#asexuality studies

[aceadmiral]

Expertise of the Two Worlds

At the time, I didn’t really feel like I could comment in an informed manner on the argument. And there’s two solutions to that: keep your p

I mean, I could summarize it, but why do that when a meme would do?

[aceadmiral]

Book Review: Asexual Erotics by Ela Przybylo

(Read on Wordpress)

[chrysocollatown]

Conference “Unthinking Sex, Imagining Asexuality”

“The inaugural international conference “Unthinking Sex, Imagining Asexuality: Intersectional and Interdisciplinary Perspectives” will be held April 26-27, 2019 at Simon Fraser University’s Downtown Campus in Vancouver, located on unceded Coast Salish Territory, the traditional territories of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Evening events will include an Asexual Art Show and a Group Book Launch.

Asexuality studies is an emergent field of study that critically interrogates "compulsory sexuality," or the idea that sex is necessary to health, well-being, happiness, and social belonging. Creating space for asexuality within sexuality studies is important not only because it increases awareness of a marginalized sexual identity and orientation but also because it raises questions as to the role of sex in relationships and society more broadly. Scholarship and activism on asexuality has given us more tools for thinking about relationships, intimacy, pleasure, and health without centering sex in those discussions.

Our event celebrates the work that has been done in this burgeoning field, but also attempts to address gaps in the scholarship and imagine what the future of the field could look like. We hope to foster further visibility, education, and acceptance of asexuality. While asexuality has gained in visibility in recent years it is still widely rejected within LGBTQ2+ spaces, and asexual experiences are often invisible or silenced. Further, asexuality is routinely medicalized and misdiagnosed as a desire disorder. Our conference will invite conversations about how to challenge pathology models, as well as ignite creative forms of asexual expression. We hope to inspire future intersectional and interdisciplinary research on asexuality since, at present, there is no academic conference devoted solely to the topic of asexuality.”

“For the week of April 1st-April 8th, registration will be prioritized for ace/aro community members (i.e., anyone who identifies as ace and/or aro) and for conference presenters. To register, please go to our eventbrite page and type in the the password acearocon2019 . Registration and attendance is free. Following the first week registration will be open and free for all.”

More info at the website and Facebook event.

@asexualresearch

[faranzi]

Today was the last session of my asexual it's seminar. It was a really cool experience - at first I was kind of worried about possible negative comments or anything like that but everybody was super respectful and we had super productive discussions. A lot of people said that they want to continue research inn at direction which made me super happy. Today after the session ended I went up to the lecturer and thanked her for offering that course and she was super touched by that - so all in all it was a very good experience and I'm just really happy ^-^

[chrysocollatown]

Esta bibliografía se centra en estudios académicos en español que traten sobre la asexualidad y el espectro asexual.

Esta bibliografía se centra en estudios y artículos académicos en español que traten sobre la asexualidad y el espectro asexual. Se debe notar que este listado incluye tanto publicaciones con visiones positivas como aquellas que desprecian o patologizan esta identidad. 

Hoy añadí 2 nuevos artículos, publicados este año: uno que habla principalmente de investigación en torno a la asexualidad, empezando por Kinsey, y otro sobre asexualidad y derecho canónico matrimonial. Yep. Dejé un comentario al respecto en el foro de AVENes.

Publicación anterior

This bibliography focuses on academic studies and articles in spanish about asexuality and the ace spectrum. Note that the list includes both publications with positive view and those that disregard or pathologize ace identities.

Previous post

[ace-muslim]

The Asexuality Interest Group of the National Women’s Studies Association reports that all of the panels and papers they submitted for the NWSA 2016 conference have been approved.

Abstracts of the panels and titles of the submitted papers for each panel are at the link and have also been copied below for reference.

