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FORWARD

I dont feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in
life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.
-

Foucault, 1988, p. 9

Two experiences have inspired this work and pushed me forward, even when it seemed
impossible to complete everything in the allotted time. The first occurred my freshmen year of
undergraduate coursework at Loyola University Chicago. I was in an introductory class to
modern philosophy. In this course, which I remember most of my classmates hating, I came into
contact with Michel Foucaults History of Sexuality for the first time. As a timid, recently out,
young, queer man - the unabashed confidence with which Foucault attacked such entrenched
ideas as morality, sexuality, and resistance shocked me. Somehow within the convoluted
language of this text, I found a voice that paralleled my own experiences of being medicalized,
shamed, and othered for desires and thoughts that felt central to my being. At the same time,
Foucault confirmed my fear and rising suspicion that recreating oneself in the likeness of a new
gay ideal was not a way out of the labyrinth of societal expectations, but rather another game
within it. Ever since this class, continuing to grapple with Foucaults work has given me the
confidence and wisdom to move forward with the project of shaping myself into the person I
desire to be.
The second experience started several years later when I boarded my first intercontinental
flight to live and study in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Having spent the previous semesters, both
inside and outside the classroom, exploring as many of my social identities as possible, I felt it
was time to test what I knew about myself. I naively thought that traveling to the non-White,
developing world would give me new perspectives on what it is like to be othered due to
appearance or cultural beliefs. What I instead found through my travels in post-colonial, South-

East Asia was the global ubiquity of White-Western-male privilege. Rather than being looked at
with suspicion or hatred, everywhere I went I was treated as an honored guest due to my gender,
light skin color, nationality, and relative wealth. Like Talya Zemach-Bersin (2008), I returned
home frustrated with my own ignorance of the socio-historic webs of power that had kept me
always slightly removed from my local roommate Nghim and his family. My time abroad was
not only a lesson in Vietnamese culture, language, and history, but also in the inherent limitations
of what I can and should have access to given my physical, socio-cultural, economic, and
epistemological position. My international experiences gave me tangible examples of what bell
hooks (2006) has so astutely named White-supremeacist-capitalist-patriarchy, the inescapable
and fiercely interconnected global structures of privilege and oppression that define our lives.
These twin experiences were formative steps towards developing both a systemic
understanding of the world, what Foucault (2007) called savoir, and the confidence to confront
these systems as they manifested in my own life. Utilizing Foucauldian ideas in an analysis of
study abroad may strike some as an odd choice. Foucault never explicitly talked about travel or
multiculturalism and he rarely touched upon topics of formal education in his formal research.
Yet, as James Miller (1994) describes in his autobiography of the French philosopher, Foucault
was obsessed with the idea of experience, how it shapes the subject and opens up new
epistemological possibilities. All of Foucaults work, whether it was on madness or Greek
stoicism, was drawn out of personal experience and a desire to better understand how individuals
fit into larger societal projects. I have approached study abroad in a similar matter, as an
experience that has transformative potential and serious implications for how contemporary
students are shaped through formal education.

Study abroad, at its best, can be seen as an opportunity to ask how one fits into the
historical patterns of our parents and into the rapidly approaching future world. Unfortunately, it
is increasingly described through neoliberal and consumerist vocabularies of skills,
competencies, and capital at the detriment to this more philosophical and spiritual quest.
Simultaneously, few in positions of power are asking questions about the ethical implications
U.S. academes project to globalize its students and our duties as visitors to the communities and
individuals we objectify in pursuit of this goal. In invoking concepts such as power, discourse,
and governmentality, I plan to do two things. First, I continue Foucaults project of examining
how Western contemporary subjects came to be. Secondly, I add my voice to those who are
resisting neoliberal and colonialist forms of international education in calling for more
responsible and theoretically grounded practice.
I believe, because of what I have studied over the past two years and what I have lived
over the past six, that study abroad can be an experience as deeply personal and revelatory as
coming to understand ones sexuality, religious beliefs, or ethnic heritage. The problem is that we
have neither the language to capture this intimacy, nor the knowledge of how to prepare students
for such a powerful process. This is my small contribution towards new understandings of both
language and knowledge, written in the hope that more students walk away from their years of
collegiate study with deeper understandings of themselves, others, and the systems that
collectively bind us together and tear us apart.

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