Asexuality and Race
By Ananth Shastri, November 2022 (published December 2023)
This list features authors of color discussing asexuality and race in mutual terms. Nonwhite populations have not only been racialized, but also hypersexualized and desexualized by centuries of white colonial rule. For several authors, navigating asexuality as a person of color requires—and generates—new strategies for reading history, socializing with others, and inhabiting one’s body.
Michael Paramo (they/them) is a writer and the creator of the multimedia journal AZE, which centers artists who are asexual, aromantic, and/or agender. In AZE’s February 2018 issue on “Asexuality and Race,” Paramo contributes an essay titled “Examining the Whiteness of the Ace Community.” They write that “‘asexuality,’ as a contemporary identity category, originated within selective and highly white online spaces.” Consequently, “those who do not possess access or awareness of these online spaces, or an internet connection in general, are far less likely to access asexuality.” Paramo urges asexual communities to not only center aces of color, but to do so in “offline spaces” with fewer material restrictions.
Sherronda J. Brown (they/them) is an author and frequent contributor to the Black Youth Project, for whom they wrote the article “Black Folks Don’t Need a Nuclear Family to Be Legitimate.” Brown makes the point that “people’s aphobia—hatred of and discrimination against asexuals and aromantics—is often revealing of other bigotry and bullshit.” In this case, the shame directed at Black womxn who refuse to “marry, procreate, and ‘build’ with a Black man” reveals a deep attachment to the nuclear family structure, “a relic of white capitalism and cisheteropatriarchy.” Brown encourages us to instead draw inspiration from the “multi-generational, interconnected, and extended ‘non-traditional’ families and households in Black cultures across the globe.”
Daniel Yo-Ling (he/they) is an editor at New Bloom Magazine, which publishes “radical perspectives on Taiwan and the Asia Pacific.” In their essay “Racial Castration and Demiboy Joy,” Yo-Ling applies psychoanalytic theory to questions of Asian American masculinity, asexuality, and aromanticism. He names the strategies of “rephallicization,” or “virile [Asian] heteromasculinity,” as well as “bottomhood,” which centers “the capacious desire of Asian-as-anus.” But, Yo-Ling asks, “Is there a way to reconfigure race, gender, and sexuality for Asian people assigned male at birth without presuming allonormativity?” In the midst of a daydream about a bird taking their genitals, Yo-Ling writes, “I told the hand of history to keep my detachable Asian phallus. This way, I have more room in my pockets for other joyous things . . .”
This study by Aasha B. Foster et al., “Personal Agency Disavowed: Identity Construction in Asexual Women of Color,” investigates “intersections of gender, race, and asexuality” (127). The authors analyze interviews with aces of color through Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR) methodology, in which researchers “achieve consensus” and employ an external auditor “to limit the influence of individual bias” (129). The authors find that participants often struggle to “conceptualize a positive asexual identity” and do not feel affirmed at the intersection of queerness, asexuality, and race (134). As a result, when faced with “rejection from one group,” participants seek “refuge in other identity-based communities”—deploying a strategy of “compartmentalizing or privileging different identities” at different times (134).
Ianna Hawkins Owen (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of English and African American and Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University. In “Still, Nothing: Mammy and Black Asexual Possibility,” Owen uses a “critical asexual reading practice—one that is open to traumatic affiliations.” Through close analysis of the figure of the Mammy and the character Mama from Corregidora, he traces the “declarative, but not confessional” practice of “black asexual silence” (81). Beyond being “unable to testify,” the figure of Mammy may use silence to “keep something for herself, offstage” (81). Earlier in the essay, Owen notes the “fissures in ‘asexuality’ as an agentive category of self-identification for bodies whose humanity is not a given” (72), offering another entrance to post- or dehumanist works such as Eunjung Kim’s essay “Unbecoming Human.” (Disclaimer: I currently work as Prof. Owen’s research assistant.)
The essays by Paramo and Brown, with their respective critiques of online spaces and the nuclear family, demonstrate that conventional sites and structures of belonging may not meet ace of color needs. The behavior described by Foster et al.—migration between several “identity-based communities”—positions aces of color as an intermediary group for whom those more-established communities must adapt. Meanwhile, Yo-Ling and Owen create pockets of space within busy discourses. Owen centers the silences of the overwritten Mammy figure; Yo-Ling withholds their own genitals from conversations on Asian American masculinity and sexuality. This push for ‘breathing room’ is a shared response to colonial processes that racialize, hypersexualize, and desexualize.
