Have you ever ached to combine building blueprints with the sense that you and your sex are egregiously at odds? This can be done -- if you're able to afford an Ivy League education.

The Princeton University School of Architecture is enlightening Spring 2025 students on how alternative lifestyle elements intersect with structural style. Specifically, the college is deconstructing cisgender architectural analysis. Gone are heteronormative oppression and patriarchal norms; these days, delving into design means drafting dimensions of diversity. Hence, the school is serving up ARC 317: Queer Spaces in the World.

Via the official course description, New Jersey's elite institution offers an ode to perplexing pluralizing. Move over, singular "history" and "discourse" and "absence;" the more, the merrier: 

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? 

Transgenderism can ostensibly assist -- with answering questions perhaps as old as indoor dwelling...

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? 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?

It's a mouthful of marginalization. Thankfully, attendees will have over four months to right architecture's written wrongs. A progressive reading list will aid them, and transgender creeks are part of the panoply:

• "Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others," Sara Ahmed
• "How Gender Structures the Prison System," Angela Davis
• "Transgender Creeks and the Three Figures of Power in Late Liberalism," Elizabeth Povinelli
• "A Queer Girl's Ode to the Piraguero," Denice Frohman

America's future architects are in experienced hands; the class is being helmed by S.E. Eisterer.

Courtesy of Aggregate.org:

S.E. Eisterer is a queer architectural historian and Assistant Professor in History and Theory of Architecture... She was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was also a member of the Executive Board for the program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.

Intersectionality abounds...

Her scholarly work centers on modern architecture and urban culture, with a focus on spatial histories of dissidence and resistance, intersectional feminism, queer theory, and gender studies, as well as environmental history and labor theory.

RELATED: The Resistance Attempts a Coup at USAID and It Doesn't Go Well

Not long ago, arenas of study -- and realms of getting things done -- were more or less focused squarely on the distinctive subjects at hand. However, a new age has been ushered in. Sectors now serve in a rotating backdrop of sorts; at the fore sits a single social ideology. Wokeness is the tie that binds:

A Whistleblower Shares a Racial Justice Lesson From Coca-Cola: 'Try to Be Less White' 

Breastfeeding Academy Bails on 'Breasts'

Professor Uncovers the White Supremacy of Organized Pantries

George Floyd Gets His Own Exhibit -- at a Holocaust Museum

Christian Church Leads Prayer to the 'God of Pronouns,' the 'Great They/Them' Who Breastfeeds

First-World Problem: Scholars Insist We Need More Gay People Studying Fish

Back to Princeton, the college's commitment to inclusive architecture extends beyond its convention-challenging course. During Fall 2024, it promoted a sock-it-to-straightism seminar.

From the online advertisement:

The Queer Space Working Group (QSWG) is thrilled to announce our upcoming workshop, “Queer(y)ing Architectures of Home and Diaspora"...

We will explore homemaking as a means of queer liberation across global diasporic communities. Throughout the four days, we will unpack the architecture of diasporic homes as material and social experiments, examining how various forms of contemporary marginalization — like ethnicity, race, migration, and gender — shape spatial politics. Through roundtable discussions, symposiums, performances, and archiving workshops, amongst others, participants will collaborate to investigate how queer perspectives can redefine our understanding of home and community.

Among its members, the Queer Space Working Group Network counts S.E. Eisterer. As for her current course's "trans*" theory, Wikipedia attempts an explanation of the term:

The word "trans*" [refers] to a deliberately undefined cluster of loosely-related identities and experiences that do not conform to traditional ideas about gender. People who consider themselves trans* may also identify as genderfluid, agender, transgender, transsexual. ... Trans*, as [settler colonialism scholar Alan Pelaez Lopez] describes, recenters gender expansive people to allow them to express their experience while remaining detached from hegemonic epistemologies of evidence.

Depending upon your mastery of discernment, you can understand how all the above would readily relate to architecture. 

Given the clear connection -- and the need for Queer Spaces in the World -- a cluster of questions come to mind: As more genderfluid and transsexual architects emerge, will you "clock" trans* structures? Or might they simply impress you as cisgender erections? And how might trans* analysis of buildings designed pre-gender ideology add dimension? Find answers in the future; for a progressive preview, pay $1,900+ per credit hour at Princeton University.

-ALEX

See more content from me:

Tackle the Trauma of Valentine's Day: University Celebrates Students Repulsed by Romance

Be Yourself: Medical School Hosts Workshop to Help Trans Folx Stop Talking Wrong

Freedom Feels Different in a Red State: Alabama Launches Ammo Vending Machines

Find all my RedState work here.

Thank you for reading! Please sound off in the Comments section below.