“1. Settler and Supremacist Intimacies: Representing/Unsettling Blackness and Asexuality at the Turn of the Century

Panel Abstract: The NWSA “Unsettling Settler Logics” subtheme call asks, “How might we decenter (enlightenment/modern) human subjectivity as the center of knowing and being?” This panel intervenes in the theorization of asexuality, blackness and the human at the turn of the century by examining representations of black sexual threats and asexual ideals, and explores their utility to the period's prevailing logics of settler and racial regimes of power, knowledge and truth. Is it possible to rewrite and reimagine specifically asexual intimacies beyond the logics of settler colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism and war that have strategically held black subjects to be either excessively or insufficiently “sexual” as the grounds for their exclusion from or contingent inclusion in categories of citizenship, personhood, and sovereignty? Scott Morgensen writes, “gendered and sexual power condition, or even generate the power relations we call ‘settler colonialism'” (14-15). This panel draws attention to how asexuality contributes to the shape of settler colonial power relations . Ultimately, we ask: in what manners are settler and supremacist structures of feeling dependent upon the malleability of blackness?

• Ianna Hawkins Owen, “Staying For Breakfast: Aunt Jemima, Asexuality, and National Comfort” • Christina Bush, “(Ir)reconcilable Differences: The Black Sambo, Asexuality, and the (Re) Figuring of Black Masculinities” • John Mundell, “An unsettling unsettlement: Lynching, black indigeneity, and asexual potentiality”

2. Asexual and Trans & Gender Non-Conforming Bodies and Biopolitics

Panel Abstract: Marginalised sexual orientations and genders are increasingly framed by colonialism’s neoliberal legacy of homonormativity (i.e., “a politic that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions [...] but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture” (Duggan, 2002, p. 179). Within a contemporary context juxtaposing neoliberal identity politics with the ongoing colonial regulation of queer and trans bodies, asexuality and diverse (and often gender non-conforming) asexual bodies can form a site of crisis for the categorisation of sex and sexuality. This panel interrogates the intersection of asexuality and transness/gender-nonconformity as a site of racialised, colonial regulation. Th first paper examines the intersections between gender and asexuality (drawing on data from the US as central to the self-identified communities initial emergence) and the race- and class- specific, gendered consequences for sexual autonomy, particularly as informed by the influence of whiteness. The second explores the late 19th century roots of these colonial ideologies-- grounded in a context of regulatory violence-- and their continued influence on neoliberal theoretical framework situating asexuality. The third unpacks the European settler colonial deployment of sex and sexuality as a means of subjugating queer and trans bodies in notably racialised ways, resonating through the further patholgisation of asexual trans and gender non-conforming bodies and the violence of the ensuing stigmatisation. The final paper traces the living legacies of assumed whiteness and existing sexuality through embodied experiences of at the intersections of transness, gender non-conformity, (a)sexual orientations and colonised PoC identities.

• CJ Chasin, “Tracing and troubling neoliberal independent-identity discourse (of gender and sexual orientation) into asexuality” • Jaysen Henderson Greenbey, “The Colonised Asexual: How Colonialism Has Shaped Gender and Sexuality” • Ishani Dugar, “Deconstructing Coloniality’s Assumed White Cishet Sexual Experience” • Kristina Gupta, “Gendering Asexuality and Asexualizing Gender: A Qualitative Study Exploring the Intersections between Gender and Asexuality”

3. Bordering Asexuality: Longings, Belongings, and Unbelongings

Panel Abstract: Building on Spivak’s argument that colonization necessitates a myth of the “uninscribed earth,” Matthew Sparke suggests a “disembodying, earth-evacuating assumption” constructs the “other” (306). If we imagine this to mean that the body must be evacuated in order to inscribe borders and regulations around the normalized or colonized body, then where does the asexual body fit in the landscape of not only heterosexually-desiring bodies, but also more simply, sexually-desiring bodies? How are boundaries drawn around spaces in order to designate where asexual or non-desiring/non-desirable bodies do not belong? In return, how do asexual bodies, like migrants, shift those spaces and their regulatory regimes to “create new modes of sexual identification, subjectivity, consumption, and coalition” (Luibhéid 144)? In this panel, we explore the contested places and (un)belongings of asexuals within cartographies of masculinism, in sexualized kink and BDSM spaces, and within narratives of trauma that inform the longings of the queer, asexual, trans body. If, as Milks and Cerankowski, write, “The time has come to recognize the ways in which asexual people are marginalized—or queered—in hypersexual societies,” then the time has certainly come to examine how that marginalization, based on myths of repression, aloneness, repulsiveness, and inhumanness, is constructed on colonial legacies that continue to shape borders around sexual norms and “appropriate” sexual bodies and desires.

