On Saturday, February 15, 2025, at 9 pm, 30 students gathered in Princeton’s Coffee Club to celebrate the launch of PRISMS, Princeton’s first undergraduate journal of Gender and Sexuality Studies (GSS). With the café still covered in Valentine’s Day decorations, authors, editors, and other members involved with the publication discussed their work. Partnering with PRISMS, Coffee Club served free drinks and treats throughout the night, with R&B music playing in the background.

Four scholarly articles were published in Volume 1, Issue 1, Winter 2025, of PRISMS: “Fantasies and the Flesh: Decadence toward Transsexuality,” written by Laurence Drayton ‘26; “Harpoons and Petticoats: Female Empowerment in the Tide of Nantucket’s Whaling Economy,” by Nora Goodman ‘25; “Policing Pleasure: Prevailing Feminist Tensions with Neoliberal Governance and Power as Diffused in the Sexual Gig Economy,” by Eve Taylor Iulo; and “Beyond ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’: Navigating Parental Titles of Trans Parents in Documentary Film” by Selena Xiang ‘27. With the exception of Iulo, a junior at Cornell University, the other three authors—and all members of the editorial board—are current Princeton undergraduate students.

Members of the editorial board emailed various institutions and spent a month soliciting submissions. While only four articles were published in this issue, 25 articles were submitted to the publication, PRISMS editor-in-chief Anika Asthana ‘25 told the Nass. “It was interesting for me to see that something that I just literally made up had a 16 percent acceptance rate,” Asthana said. Undergraduate students, master’s students, Ph. D. students, a Rhodes Scholar, and an assistant professor submitted to the journal, with authors coming from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. However, for Asthana, the abundance of submissions highlighted a disheartening reality of the gender and sexuality field. “There just aren’t that many spaces to engage with this field,” Asthana explained. 

In fact, Asthana was inspired to create PRISMS because of the lack of availability in undergraduate spaces to publish gender and sexuality research. “It was pretty difficult to find many undergrad journals that focus specifically on this discipline,” Asthana said.

PRISMS managing editor Aidan Iacobucci ‘25, explained that the primary criteria for this journal was to examine gender and sexuality studies across different disciplines: “We’re not just a history journal, we’re not just a comparative literature journal, we’re not just a journal that studies neuroscience, but we accept all.”

Editors of PRISMS underwent a rigorous selection process in choosing the four pieces to publish. “We conducted a double-blind review process, which basically meant that for each submission that we had, two editors would read a piece and they would then rate it with a Google form,” Asthana said. Editors then discussed the submissions they read, and the editorial board narrowed down the pieces to four. The four pieces chosen “showcased the expanse of our submissions and as well as the excellence that the submissions brought,” Iacobucci said. 

In the wake of budget cuts on scholarly research, assaults on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and anti-trans legislation, “The basis of GSS is being attacked every day, and it is up to us to protect and persist in the field,” associate and lead editor, and incoming editor-in-chief, Amy Başkurt ‘26 said.

Başkurt is the Events Editor at the Nass.

Members of PRISMS feel a delegitimization of GSS in both the nation and on campus. Editor, and incoming copy editor, Charlie Yale ‘28, who formerly wrote an op-ed in The Daily Princetonian arguing for the creation of a GSS major at Princeton, as Princeton is the only Ivy-League University to not have GSS as a major, explained that “ Princeton in the past, and to this day, has been reluctant to dive headfirst into studying identity, how who you are as a person affects your interactions with the world.”

Editor Sam Yamashita ’26 described observing a “hierarchy in what’s considered a serious academic discipline” at Princeton and hopes that people beyond those already passionate about GSS start to take the field more seriously. “But I think that’s probably likely a reflection of the nation, what’s considered important, and this erasure of thought and scholarship is genuinely so terrifying that we need to be doing as much as we can to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Yamashita said.

“ Someone’s gender and sexuality identities undergirds everything in the world and it will shape how you experience the world and how you go through the world. It’s not just for these marginalized people. No matter who you are, your gender and your sexuality will affect how you live. Your lived experience is completely filtered always in ways that, that I think are often taken for granted by your identity. And so, it doesn’t matter who you are. Gender and sexuality studies is important to you and relevant to you and impacts your everyday in ways you probably can’t completely appreciate,” Yamashita said.