This chapter addresses the large gap in information about asexual identities, examines potential prevalence rates of asexual individuals interacting with community colleges, and equips practitioners with tools for integrating asexuality into their current LGBTQIA+ initiatives.
In the first chapter of this volume, Brisolara writes that "the prevailing social norms in many rural and rural-serving areas present barriers to explorations of intersectionality and how multiple identities, some privileged, some not, interact and shape the experiences and opportunities of individuals living in these areas." We can extrapolate Brisolara' s claim and use it as a mechanism for seeing and addressing the disconnect between popular understandings of LGBTQIA+ communities, most visible in media like television shows, and LGBTQIA+ students' lived realities. Approached without full consideration of students' intersecting identities renders the students and their lived realities invisible. Indeed, what we see as unique about the work that many of the authors are doing right now with LGBTQIA+ students in community colleges, and a goal of this volume, is the opportunity to constructively reframe many assumptions, including what it means to be a LGBTQIA+ community college student in a wide range of spaces and places throughout the United States.While we believe that the articles in this collection do many things well, they also make visible the need for further research. For example, it is significant that none of our chapters address intersex identities in any substantive way. We also see a pattern of compartmentalization in broader society that tends to simplify assumptions about types of people in particular places-for example, dominant cultural narratives insist that white people live in the country and suburbs while brown people live in the city;LGBTQIA+ people may be born in rural spaces, but they quickly migrate to urban spaces as adults.The chapters in this volume take important steps toward bringing to the fore key issues that have not been considered in scholarship on LGBTQIA+ issues in higher education and community colleges, and yet there is so much more work to be done. We hope that this is just the beginning of the conversation.
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