• Anna Lise Jensen, “Asexual Space: Paradoxical and Ambiguous” • Sara Regensburger, “Asexuals Involved in BDSM: Creating a space within allegedly sexual atmospheres for nonsexual exploration” • Karli Cerankowski, “Bound in Pleasure: Pain, Trauma, and Masochistic Asexualities”

4. Creating Asexual Worlds

Panel Abstract: Compulsory sexuality is one part of broader colonial regimes of racialized sexualities, in which processes of hypersexualization and desexualization are used to stigmatize and regulate the sexual lives of internal and external “others” (Gupta 2015, Owen 2014, Kim 2011). This panel explores critical and creative work that seeks to challenge compulsory sexual worlds and imagine new worlds conducive to asexual survival and flourishing. The first paper analyzes British literature, imagining possibilities for asexual romantic expression. The second paper explores the ways in which spirituality and institutional religion, in the context of post-socialist Poland, enable the creation of particular kinds of asexual worlds. The third paper examines how decentering anthropocentrism can open up spaces for asexual survival. The final paper recuperates the concept of political celibacy from the women’s movement and early lesbian feminism in order to create spaces for asexual identities. As a whole, the papers on this panel begin to think about the ways in which processes of asexual world-making can also be processes of decolonial world-making.

• Jennifer Craven, “An Asexual Understanding of Romance in Literature” • Anna Kurowicka, “Studying Catholic Asexualities: How Spirituality and Institutional Religion Affect Asexuality” • A. K. Morrissey, “Decentering Sexualcentricity and Anthropocentrism” • Ela Przybylo, “Sisterly: Asexual Longings of Lesbian Feminism”

[iannahawkinsowen]

Asexuality Studies Call for Papers: Decoloniality

2016 Call for Proposals about Asexualities

Asexuality Studies Interest Group

2016 NWSA Annual Conference: Decoloniality

November 10-13, 2016 • Montréal, Québec

The NWSA Asexuality Studies Interest Group is organizing a series of panels that will be submitted to the 2016 NWSA annual conference. The general call for proposals for the conference can be found here: http://www.nwsa.org/cfp

If you are interested in being a part of the 2016 Asexuality Studies Interest Group panels at NWSA, please review the following individual CFPs below and then complete the following form by Monday, February 8, 2016:*

http://goo.gl/forms/iumSOZzaDU

We will try to accommodate as many qualified papers as possible, but panels are limited to 3-4 presenters. NWSA will make the final decision about which panels are accepted. Presenters accepted into the conference program must become members of NWSA in addition to registering for the conference.

*If you are unable to complete the form, alternatively you may email the following to the appropriate panel organizer (listed under each theme):

Name, Affiliation, Mailing Address, Email, Phone

NWSA Theme your paper fits under

Title for your talk

50-100 word abstract (with relevant citations**)

**NWSA now requires a panel rationale with a works cited section. Panel organizers will incorporate the citations from individuals abstracts into the final panel rationale.

Theme 1: Unsettling Settler Logics

Panel Title: “Settler and Supremacist Interpellations: Unsettling Asexual Intimacies and Figurations”

Contact: Ianna Hawkins Owen ([email protected])

Panel CFP: The NWSA “Unsettling Settler Logics” subtheme call asks, “How might we decenter (enlightenment/modern) human subjectivity as the center of knowing and being?” Broadly, this panel seeks interventions in the theorization of asexuality, race and the human. This panel seeks papers that examine representations of asexuals and asexuality as they are influenced or informed by prevailing logics of settler and racial regimes of power, knowledge and truth. Is it possible to rewrite and reimagine specifically asexual intimacies beyond the logics of settler colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism and war that have strategically held particular racialized subjects to be either excessively or insufficiently “sexual” as the grounds for their exclusion from or contingent inclusion in categories of citizenship, personhood, and sovereignty? Scott Morgensen writes, “gendered and sexual power condition, or even generate the power relations we call ‘settler colonialism'” (14-15). How might attention to asexuality aid in the effort of fleshing out this terrain? In what manners are asexual structures of feeling influenced or animated by the logics of settler colonialism and white (and other) supremacies (Rifkin 2011)?

