Netherlands

Global Perspectives on Sex Work – syllabus
(GEND3000 / 3 credits)

This course exposes students to the historical and contemporary debates regarding sex work, while situating and considering these in a global context. Students will examine topics ranging from the history of different forms of prostitution, the past and future of red-light districts (with a special focus on Amsterdam’s red-light district), the formation of mainstream and alternative sex industries, as well as the legal, social, and political frameworks that delimit sex work (and have, in places like The Netherlands, led to its decriminalization), sex-work activism, and the standing and representation of sex workers.

Throughout the course, we will consider sex workers as three-dimensional actors with (bounded) agency who engage in sexual labor (broadly conceived) as a commercial transaction. We will trace, through the lens of the feminist sex wars, the evolving views on sex work and sex workers from those that center coercion and conceive of (paid) sex as being inextricably bound up in exploitative patriarchal and capitalist systems to those that re-center individual (economic) agency, consent, and the lived (and non-uniform) experiences of sex workers.

Modern Human Trafficking – syllabus
(GEND3500 / 3 credits)

This course approaches the closely related practices of human trafficking and modern slavery as case studies for interrogating the relationship and complex interaction between sex, gender, and human rights; race, colonialism, and the global economy; capitalism and labor exploitation; as well as discourses of public health, bodily, and personal integrity, and (state-sanctioned) violence. Taking a capacious view of contemporary human trafficking and its role in maintaining and replicating practices of forced labor, this course will discuss not only the fraught twinning of human trafficking and (some forms of) sex work, but will expand beyond this to analyze, for example, child labor in the Global South and its role in perpetuating “fast” practices of economic consumption in the Global North, smuggling and trafficking as integral practices in sustaining the illegal drug trade, and the trafficking in political asylum seekers and economic migrants in the face of (trans)national migration laws. Students will be exposed to – and asked to consider the relative (de)merits of – a wide array of public and private sector responses, policy proposals, and initiatives that have been developed to stem and counter these and other forms of modern human trafficking.