Ela and I have been colleagues for over a decade now, thinking together with a small group of other scholars interested in analyzing contemporary asexual identities from intersectional feminist and queer perspectives. It is a pleasure to be able to read Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality (2019) as a sustained expression of Ela’s thinking about asexualities and compulsory sexuality, thinking that has evolved over the course of a decade. In this brief response, I will reflect on Ela’s evocative and thought-provoking explanation of the concept of “asexual erotics,” as well as ask a few questions that I hope will give Ela the opportunity to clarify and elaborate on certain aspects of this concept.

Ela’s most notable inspiration for her concept of asexual erotics is Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978). Not surprisingly, this essay has been useful for a number of scholars interested in asexualities (for example, Owen 2022). In the essay, Lorde introduces her concept of the erotic, which she uses to describe feelings of pleasure, joy, energy, and power. For Lorde, these erotic feelings are a source of knowledge about justice and injustice—once someone has experienced the erotic, they will want to experience it more often and more fully, so they will observe the conditions of the world that impede the erotic (injustice) and the conditions that allow it to flourish (justice) and will be inspired to engage in collective political action to transform the world from injustice to justice. Importantly for scholars of asexualities, Lorde considers sexual activity as only one of many activities that can produce erotic feelings—and sexual activity is not a privileged erotic activity for Lorde either. Famously, Lorde writes that she experiences the erotic in not only sexual activity, but in “dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea” (Lorde 1984, 57). Lorde argues that there is only a difference in quantity, not quality, between the eroticism experienced as a result of one of these activities compared to another.

While I remain uncommitted to the choice of the word “erotic” specifically, I personally find Lorde’s discussion of the erotic useful for thinking about asexualities because she offers poetic and searing support for the argument that experiences, relationships, and, indeed, lives can be joyful, pleasurable, energizing, and/or knowledge-producing whether they contain a great deal of sexual desire and activity, some sexual desire and activity, or no sexual desire or activity. Put another way, Lorde’s discussion of the erotic suggests that the presence or absence of sex cannot not be used to judge the quality of an experience, a relationship, or a life. Joy, knowledge about justice and injustice, and inspiration for political action can come from sexualities and asexualities alike (Gupta 2013).

I believe Ela shares this understanding of the relevance of Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” for thinking about asexualities. In her introduction, Ela discusses in depth her choice of the term “asexual erotics” as well as her definition of it, writing, “…an emphasis on the erotic is thus only an attempt to think sexuality beyond sexual and bodily regimentation, an attempt to think through the well-known fact that there are many ways to love and be loved, to touch and be touched, to desire and be desired, to attract and be attracted, to arouse and be aroused that are not reducible to sex or encompassable by sexuality. ‘Asexual erotics’…is a phrase I use to think about the critiques, forms of reading, and models of relating that are made possible when asexuality is centralized” (26). Ela then proceeds, in the remainder of the book, to identify and analyze the workings of asexual erotics in a series of case studies.

Many of the cases Ela discusses provide elegant examples of asexual erotics. For example, in her chapter, “Growing into Asexuality: The Queer Erotics of Childhood,” Ela adeptly demonstrates the value of thinking about intergenerational relationships (for example, between parent and child or aunt and niece) as asexually erotic, thus avoiding the forced desexualization of these relationships by conservatives who insist on the sexual innocence of children (and thus view any hint of sexuality in these relationships as criminal, monstrous, and disordered) as well as the forced sexualization of these relationships by some sex radicals (and psychoanalysts) who can only see relationships that involve joy, sensuality, touch, and arousal as inherently sexual. As Ela suggests at the end of the chapter, we need to be able to acknowledge a variety of erotic possibilities in intergenerational relationships that are “not distillable to the sexual” (111).

