Global Arc

This course explores the intellectual history of the intersections of race and sexual violence. We analyze the evolution of legal frameworks about sexual violence in different jurisdictions, while also exploring the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in the history of sexual violence in the Atlantic slave trade and contemporary carceral systems. Students will examine case studies of sexual violence against trans youth of color and the racialization of intimate partner sexual violence, genocidal rape, post-catastrophe sexual violence, and sex trafficking, including forced marriage and child sexual exploitation.

This course explores the intellectual history of media, sex, and the racialized body. We will analyze the representation of the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in film, advertisements, the fashion industry, reality TV, animation, and music videos. This course will closely examine the predominance of white heteronormativity in media, the representation of gender in K-pop and K-dramas, the media conceptualization of the "intimacy of the Arab woman," and the sexualization of blackness and Latinx bodies in blaxploitation films and telenovelas.

Human reproduction is often taken for granted as a merely biological phenomenon, yet reproduction is laden with cultural meaning and import for individuals and for society as a whole. Despite its significance, reproduction is rarely addressed in the Princeton curriculum. This new lecture course explores human reproduction from a sociological perspective. It also seeks to introduce students to some of the basic modes of thinking in both sociology and gender and sexuality studies.

This course explores the intellectual history of the racialization of beauty. We will begin by analyzing how the history of Atlantic slavery and scientific racism set precedents for the contemporary dominant conceptualization of beauty in the body, art, and nature. Students will then concentrate on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in beauty pageants, advertising, and the plastic surgery industry. This course will also closely examine racialized fat phobia, the racial politics of hair, transnational colorism, and racialized exploitation in beauty service work.

This course explores the recent history of ideas about contemporary unfreedom, focusing on the influence of discourses about race, gender, and sexuality. We will study how scientific racism, structural violence, and climate change fuel contemporary slavery. Students will analyze how the silencing of the pervasiveness of contemporary slavery is tied to the narrative of "abolition" and the globalization of economic dynamics based on the exploitation of predominantly people of color. This course will also examine the racialization of child exploitation, survivor criminalization, and representation of unfreedom in the annual U.S. TIP Report.

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. 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.

This seminar examines how gender and sexuality shape processes of migration. It mainly focuses on the experiences of women. It addresses the constitution of gender and sexuality in the process of migration, analyzes the ways that society disciplines migrants via the control of their gender and sexuality, examines how race factors in these processes, and lastly identifies the ways that migrants utilize gender and sexuality to negotiate the various structural inequalities they confront in the process of migration. This course situates our discussion of gender and sexuality in the state, labor market, and family.

This seminar is an in-depth exploration of Michel Foucault's work as not only theorist of power, but as theorist of knowledge as well. To this end, we will engage in close readings of selections of Foucault's work from his Archeological and his Genealogical Periods, as well as from his lecture series at the Collége de France. In the course of this survey, we will explore Foucault's account of the historical emergence of biopower as a unique form of power over "life, itself," as well as his critical explorations of the "human sciences," such as human biology, the science of sexuality, and psychiatry, along with other social sciences.

Advanced seminar; focus changes from year to year. In general the seminar uses contemporary and classic works of feminist theory to examine ideas about gender that have shaped modern culture. Topics have included feminism and liberalism, literature and ideology, and psychoanalysis and feminism.

Feminist Futures explores the way in which recent women writers have transformed science fiction into speculative fiction - an innovative literary form capable of introducing and exploring new kinds of feminist and multi-cultural perspectives. These books confront the limitations imposed on women and imagine transformative possibilities for thinking about gender roles and relationships, the body, forms of power, and political and social structures.