“Good Luck Babes:” Creating Resistance through Lavender Graduations at Community Colleges

• In Event: Teaching Repression from the Civil Rights Era to the Present: Part 2

Abstract

LGBTQIA+ clubs at community colleges serve as third spaces for students and provide opportunities for “worldmaking” through exploring identity, history, and intersectional experiences that creates community and solidarity. This leads to political practices of queerness through lavender graduations that exceed mere performance. Community colleges foster belonging, inclusion, and empowerment of students through self-actualization beyond the classroom; these lavender celebrations allow LGBTQIA+ students the potential to explore new ways to center joy and destabilize traditional understandings of sexuality and gender as acts of meaningful resistance. As community college educators, we empower everyday students in and out of the classroom as they navigate the liminal space between societal demands and pursuing their dreams. Community college students often lack social and cultural capital when compared to their peers at four year institutions which widens further with the Ivy Leagues. Through testimonios we examine how fugitive learning through queer politics intertwines with cultural empathy, intentionality, and community in both the classroom and community. The methodology highlights how students, typically an object of study and social actors, now reclaim and destabilize societal categories. This allows students to become their own witnesses and participate in radical politics beyond the white supremacist heteronormative lens. The research examines the uniquely similar challenges faced by many academic institutions under political and symbolic violence of the United States government, and cultural norms towards LGBTQIA+ students. Hegemonic misconceptions across regional politics and negotiations of identity experienced in conservative rural Kansas (Allen Community College) and liberal urban New York City (CUNY Kingsborough) contradict lived realities. With queer politics centered in the performance of lavender graduations, we continue to challenge the norms of the cultural imagination with long-term sustainable resistance and collective understanding of community rooted in joy and bonded kinship.

Authors

• Anne Marie Foley, Allen Community College

• Arturo Humberto Enamorado, CUNY Graduate Center