Entering the Rose Garden: Cruising the University: Queer Wisdom for Resistance

"Entering the Rose Garden" is a guided, speculative, and performative cruising meditation that invites participants to navigate the space while attuning to their desires, attachments, and frictions toward the university. Through live spoken word layered with an immersive soundscape, the performance opens an imaginative rose garden as a site for intimate reflection and collective re-orientation. Participants engage through movement, stillness, or closed-eye immersion, creating an affective atmosphere in which imagination and queer relationality serve as tools for sensing institutional conditions and preparing for the workshop’s subsequent inquiry. The performance is presented as part of MAR’s “Becoming Reoriented” event and draws on the queer wisdom of cruising practices alongside Sara Ahmed’s work on orientation, José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of cruising as speculative method, and the poetics of desire in Jean Genet.