Many of the specific cases within her chapter, “The Erotics of Feminist Revolution: Political Celibacies/Asexualities in the Women’s Movement,” also offer powerful examples of asexual erotics. For example, Ela demonstrates that the “political celibacy” advocated for by radical feminist separatist groups in the 1970s “constituted a form of erotic engagement” as it served not only to remove the sexual and reproductive labor of women from men, but also (and more critically in regards to erotics) to develop new types of relationality and to energize collective political action. I was struck, however, by some of the cases in this chapter and their fit or misfit with the concept of asexual erotics. For example, Ela argues that Valerie Solanas’s text, SCUM Manifesto (1967) offers an example of a “nihilist asexuality” that elucidates an “acidic erotics that was based in a raging dissatisfaction with the conditions of her life” (50). Ela goes on to write, “Solanas’s radical feminist asexuality is a nihilistic asexuality, an asexuality of death, decay, and social extermination – an antisocial thesis” (51). While I agree with Ela about the relevance of Solanas’s work for thinking about asexuality and with her reading of SCUM Manifesto as a text of nihilistic asexuality, I did begin to wonder how nihilism fits within the concept of asexual erotics.

These questions were heightened for me by the following chapter “Lesbian Bed Death, Asexually: An Erotics of Failure.” In this chapter, Ela examines the concept of lesbian bed death and how it has been used pejoratively to deride asexual-like lesbian relationships as failed relationships. I fully agree with Ela’s argument that the term lesbian bed death is used to deny asexual-like relationships through associating them with loss, death, and failure. However, I was intrigued by Ela’s argument that the trope of lesbian bed death itself (and not just actual asexual-like lesbian relationships) can be a form of asexual erotics, specifically an erotics of failure. She writes, “‘asexuality without optimism’…traces the darker affective undercurrents of sexual lack, low levels of sexual desire, and forms of nonsexuality articulated in popular parlance as ‘failure’ or failed sexuality” (87). Again, I agree entirely with Ela’s rejection of the idea that asexualities, in order to combat stigma, must always be visible as happy, satisfying, etc. I fully agree that there also needs to be space for asexualities that are experienced as depressing, painful, lacking, and failing. However, I remain curious about the fit of lesbian bed death—as a pejorative—within an erotics of failure as well as the fit of an erotics of failure within asexual erotics.

From her discussion of incels in her epilogue, it is clear that Ela does not place all forms of nonsexuality or asexuality under the label of asexual erotics. “Incels” is a term used by misogynistic and racist (usually white) men who describe themselves as celibate against their own desires because women refuse to have sex with them. About incels, Ela writes “in these racist and sexist uses, ‘involuntary celibacy’ emerges as an anti-erotic tool intent on speaking against feminist and antiracist progress, building a world within which white men can continue to have unfettered access to the bodies of others…Erotics, in turn, inform the decentering of compulsory sexuality, challenging anti-erotic deployments of hatred” (141). This statement left me wondering why incels are classified as “anti-erotic” while ‘lesbian bed death’—a term that reinforces compulsory sexuality—is classified as an asexual erotics of failure.

In the epilogue, Ela returns to Audre Lorde’s formulation of the erotic, again noting that it structures her book. She writes, “Lorde, we can recall, positioned the erotic as a powerful source for addressing racism and sexism and as an energy that women can access toward leading more full and self-determined lives, even within contexts of patriarchy. The erotic provides strength and fuel for living a life of self-determination and satisfaction, and for challenging racism and sexism at the deepest level” (140). Given Lorde’s understanding of the erotic, I would appreciate hearing more from Ela about how she sees concepts like “acidic erotics” (Solanas) and an “erotics of failure” (lesbian bed death) fitting within her concept of asexual erotics.

In general, given the potential importance of the concept of asexual erotics for scholarship in sexuality studies (and not just in asexuality studies), I would appreciate hearing more from Ela about her understanding of asexual erotics. I am curious to know, for example, how the concept of asexual erotics (dis)articulates with other terms, such as joy, pleasure, relationality, connection, sensuality, energy, inspiration, and intimacy. I am also interested in the relationship between asexual erotics and embodiment. And, as suggested above, I would like to know more about how the concept includes “negative” affects and experiences such as failure, anti-sociality, and nihilism. In Asexual Erotics, Ela has given us a beautiful gift with her elucidation of the concept of asexual erotics and I look forward to its adaptation, expansion, and elaboration.

