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.”
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“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.
