Top US university offers courses on sex work and queer studies

Princeton’s new spring semester program also includes erotic dance and pornography

Princeton University, one of the most prestigious institutions in the US, is introducing courses on traditionally taboo subjects as part of its spring 2025 semester curriculum, according to its recently published online course listing.

The offerings, part of the school’s gender and sexuality studies program, will cover topics such as queer theory, prostitution, pornography, sex tourism, and architectural histories viewed through feminist and LGBTQ+ perspectives.

The department will offer a total of five classes that include the word ‘queer’ in the course descriptions. A course on ‘Queer Spaces in the World’ will delve into the history of “groups and institutions that have actively resisted dominant regimes of power,” and analyze institutional and historical power dynamics through gender-related theories.

A course called ‘Love: Anthropological Explorations’ is said to explore links between love and technology, gender, race, law, capitalism, colonialism, and religion. The university’s course on prostitution, ‘Power, Profit and Pleasure: Sex Workers and Sex Work’, is pitched as a discussion about sex workers and their clients, and will cover stigmatization and controversies regarding the topic, as well as race, class, and queer dynamics.

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Attending Princeton comes with a significant financial commitment. For the 2024-2025 academic year, tuition is set at $59,710, with the total cost of attendance, including room, board, and fees, exceeding $80,000.

Princeton has not yet commented on its new course offerings. However, it is not the first US university to offer classes exploring LGBTQ+ issues.

Stanford University in California, for instance, announced last week a course called ‘Queer Electronic Music Composition’, which will focus on LGBTQ+ contributions to electronic music and creative projects. The University of Chicago’s 2023-2024 program included a religious studies course called ‘Queering God’, which was promoted as applying LGBTQ+ ideology to different religions. Texas Christian University offered a ‘Queer Art of Drag’ class last year that required students to create a “drag persona” and “engage queer theories in relation to performance practice.”

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Russia has taken a different position on the issue for over a decade, adopting a number of laws restricting LGBTQ+ propaganda to minors in 2013 and broadening the ban to include adults in 2022. That year, Russia outlawed the “international LGBT public movement,” with the Supreme Court labeling it an extremist organization.