References:

Gupta, Kristina. 2013. “Compulsory Sexuality and Its Discontents: The Challenge of Asexualities.” PhD, Emory University.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. 1st ed. Crossing Press. 

Owen, Ianna Hawkins. 2022. “More: Cake, Feedism, and Asexuality.” Social Text 40 (2) 151: 93–111. 

Convinced as I am of the power and importance of “reparative reading,” coined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a mode of critique that emphasizes surprise, positivity, and pleasure in critical analysis (2003, 123), I am amazed by how often I must be dissuaded from a “paranoid reading,” a “hermeneutic of suspicion” and “negative affect” that is defensive, expository, anticipates bad faith, and reinforces binary thinking (2003, 128). Perhaps I shouldn’t be. Where sexuality is concerned, I have long been a paranoid and a reparative reader, and many of the most renowned queer theorists, including the late Sedgwick herself, argue this is not a bad thing, as paranoia and reparation form a dialogical set of “changing and heterogeneous relational stances” (2003, 128). 

Like Ela Przybylo, whose work I discuss here, I attended the University of Alberta as an undergraduate student and took classes in women’s and gender studies. In my introductory queer theory seminar with a professor whom I will call “L”, my paranoia was on full display. Granted, I was too young for the class and only skimmed the readings, and so was woefully unprepared for the onslaught of Judith Butler, the destabilization of identity categories, and the trenchant critiques of marriage by my more senior classmates. But I was also paranoid, and largely so by way of fear and loathing. I feared sex and therefore loathed it. I romanticized romantic relationships, and still do, and saw gay men’s proclivity for casual sex as a sign that I would never “find someone.” Believing that marriage and monogamy would end my loneliness, I did not react positively to non-traditional discussions of kink and public sex. Indeed, while trauma makes for some of the best paranoid readers, so do projection and misrecognition. My stubbornness with L, who taught me that learning is a form of affective labour and that knowledge is not always powerful, morphed into a hunger for queer theory. As I “matured” into an honours program and delved deeper into the archive of the sex wars, I became more amenable to sex-positive/radical feminisms. 

By the time I met “FF”, who was finishing up as Przybylo’s dissertation director as I arrived at York University for a master’s degree, I was on the cusp of admitting my kinks, exploring my first gay bathhouse, and declaring my personal and intellectual allegiance to those who, like FF, resisted the legal approbation of anti-pornography feminism in R. v. Butler (1992) and beyond. My paranoia re-emerged. When FF told me she had supervised a dissertation on asexuality, I thought back to L’s course and my former peers at OUTReach, the U of A’s queer student group, where an incipient asexual consciousness, or resonance, had emerged during my time there. Despite my own effective asexuality at OUTReach—my self-imposed virginity under the guise that sex “should be” with a boyfriend—something about asexuality seemed culturally backward and politically milquetoast. While I wanted sex—the “right” kind—these people didn’t want it at all. 

What’s more, the contours of asexual identity often spilled over into paranoid moralism. One student scandalized OUTReach by advertising an amateur male strip night at a local gay bar on the group Facebook page. The OUTReach executive removed the post because high school students were known to peruse the page and would be “harmed” by sexualized images, and because the executive did not want the group to be “all about sex.” It became difficult to separate asexuality from “desexualization,” defined by Przybylo as that which renders certain groups “such as people with disabilities, lesbians and transgender people, children and older adults, people of size, and some racialized people as ‘asexual’ by default” (15), but I define as our culture’s effacement of sex and sexuality under the pretence of “protecting” people from “harm.” I will return to the idea of desexualization, but for now, know that during my first year of graduate study, a thesis on asexuality seemed at best odd, and at worst, regressively apolitical. 

