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”
