Student Contributor Lynn Liu Discusses How She Was Able to Advance Her Academic Interests Abroad

In the fall semester of junior year, I participated in the Women’s and Gender Studies in Europe (WGSE) program provided by Carleton College. The WGSE program was truly fascinating. We traveled to the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic and took feminist and queer theory classes in each of the countries. We also got to visit local NGOs and activists as well as to conduct our independent research projects. My independent project was on the lived experience of migrant sex workers in Europe, and the program provided me with incredible resources and connections for my research to be conducted successfully. 

Since 1984, Women’s and Gender Studies in Europe has offered students a unique opportunity to explore feminist and queer theory in practice across Western and East Central Europe. Interaction with academics, politicians, activists, and homestay hosts in Utrecht, Berlin, Prague, and Krakow encourages comparative approaches to independent research projects.  

One of the principal goals of the program is a comparative exploration of Europe in its heterogeneity. The program’s focus is on bringing the margins to the center. We explore the diversity that is Europe from the perspectives of women and sexual and ethnic/racial minorities. We also learn about the historical and current day experiences of the citizens of Jewish, Afro-German, and Turkish backgrounds in Germany, about the struggles of the Roma women in the Czech Republic and Poland, about the ways in which Islamophobia affects Muslim populations across Europe. These topics are addressed both through scholarly inquiry and situated empirical experience throughout the semester, framed through our discussions of post-colonial, feminist, and queer theories. 

Moving beyond the Western frameworks and attending to the specificity of the program’s East-Central European sites, the WGSE program is uniquely situated to complicate the established story of European feminist and LGBT movements, suggesting broader questions about alternative routes towards women’s and LGBT rights. What does it mean to realize that some goals of the feminist second wave, such as reproductive rights, accessibility to higher education for women, or equal employment opportunities, were argued and achieved in much of the former Eastern bloc as part and parcel of the socialist doctrine? How does the story of LGBT activism unfold in a social context where homosexuality and trans*sexuality have been discussed in a medical/sexuological framework until very recently? These topics are framed through our discussions of post-colonial, feminist and queer theories, and they are explored through students’ self-designed field research. 

Being part of the WGSE program, I got the opportunity to reflect on my sexual, cultural, as well as racial identity. I feel lucky to be in a cohort of Gender Studies students from various institutions and to share our individual experiences of gender and sexuality from a cross-cultural perspective. The semester in Europe has been a life-changing experience for me.