When Ada Jaarsma asked me to contribute this response to Przybylo’s book, Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality (2019), I had to talk myself off the ledge of a paranoid reading. I remembered my training from L and FF to read reparatively—to not project my own anxieties and experiences onto the text, to admit that I can be (and am often) wrong, and to meet the author halfway. And how could I not do the latter? Przybylo remains something of a distant intellectual cousin. While we attended the same institutions and have nearly two dozen mutual friends, we have never met, and yet I feel like I know her from numerous stories and glowing reviews of both her work and personality. I’m glad I was able to overcome some of my skepticism. 

Asexual Erotics is on the cutting edge of contemporary queer theory, as well as film and cultural studies. Those who, like me, expected this book to attack sexuality studies will find themselves pleasantly surprised (or perhaps rudely awakened). Like any queer theorist worth their salt, Przybylo asks her readers to check their assumptions and investments. The central premise of the book is not that queer theory has an “obsession” with sex, as Jennifer Tyburczy proclaims on the back cover, but that it in certain intellectual quarters, it is overdetermined at the expense of queer analytics and erotics wherein sex is not a central referent (22). This is a valid point, as Przybylo’s analyses of various cultural objects attest. Proposing a distinctly reparative mode of analysis that “involves undertaking an asexual reading of texts that may not be obviously asexual,” but contain asexual traces or “resonances” (26), Asexual Erotics probes film and culture for iterations of kinship and erotic possibility that imbue a certain “nonsexuality,” or that abjure “compulsory sexuality”—the myriad “ways in which sexuality is presumed to be natural and normal to the detriment of various forms of asexual and nonsexual lives, relationships, and identities” (1). 

Engaging the political celibacies of Women’s Liberation, lesbian bed death, the figure of the child, and the trope of the spinster, Przybylo offers “intimate readings” of texts ranging from The Argonauts (2015) to the Oscar-nominated dramedy The Kids Are All Right (2010) and Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha (2012). By “intimate reading,” Przybylo means a “feeling based” approach to textual analysis that is semi-autobiographical—or that factors in her “asexual tendencies” (3)—and is attuned to the ways in which her objects are haunted, as it were, by asexuality (30). I was convinced of all of Przybylo’s analyses and thought that her framework of an “intimate reading” worked well. Formulating a coherent analytical approach to examining texts, particularly those of this range, that includes autobiography is challenging. However, I consider it a resounding success in this book. 

Before I offer a provocation to Przybylo by way of a return to my earlier narrative, I will first offer something of a cautionary disclosure. Having recently come to consciousness about my neurodivergence, it has become clear to me that I am often literal and tangential, consumed by small details and asides, and caught up in the minutiae of what I read. Identifying the difference between a paranoid reading and what I call a “neurodivergent snag”—getting overly hung up on a single word or concept to the detriment of the “bigger picture”—eludes me. All of this is to say that when I tried to formulate a response to Asexual Erotics, I once again had to interrogate my paranoia. 

In Asexual Erotics, Przybylo critiques compulsory sexuality, or “sexusociety,” a “society organized around sex” (17). Her main concern is that compulsory sexuality forecloses on relational and erotic potential outside of sex and can be experienced as oppressive by asexual and nonsexual bodies. While our society is certainly organized around reproduction, as Lee Edelman argues in the polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), at no point while reading Asexual Erotics was I fully convinced that compulsory sexuality has, or continues to have, the charge that Przybylo attributes to it outside of fictional representations. Put otherwise, I do not feel like the “compulsory” in compulsory sexuality was sufficiently elaborated. Why? 

Because the very identification of “compulsory sexuality” can be a paranoid stance, one that tacitly reinforces de/hypersexualization. To be sure, Przybylo is aware of the damaging effects of de/hypersexualization, especially when paired with ableism, homophobia, and/or racism. She acknowledges the ways in which being construed as inherently devoid of sexuality can be oppressive and downright hurtful, and understands compulsory sexuality to prohibit certain populations, like gay men, from having “too much” or the “wrong kind” of sex, while also rendering certain groups, like persons with disabilities, asexual by default (16, my quotations). 

