The College Fix

‘The concern here … is the university-funded imposition of something potentially harmful and addictive by faculty onto students’

Princeton University will host a course this spring on “Black + Queer” bondage and sado-maschochism, drawing concern from some students who argue the class is a thinly veiled attempt to celebrate and venerate the BDSM culture.

The Ivy League course, “Black + Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture,” explores “Black Queer BDSM communities,” according to the course catalog description.

“Black Queer BDSM material culture resists contextualization in relationship to biographical narratives because of the underground elements of the community,” according to an alternate description on the Princeton Lewis Center for the Arts website, which added it will have “a significant research focus on finding and presenting new materials.”

The reading list includes “Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism” by Amber Jamilla Musser, “The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography” by Ariane Cruz, “The Black Body In Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography,” by Jennifer Nash, and “A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography” by Mireille Miller-Young.

Miller-Young is an associate professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara whose area of focus is black studies, pornography and sex-work. She got in a physical altercation with a pro-life teenager in campus in 2014 after she was “triggered” by pro-life demonstrators’ signs. She was sentenced to to community service, anger-management classes, and $493 in restitution to the teen she assaulted, The College Fix reported at the time.

Princeton’s “Black + Queer” class is cross-listed with the Program in Visual Arts, the African American Studies department, and the Gender and Sexuality Studies department. Tiona McClodden, a 2021-23 Arts Fellow with Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts, is listed as its instructor.

McClodden is a “filmmaker and visual artist” whose work “explores shared ideas, values, and beliefs within the African Diaspora,” which she refers to as the “Black mentifact,” according to her website. McClodden is interested in “Blackness and traversing nostalgia” and explores the themes of “narrative within social realism, re-memory” and “biomythography,” it added.

“Tell me there is a lesbian forever…,” “The Dom Drop,” and “The Hitter” are among McClodden’s previous works.

The College Fix asked McClodden for a copy of the syllabus but has not received a response. 

Students express shock at Princeton-sponsored exposure to ‘highly addictive’ pornographic content, violent imagery

Some Princeton undergraduate students expressed concern about a course containing what they consider pornographic content and sexual violence.

“The primary issue I take with this course is its employment of pornography,” Princeton junior Paul Fletcher wrote to The Fix.

Fletcher is president of the Princeton chapter of the Anscombe Society, an undergraduate organization that promotes traditional views of sex, love and marriage. It “aims to foster an atmosphere where sex is dignified, respectful, and beautiful…and where no one is objectified, instrumentalized, or demeaned,” its website states.

“In the course description, pornographic content is required reading,” Fletcher wrote.

“Pornographic content of this sort is highly addictive, particularly to men and women of college age, often correlating with severe anxiety and depression,” Fletcher said via email. “Students cannot just watch it, ‘study it,’ without consuming it. This is the equivalent of a Princeton course requiring every student to smoke a cigarette each week, and ‘study’ its effects. This course has no place in a university that prioritizes the wellbeing of its students.”

“The concern here…is the university-funded imposition of something potentially harmful and addictive by faculty onto students,” Fletcher wrote.

Sophomore Julianna Lee, vice president of Princeton’s Anscombe Society, wrote to The Fix she is “shocked that such a course is being taught at Princeton. Cultural discourse and understanding are good things, but there is no need to do it in such a way that students are exposed to content that has been scientifically proven to be harmful.”

“Plenty of people would be vehemently opposed to the idea of glorifying domestic abuse or gun violence, so why is it okay to have a class dedicated to concepts that promote unsafe sexual practices?” Lee said via email.

Lee noted she has never seen the university offer a course dedicated to traditional understandings of sexuality.

“I have not yet seen a single course here dedicated to exploring what it means to love in such a way that minimizes damage, including a clear dating timeline and how to truly will the good of another,” Lee wrote to The Fix.

MORE: Harvard hosts ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ BDSM tutorial, ‘Orgies 101′

MORE: Cal Poly investigates alleged vandalism against pro-life display

IMAGE: Duke University Press

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