“The Politics of Desirelessness: Asexuality, Stillness, and Nation-States” panel selected for NWSA 2017
NATIONAL WOMEN’S STUDIES ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE PANEL
November 16-19, 2017 in Baltimore, MD
“The Politics of Desirelessness: Asexuality, Stillness, and Nation-States”
This panel seeks to utilize asexuality, desirelessness, and stillness as a transnational queer analytic that interrogates state, carceral, and professional interventions to maintain desires that are considered crucial in reproducing the nation-states, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and anthropocentrism. Three presentations engage in the analyses of historical documents, sci-fi texts, policies, personal narratives, and political campaigns. Looking for the intersections among asexuality, politicized celibacy, species-crossing, and spiritual silence, the presentations explore how nation-states, carceral institutions, and professional authorities have not only worked to disallow sexual citizenship to certain people but also worked to increase heterosexual coupledom and sexual desires for certain citizens. As these efforts may reveal that the desires themselves are not stable nor constant, the presentations ask how low rates of births, asexual existence, mental disability, self-starvation, and spirituality are considered threatening to the sustainability of nation-states. Furthermore, how do projects of emancipatory nation-building engage with queer asexual existence? How might desirelessness, sexual disengagements, nonreproduction, cross-species identifications, disability, and spirituality in solitary confinement be read as political resistance against war, racism, medical violence, colonization, trauma, environmental destruction, and the patriarchal nationalist imperative of recovery?
Eunjung Kim will present “Desire Interventions: The Violence of Coupling and Culling in The Lobster and Vegetarian”
Ianna Hawkins Owen will present “Asexuality, Incarceration, and Black Power(lessness)”
Michael Paramo will present “Tracing Desirelessness: An Historical Analysis of “Asexual” Existence”
Bauer McClave will moderate