But while reading Asexual Erotics, I couldn’t get the removal of the OUTReach post about an amateur male strip show out of my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about how the post seemed to symbolize a certain sexual compulsoriness that simply wasn’t there, how sex was overdetermined  in Gayle Rubin’s sense (1984), and how its removal simultaneously de- and hyper-sexualized particular populations. When the post was removed under the guise of “protecting” high school students from the “harm” of seeing a half-naked man, these students were desexualized, or understood to be too young to freely explore or see sexuality reflected in a public forum, while gay men were desexualized and hypersexualized—desexualized in the sense that a reflection of our sexuality was censored, and hypersexualized insofar as the post, according to the pan-/asexual majority OUTReach executive, made the whole group seem like it was “all about sex.” 

Not insignificantly, it was the symbolic presence of gay male sexuality that ostensibly made the group seem unitarily hypersexual. Moreover, the removal of the post reinforced the idea that transgressive sexual representations are “harmful.” If we look to the examples of YouTube deleting the entire Cornell University Library account over posts of lectures and panels by Rubin and the sex-radical feminist publication On Our Backs (1984–2006),1 as well as the censure of queer professors Saul Levine,2 and Aneil Rallin,3 this idea has gained traction in recent years. 

While asexuality certainly cannot be blamed for these events, there does seem to be a compulsory desexualization, or dare I say, asexualization happening in our society at present that makes it difficult to see “sexusociety” as a legitimate concern and to see anything about sexuality as compulsory. Undoubtedly, it would be frustrating to be asexual and live in a society where “sexuality is presumed to be natural and normal to the detriment of various forms of asexual and nonsexual lives, relationships, and identities” (1), but if the sociosexual trends of Millennials and Generation Z are any indication—that we/they have less sex than previous generations—sex no longer seems natural, normal, or compulsory. Am I off-base here? Have I missed something? Paranoia “knows some things well and others poorly,” as Sedgwick writes, but sometimes people are “delusional” and “simply wrong” (2003, 130). Am I paranoid? 

References:

Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 

Rubin, Gayle S. 1984.. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, edited by Carole S. Vance, Boston: Routledge and & Kegan Paul, 267–319. 

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 

Dear Ela,

When I first read Asexual Erotics (2019) back in the summer of 2021, I was immediately struck by the book’s “refusal to be bound solely by identificatory frames” (3). At the time, it had been almost a year since I relocated from the United States to Taiwan and I was trying to figure out how much of myself to devote to asexual organizing and advocacy. Though I had developed a self-concept as graysexual towards the end of college back in the States, I never interacted with any aspec communities there (both online and offline) due in large part to how overwhelmingly white these spaces feel. In fact, the entire structure of sexual minority identification felt, at the time, overwhelmingly white. Let me share an anecdote that will hopefully explain what I mean: 

During my graduate studies at the University of Virginia, I was doing my WGS seminar reading at a coffee shop near campus, and on National Coming Out Day of all days. An old white man, presumably retiree age, came and sat next to me. My reading materials must have outed me to him, because when I started to pack up my things to leave he struck up conversation by asking me if I was gay. I said yes, trying to be sensitive to the possibility that his generational relationship to my preferred public identification as queer (at that point, I only shared and discussed graysexuality with close friends) might be fraught. He then proceeded to tell me about his experience of being gay in New York during the seventies and eighties, attending some of the first Pride events there and participating in die-ins. It was interesting to hear his albeit long and spontaneous account, but halfway through this twenty-minute exchange, he abruptly paused and asked me if I was “out.” I said for the most part, but not to my extended family, especially all of my family back in Taiwan. He immediately, and rather vociferously, replied: “Well, fuck em’!” 

