Princeton University will offer a course titled “Black + Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture” in the Spring 2023 semester. The course will study how Black Queer BDSM material culture resists contextualization in relationship to biographical narratives.
“Black + Queer in Leather” will be taught by Tiona Nekkia McClodden, a Princeton Arts Fellow. According to her personal website, McClodden was educated for two years at Clark Atlanta University but was not awarded a degree. Her website states that her work has won numerous awards at the Philadelphia Int’l Gay + Lesbian Film Festival and has been recognized by the Andy Warhol Foundation. McClodden’s work at Princeton is currently supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, David E. Kelley Society of Fellows in the Arts, and the Maurice R. Greenberg Scholarship Fund for “demonstrating extraordinary promise in any area of artistic practice and teaching.”
This class fulfills undergraduate students’ Culture and Difference (CD) graduation requirement. The CD requirement was introduced for the entering Class of 2024 and beyond to learn about “groups who have historically been excluded from dominant cultural narratives or structures of social power.”
A sample reading list for the course includes titles such as A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography and The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography.
Mireille Miller-Young, the author of A Taste for Brown Sugar, was convicted for “grand theft, vandalism, and battery on a 16-year-old girl” in response to feeling “triggered” by a pro-life poster the teenager was holding.
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