Princeton University offers courses on how to navigate the world of prostitution and ‘erotic dance’

At Princeton students can take five courses that are focused on “queer,” 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 on sex work is not so much a guided how-to about getting involved in prostitution as it is a discussion about how those who practice world’s oldest profession and its attendants have been sidelined and ostracized by a hypocritical society.

“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,” reads a section of the course description.

When taking the “queer spaces” course, students are asked to question why hetrosexuals, who comprise from 90 to 98 percent of the population, continue to dominate politics and policy. The course challenges students to ask, “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?”