Introduction to Asexuality Theory
By Jenna McKellips, September 2022
This reading list is meant to be an introduction to asexuality studies and theories overall; it therefore includes a variety of foundational texts which discuss key terms and ideas to using asexuality as a critical lens. Because asexuality can only be understood intersectionally, the majority of texts on this list define asexuality through its points of intersection with other identities.
KJ Cerankowski and Megan Milk’s “New Orientations: Asexuality and Its Implications for Theory and Practice” is intended to be a introduction to asexuality as a field of study. This article discusses the diversity of definitions and experiences that are categorized as asexuality, as well as discussing the online movements and research that served as the foundation of the first academic work on asexuality. The authors then ask some of the questions central to theoretical work on asexuality: how can asexuality help researchers rethink feminist ideas of “sex-positivity”? Can scholars read someone from the past, like Joan of Arc, as asexual? How should asexuality be positioned in respect to queerness, or queer theory?
Ianna Hawkins Owen’s “On the Racialization of Asexuality” traces a “peripheral genealogy of the asexual through the study of race” (119), revealing that asexuality is inextricably connected to race. Owen observes how asexuality has been weaponized by whiteness and how “the white practitioner is considered pure and deserving of reverence, while the black asexual figure is considered less threatening than her hypersexual counterpart” (122). Owen hypothesizes asexuality’s oppression of black women through two “controlling images”: the hypersexual jezebel, a figure who was used to justify dehumanizing and sexually abusing slaves, and the “Mammy,” a figure who was developed to relegate black women to positions of surrogate motherhood for white children, without causing sexual desire in white fathers. In neither case are black women given agency over their own bodies and sexualities. Owen traces the influence these controlling images have had through history, and ultimately proves that asexuality studies must rid itself of its relationship to whiteness, and focus on destroying power structures, rather than on mere visibility.
Kim TallBear and Angela Willey’s “Critical Relationality: Queer, Indigenous, and Multispecies Belonging Beyond Settler Sex and Nature” places nonsexualities alongside indigenous ways of thinking, relating, and being. TallBear and Willey consider how colonial discourses use the word “natural” to privilege certain relationships, particularly relationships that are “centered around biological reproduction and which treat land, women, and children as property” (5). TallBear and Willey then detail eco-erotics as an alternative to sexual, reproductive relationships, describing such erotics as “theoretically generative” for Indigenous readers with “longer-standing intimate relational frameworks” with the land (6). The authors also seek to end using anthropology as a way of objectifying Indigenous subjects, and instead recommend a way of viewing the past and present as “relations between bodies, not all of them human and not all of them living” (6). Though the authors are not focused on asexuality as such, the nonsexual, in this context, can present a method of rebelling against colonial sexual discourses.
Eunjung Kim’s “Asexuality in disability narratives” seeks to inspect the intersection of asexuality and disability, an impulse that theorists once shied away from because of ableist stigmas that desexualize disabled people. Kim celebrates sex positive movements in the disabled community, but notes that universalizing claims about the sexual interest of disabled folks erases aces in the community. Therefore, while rejecting the desexualization of disability, Kim resists the belief that asexuality is disempowering, arguing that such arguments normalize sexuality. Even if disability may be part of the cause of a person’s asexual desire, Kim argues, neither identity is less valid; indeed, it can be empowering within disability studies to remove the importance of sex to definitions of normalcy. This turn away from “normalcy,” found in asexual and disabled communities is also reflected in gender queer, non-heteronormative, and intersex communities, and Kim draws attention to these intersections.
This list ends with a blog post on TheAceTheist by Coyote, “Top 6 Mistakes in the Academic Field of Asexuality Studies.” This post reveals the importance of listening to the asexual community when writing about asexuality in scholarly ways, and draws attention to the most common issues found in scholarship, to caution and improve future work in the field.
The queer turn away from compulsory sexuality is a necessary rhetorical interest of asexuality studies, but as this reading list shows, this turn must take into account the lived experiences of asexual people, and it cannot occur without a simultaneous turn away from white, colonial, and ableist narratives.
