Content/trigger warnings: Amisia, Sexual Assault mentions
Lately, i’ve caught myself wondering where we go from here with asexual theories and praxis. What is left to be said on asexuality? Of course, the most pertinent of matters is related to providing resources/networks for ace survivors and protecting ace bodies and spirits from the corruption of allo-cisheteropatriarchy. We should be critiquing and dismantling the social structures producing such a heinous cisheteropatriarchal, sexually normative world. We should also be critiquing sexusociety, which is not separable from cisheteropatriarchy.
There’s very few papers that discuss the asexual within a sexusociety. By framing things in terms of sexusociety, it’s meant to remove the idea that the “sexual world” is just one independent feature of the world and instead contextualize sexuality as central to everyday life and as everywhere. Sexusociety is about the Institutionalized Discourses surrounding sexuality and the becoming of sexually-enacted bodies. I think of sexuality in the same way I think of gender. I see gender as enacted and embodied. In the linked paper on gendered embodiment as enactment it is said:
Gender is not something that we are but something that we become
and do through the recursive and practical implementation—and eventually
questioning—of social norms and structured models of gender identity and
practices which are historical and, in one way or another, connected to
human bodies and their reproduction.
We can replace “gender” with sexuality and get at what is spoken of by “sexusociety.” Sexusociety would be those discourses creating, legitimizing and recreating sexual normativity, sexually-enacted bodies, and sexual selves. This is why sexuality is considered such an important part of self-hood and life itself. “Normal” bodies are sexual ones. “Properly functioning” bodies are considered sexual ones. In sexusociety, everyone operates relationally as sexual agents.
At the core of this framework is the use of discourse to study the socio-cultural and historical framing of human sexual behavior under the assumption that discourse reiterates the norms, roles, identities, ethos and gender-based power associated with sexual relationships
Where do asexual selves, bodies, meanings, etc. fall in all of this? It seems to me that ace’s have been defining themselves, and performing narratives, through the sexusocial discourse rather than formulating asexuality as a radical and subverting way of knowing and being. In the first paper I linked, Crisis and Safety: The Asexual in Sexusociety, it is suggested that we have formulated an illusion of a safe space within sexusociety rather than making for an overall plurality by utilizing the subversive potentials of asexuality. Asexuality has done this by merely defining itself as an absence. That is, by pointing to what the sexusocial discourse says about sexual bodies, identities, and selves and saying “this is what we are not.” This space is an illusion of safety because we haven’t actually dismantled the harmful sexu-structures. This is why we still face things such as unsolicited medicalization/pathologization, dehumanization (because sex is considered a life force), and corrective rape.
So, perhaps where we need to go from here is to reformulate asexual selves/bodies/identities as a positive presence rather than mere negation. We need to create new meanings and challenge the sexusocial discourse in a way that genuinely welcomes asexuality rather than us continuing on trying to put ace bodies in little illusory protective bubbles to walk around in the perils of sexual normativity. We’ve let ourselves be defined by the very sexusocial discourse that is destructive to ace selves and bodies. The same discourse that creates sexual embodiments and enactments that lead to things such as: aces facing corrective rape, unsolicited pathologization and medicalization, the inherent asexualization of disabled people, the further marginalization of disabled ace folks, and that uphold colonial powers of unsolicited asexualization as a form of dominion over gendered/sexed and racialized bodies and selves. This very sexusocial discourses can and are replicated within queer spaces (a point for asexuals identifying as queer and engaging in queer spaces to consider as they navigate). We have to start creating a subversive asexuality rather than letting our very asexual identities be a product of the hellscape of sexusociety. We cannot be merely a symptom.
Asexual Ramblings 