Asexuality, Race, and Community
A couple weeks ago at the Empowering Women of Color Conference in Berkeley, I hosted a workshop/presentation on the history of asexuality and the online community and the conversations about race and (a)sexuality that have been ongoing. The presentation is in Google Drive: Asexuality, Race, and Community.
There are a lot of slides! It ended up as multiple timelines, first of asexual awareness and the emergence of online communities, second of asexuality in the media, and third of conversations about asexuality and race within ace communities. We see that these conversations are either around increasing awareness of racialized (a)sexuality (including calling out racism within ace communities), sharing of experiences as APOC, or calls for spaces for APOC. We’ve been having these conversations since 2011 or so, and we may still be in the “raising awareness” stage of not only race and asexuality, but asexuality in general. It’ll be interesting to see what other spaces for aces of color will be created in the future.
Some topics that came up after the presentation:
Sex-positivity and asexuality. While sex-positivity at its core is about the ability for sex to be a positive experience, it can be difficult for people to accept sex-positivity as it’s currently framed – especially mainstream sex-positivity which has the tendency to frame all consensual sex as positive – since it tends to ignore the experiences of people of color along with aces. I’ve stopped identifying as sex-positive and now tend to say that I’m sex-critical or sex-negative. One of my favorite articles of all time is by Lisa at A Radical TransFeminist, who wrote The Ethical Prude: Imagining An Authentic Sex-Negative Feminism. Sex-positive feminism opposes sex moralism, "the controlled right of male sexual (and otherwise) access to women, in which people acting sexually outside of that controlled system are considered shameful and dirty,” whereas sex-negative feminism opposes compulsory sexuality, “a set of social attitudes, institutions and practices which hold and enforce the belief that everyone should have or want to have frequent sex (of a socially approved kind).” As Lisa frames it, sex-negative feminism isn’t the opposite of sex-positivity, but another way to oppose how women and their bodies are policed. Another good article I like is by Jo at A life unexamined, who wrote Sex-Positivity, Compulsory Sexuality and Intersecting Identities. Online ace communities are generally sex-positive (since it’s the prevailing liberal viewpoint), but there have been a lot of interesting conversations around asexuality and sex-positivity, and more discussions around being critical about sex and being sex-neutral have been happening.
Asexual relationships. I think this is something that most people are most curious about in terms of asexuality, including ace folks. How do relationships work with people who aren’t asexual? I wrote about Asexual/Allosexual Relationships for Ace Awareness Week last year. I’m a bit biased as a sex-averse ace, so while I fervently defend the ability of asexuals to enthusiastically consent to sex and believe that consenting to sex doesn’t require sexual attraction, I also think there needs to be more space for asexuals for whom sex is a deal-breaker.
What the ace community has to offer. There are topics of significant importance to asexuals – some of the big ones being consent and relationships – that are also important to people who aren’t asexual. For instance, critiques of sex-positivity have contributed to discussions around sex. I wrote a bit on Asexuality for Allosexuals for Ace Awareness Week last year, too. It references an article by Mary Maxfield Brave, Sp[ace] Exploration: What Sexual People Can Learn from Asexual Communities, that I thought was really cool.
Thanks to everyone who helped me with the presentation, and thanks to the folks at EWOCC and everyone who attended! The conference in and of itself was awesome. The panel on gentrification was particularly noteworthy, and it was cool just to be in a space with a majority of women and non-binary people of color.
(Quick note: I linked to all the sources I used in each slide in the speaker’s notes, so take a look at those if you’re interested in where I got all the information. A lot of it came from articles linked from cassz’s Asexuality and Race Resources document, and most of the general history tidbits were pulled from AVENwiki.)
