Purdue Offers LGBT Themed Study Abroad Program

Purdue Offers LGBT Themed Study Abroad Program

Are schools going to start catering to all identity groups now? Will there be specialized study abroad programs for every group?

Campus Reform reports:

Purdue offers wacky LGBTQ study abroad to Paris, Berlin

Purdue University now offers an LGBTQ-themed study abroad program called “sex, history, and the cities.”

The program will take participants to New York City, Berlin, and Paris, where they will explore “LGBTQ history and culture from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries.”

“Taking a comparative approach, we examine the changing meanings of same-sex sexual desire, acts, and identities,” a description for the course elaborates, noting that students will “uncover and recover how people formed communities around shared sexual and gender identities,” while examining “how those communities developed and survived, often in the face of devastating, often violent, social, legal, and economic oppressions.”

The program, open to students of all majors, will be condensed into six weeks as opposed to the normal 16-week semester length, but nonetheless awards students six credits towards their degrees, which, according to the school’s credit hour guidelines, is at least double what a typical course would provide.

In previous years, students have participated in variety of LGBTQ activities. In Paris, they went sightseeing in the Montmartre neighborhood—which, according to the program’s blog, “was filled with sex shops, strip clubs, lingerie stores, [and] porn shops…”

While in New York City, they visited the Museum of Sex, where they viewed exhibits such as “FunLand: Pleasures & Perils of the Erotic Playground,” a carnival-themed room where they were encouraged to “contemplate the sexual subtext of carnivals,” as well as an attraction that one student simply refers to as a “bouncy castle of breasts.”

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