Works Cited: Arondekar, Anjali. 2005. “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive.” Journal of the History of Sexuality. 14.1/2: 10-27; Morgensen, Scott Lauria. 2012. “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction.” Settler Colonial Studies, 2:2, 2-22; Przybylo, Ela and Danielle Cooper. 2014. “Asexual Resonances: Tracing a Queerly Asexual Archive.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 20.3: 297-318; Rifkin, Mark. 2011. “Settler States of Feeling: National Belonging and the Erasure of Native American Presence.” In A Companion to American Literary Studies, edited by Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell; Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review. 3.3: 257-337.

Theme 2: Movements and Migrations

Panel Title: “Asexual Flows”

Contact: Ela Przybylo ([email protected])

Panel CFP: Drawing on the theme of movements and migrations, this panel asks us to think about the movement flows of asexuality transnationally. Asexuality scholarship and activism is emerging as both a robust network of identities and a compelling series of perspectives for thinking about sex, sexual citizenship, community-making, normativity, gender, bodies, and abilities. In this sense, asexuality has emerged, like other sexual identities, as a movement. At the same time, asexuality’s movements and the asexual movement itself has been articulated mostly within the parameters of Western, colonial, urban, and secular flows (one exception is Wong 2015). The focus of this panel is thus to think of asexual movements against the Western model, and specifically with attentiveness to how asexuality moves in non-Western contexts and sites, in non-secular iterations, and in decolonizing frameworks.

Questions to consider include:

-How can we make sense of asexuality alongside border imperialism (Walia 2013), homonationalism (Puar 2007), and settler colonialism (Finley 2011)?

-What meanings and iterations does asexuality acquire when framed through non-Western knowledge systems?

-How has asexual activism and scholarship been on the move, in movement across geopolitical sites?

-If asexuality is true to people across historical and cultural sites, how is it experienced and named in non-Western paradigms?

-What coalitions and solidarities can be formed among asexualities transnationally?

Works Cited: Finley, Chris. 2011. “Decolonizing the Queer Native Body (and Recovering the Native Bull-Dyke): Bringing ‘Sexy Back’ and Out of the Native Studies Closet.” In Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature. Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press. 31-42; Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press; Walia, Harsha. 2013. Undoing Border Imperialism. Oakland: AK Press; Wong, Day. 2015. “Asexuality in China’s Sexual Revolution: Asexual Marriage as Coping Strategy.” Sexualities 18.1-2: 100-116.

Theme 3: Bodies and Biopolitics

Panel Title: “Asexual and Trans & Gender Non-Conforming Bodies and Biopolitics”

Contact: [email protected]

Panel CFP: The legacies of colonialism and its social order has informed the structure of society to the present (Quijano, 2000). As the NWSA 2016 CFP states, “coloniality has played a central role in producing particular understandings of bodies, sexes, races, abilities, and genders. These categorizations are often tied to deficit models of human difference that undergird pathologization.” This panel will consider biopolitical questions related to the intersection between asexuality and gender - particularly trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming identities. This panel will consider: how have colonial categorizations led to the pathologization of asexual and gender non-conforming bodies? How can feminist decolonial frameworks work to deconstruct deficit models of asexual and gender non-conforming bodies?

Questions to consider:

• What can thinking about gender non-conformity and asexuality together teach us about the ways in which gender and sexuality can be colonial impositions that sustain racialized, heteronormative, patriarchal hierarchies and that reinforce distinctions between persons and non-persons?

• How do decolonial feminist frameworks help to name coloniality’s wounds, unpack its legacies of trauma, and contest the governance of bodies and intimacies, specifically in the case of asexuality and gender non-conformity? Relatedly, what are the contours of decolonized asexual and trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming bodies, and how are they performed, inhabited, felt, represented, known?

• How do multiple control practices operate simultaneously to try to contain and/or manage asexual and trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming bodies?

• What are the contours of decolonized asexual and trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming bodies, and how are they performed, inhabited, felt, represented, known?

• What are asexual and trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming examples of lived resilience/resistance and alternatives to normative physical bodies?

• How can thinking about asexual and trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming identities help us in reimagining or resisting the (normative) national body?

• When thinking about the intersections of asexuality and trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming identities, why is it essential to examine connections between environmental degradation, illness, reproductive violence and in/justice, and the medico-industrial complex?

