Autism and Asexuality
By K. Zimmer, March 2023
Discourse surrounding autism and asexuality has historically perpetuated ableism and aphobia through medically and socially imposed presumptions of mutual inclusivity: maintaining that autistic people are inherently asexual and that, in the absence of a physiological explanation, asexuality stems from mental or neurodevelopmental disabilities like autism. These narratives harm the ASD and ace communities in three crucial ways: first, by misusing asexuality to desexualize autism; second, by using autism to pathologize asexuality; and third, by fomenting division between both communities, who often affirm their identities by distancing themselves from the other. The recommended readings in this post historicize these forms of discursive harm to generate intersectional and mutually affirmative frameworks for discussing and theorizing the relationship between autism and asexuality.
In their article, “Regulating, fostering and preserving: the production of sexual normates through cognitive ableism and cognitive othering,” Linn J Sandberg, Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, and Alisa Grigorovich historicize the scientific community’s misuse of the term “asexual” to desexualize people with “cognitive disabilities,” an umbrella term under which they include autism (1422). Surveying Western scientific research on the sexualities of people with disabilities like autism, the writers reveal how the medical model has desexualized these individuals by constructing them “as either asexual” or in need of sexual “management” through “professional intervention” (1423). Tracing medically imposed assumptions of asexuality or sexual regulation on people with cognitive disabilities to the history of eugenics, the writers demonstrate how cognitive ableism in Western research has harmed both the disabled community by denying them “sexual agency” (1423) and the asexual community by promoting “normative assumptions” regarding “‘healthy’ sexuality” (1426). In response to the medical model, Sandberg, Rosqvist, and Grigorovich endorse “queering and cripping” “research and social policy” (1430) through “cross-disciplinary” (1431) studies of cognitive disabilities and sexuality.
Eunjung Kim’s “Asexualities and Disabilities in Constructing Sexual Normalcy” offers a comprehensive history of how asexuality has been discursively pathologized within the fields of sexology and medicine. Spanning the Victorian era to present-day, Kim’s investigation historicizes how medical discourse yoked asexuality with not only physiological disabilities but also mental disorders. While Kim does not explicitly mention autism, this history nevertheless explains later medical and social discourse which explicitly assumes mutual inclusivity between autism and asexuality. For instance, Kim notes that Victorian sexology connected the absence of “sexual normalcy” with “imbecility,” “idiocy,” and “intellectual disability” (264), all terms which have been used to characterize autism. By archiving significant medical and sociological histories in pathologizing asexuality as a disability, Kim differentiates “assumed asexuality” from an “asexual identity” (274) and contextualizes the “methodological distancing” (273) between the disabled and asexual communities through their “mutual negation” (273). Kim ultimately argues for the need to “crip asexuality” to “forge a productive alliance” against normative “sexuality and able-bodiedness” (274).
In their article “Asexuality and Disability: Strange but Compatible Bedfellows,” Emily Lund and Bayley Johnson analyze and critique the “myth of asexuality” (126) within the disability movement. Citing Kim’s chapter, Lund and Johnson explain how certain discursive strategies within “the disability sexuality movement” distances disabled people from “the asexuality visibility and education movement” (123). By historicizing how asexuality became an “assumption” “forced” (123) upon disabled people, Lund and Johnson contextualize the disability community’s prevalent rejection of asexuality. Critiquing this rejection, Lund and Johnson contend that “the myth of asexuality and disability is just that—a myth” (127). Using Asperger’s as an example, Lund and Johnson reason that, since asexuality is “a legitimate sexual orientation,” “at least some” disabled people are asexual (127), a fact which “does not prove the broader myth of asexuality and disability” (127). Lund and Johnson suggest viewing the “intersection of asexuality and disability through a dual affirming lens” (130), one which acknowledges the systemic desexualization of disability without disavowing asexuality.
In Authoring Autism, Melanie Yergeau also cites Kim’s “historical asexuality narratives” (189) while illustrating the mutual negation between the autistic and asexual communities. Yergeau, who identifies as a “pansexual autistic queer who is sometimes asexual” (143), uses her lived experience as well as online forums to underscore the difficulty in “claiming asexuality” (190) as an autistic or otherwise disabled person. “Disabled people,” Yergeau writes, “have long agitated for recognition as (allo)sexual beings” (190), a fight which often rejects disabled people who “embrace asexuality” (190) from the disability rights movement. Yergeau underscores how her online “neuroqueer disclosure had been read as an identification with desexualization” (191) from some autistic bloggers, and she cites web forums like AVEN to highlight examples of allistic (non-autistic) asexual people declaring “their nonautism . . . as if the mark of disability was a ‘spoiling’ of an otherwise asexual identity” (191). Yergeau argues to “neuroqueer” discourse around autism and asexuality to accommodate “a plurality of identities, orientations, affective stances, and lived experiences” (86).
The writers cited in this post reject the desexualization of autism and the pathologization of asexuality without pitting both marginalized communities against each other. Instead of mutual negation, the writers endorse a queer-crip intersectional coalition between autistic and asexual people, an alliance of two mutually affirming communities collaborating against systemic marginalization and discursive harm.
