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.