Sources Cited: Quijano, Aníbal. "Coloniality of power and Eurocentrism in Latin America."International Sociology 15.2 (2000): 215-232.

Theme 4: Borders and Be/longings

Panel Title: “Bordering Asexuality: Longings, Belongings, and Unbelongings”

Contact: Karli June Cerankowski ([email protected])

Panel CFP: As the NWSA organizers note, “Borders actively structure, produce, regulate, and secure hierarchies of race, class, disability, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality (Luibhéid 2002). Borders help to produce the conditions for belonging, but also un-belonging, erasure, and violence, including genocidal and gendered violence.” How can we think about asexuality within and across borders, whether they be literal national borders or epistemological, hierarchical, psychosocial borders that dictate the spaces of belonging or unbelonging of different types of asexual or asexualized bodies?

If “settler colonial states, moreover, mobilize (and manipulate) affects of belonging, in part to inspire subjects to yearn for or take up the state’s desires,” where does asexuality fit into settler colonial logics of yearning and desire; how does asexuality break down those logics? What does it mean to yearn, to long for, to belong, or not belong against, across, and within imposed boundaries and borders constructed by settler colonial logics? How might we employ the (il)logics of asexuality as a decolonial framework? How might we address the critique of the asexual’s dominant image as the unassailable, cis-normative, able-bodied white asexual through interrogations of borders, citizenship, race, gender, age, religion, and ability? Who are the asexuals who have not belonged even within normative asexual borders? Where are the stories and bodies we long for?

We welcome submissions that take up asexualities (broadly defined and understood) in relation to borders (broadly defined and understood) and notions of both longing and belonging (or unbelonging).

Further questions to consider:

• How can decolonial feminist work help to denaturalize borders, especially those that dictate the place of sexuality, in order to reframe geographies of power or otherwise disrupt colonial cartographies? How does it take up questions of sovereignty, co-resistance, and co-existence?

• By what means can we contest the “physical borders that enforce a global system of apartheid and…conceptual borders that keep us separated from one another” (Walia 2013, 2)? How do those who are colonized and disenfranchised challenge the state’s imposed borders of belonging and not belonging on a daily basis?

• What might it mean for feminist scholars and asexuality studies scholars situated in North America to confront and consider the historic and ongoing erasures, omissions, and occlusions accomplished by the imposition of borders and boundaries?

• How do decolonial approaches to borders and their structuring il/logics of being, affect, and belonging expose mechanisms of power that reproduce sexual and gender hierarchies and exclusions and how do these relate to queer, trans, and asexual histories, peoples, and communities?

Theme 5: World-Making and Resistant Imaginaries

Panel Title: “Creating Asexual Worlds”

Contact: Kristina Gupta ([email protected])

Panel CFP: According to the NWSA call for proposals, “Critical, performative, creative work has long been pivotal to anti-colonial, queer, and coalitional resistances, including those that expose colonialist fantasies and histories, refuse silences and forgetting, or dismantle colonial regimes of racialized genders and sexualities.” For this panel, we invite both creative works and analyses of creative works that seek to create asexual-positive spaces and/or challenge the settler logic of compulsory sexuality. We are interested in visual and performance art and poetry and creative writing, as well as scholarly analyses of art and creative writing. Further questions to consider:

What are some examples of creative resistance or performance that refuse to soothe or accommodate the settler logic of compulsory sexuality?

How can creative/performative work help to spark revolutionary ace-positive struggles?

How can asexuality, as a lived identity or as a mode of analysis, help to foster radical visions and performances, mobilize memory, and reimagine landscapes (whether sonic, visual, imagined, or physical)?

In the contexts of decolonial feminist and ace-positive work, why is it important to consider collaborative, relational ways of knowing, inquiring, and creating, or to engage (or craft) work that disrupts or refuses false divides (e.g., between the aesthetic and the analytical, the creative and critical, the affective and the theoretical, the human and non-human, the animate and inanimate)?

How can everyday social and cultural practices, including those that are ephemeral (e.g., street demonstrations, graffiti, pop-up performances), be understood as essential forms of decolonial, feminist, and ace-positive world-making?

[iannahawkinsowen]

Named the new co-chair of the Asexuality Studies Interest Group at NWSA with Kristina Gupta. Very excited to collaborate with everyone on the next two years of ace tracks at the conference!