His response jolted me. And it still sticks out in my mind today as an example of why “identificatory frames” feel so inadequate and, frankly, white. There is something about the audacity of casually telling a complete stranger to “fuck off” their family relations for the sake of membership in some out-loud-proud fraternity of gay men that strikes me as symptomatic of a certain kind of whiteness. What I mean is this: Imagine relating to your own experience as transparently universal, relating to the experiences of others under the normative assumption that their experience should reflect your own, and demanding conformity when said experiences diverge. If this sounds like the logic of colonialism and empire, that’s because it is. When I critically analyze the framework of identification and the Euro-American construction of “asexual identity,” I can’t help but wonder how much of this logic is at play. It’s not that there are white aces running around foisting their supposedly universal experiences on others through the form of asexual identity, but rather the hegemonic role that identity takes in aspec discourses. Is the vast expanse of nonsexual or asexual ways of being really reducible to the semiosis of an artificially colored vanilla layer cake? 

You know that I have some degree of appreciation for Joseph Massad’s work, despite the many important criticisms that have been raised over the years. When it comes to my unease with sexual identity, I find that Massad’s provincialization of sexual identity within what he calls “Western sexual epistemology”—the demand of truth upon sexual desire and the use of confession to extract said truth in the process of producing one’s “self”—helps me to articulate why I, at times, get so tired of the inward-facing discourse around absence or paucity of sexual attraction that can saturate aspec spaces. Like, yes, this discourse does describe the experiences of a certain community of people, but it also fails to account for the experiences of (racialized) others, as Alok Vaid-Menon (2014) and Ianna Hawkins Owen have pointed out (2018), as well as the diverse forms of nonsexualities that people engage in across the world (Singh 2022, 148; Wong 2015). 

When I first read Asexual Erotics back in the summer of 2021, I was trying to figure out how to balance my criticisms of (a)sexuality and my growing involvement in aspec advocacy in Taiwan. I recognize something of a shared sensibility in the pages of your book: a deep appreciation and respect for what has been able to gather under the sign of “asexuality” qua sexual identity since the turn of the century (the community, the terminology, the zines, the inventiveness), but more importantly, a yearning for something broader and more capacious that can hold together all of the myriad relations and intimacies that exceed the sexual. And of course, these two commitments aren’t necessarily in conflict with each other, as your writing so beautifully demonstrates. For instance, you write: “Asexual elaborations of other forms of attraction implicitly question the basis of grounding identities and orientations in sexual desire, thereby also questioning, more broadly, modern systems of sexuality that have been taking shape since the late seventeenth century in Western settler contexts” (5).  Your work, broadly, and Asexual Erotics, specifically, have taught me how to both speak in the register of asexual identity without letting my exasperations get the best of me and speak about asexualities in a way that exceeds identificatory frames. 

In terms of my aspec advocacy in Taiwan, I’ve done a mix of identity-focused asexual visibility work and public talks that attempt to shift the conversation to examples of asexual erotics and resonances such as the radical feminist and lesbian separatist politics from the late sixties and early seventies you write about in chapter one of your book. I find the discussions arising from the latter to be the most engaging. Another anecdote: 

In my one of my public talks on asexuality, I spent a little more time unpacking your larger argument in Asexual Erotics for moving beyond Freud towards a Lordean understanding of the erotic underpinning all creative activity and moments of deeply felt connection. I took time to explain more fully Lorde’s distinction between sensation (the pornographic) and feeling (the erotic), as well as her understanding of the erotic as “sharing deeply any pursuit with another person” and unlocking the capacity to “feel deeply” all aspects of our lives. During the Q&A discussion, a woman who explicitly introduced herself as not being asexual shared about her frustrations navigating other peoples’ perceptions and assumptions about an intimate friendship she has with one of her male bandmates. Having been accused on multiple occasions of “stringing him along,” she rejected the presumption of sexual interest and instead emphasized the life-giving pleasures she feels when making music with this friend or spending long hours by the riverside conversing with him deep into the night. Under the sign of asexual erotics, this participant found space to finally voice the experiences of artistic, conversational, and platonic erotics that she shares with her bandmate. 

In moments like these I feel, at the level of Lordean erotic potential, splashes of possibility in the conversation space in and around asexuality being taken up by a broader world becoming more hospital to aspec flourishing. And the thing is, I consistently encounter people throughout my advocacy work here in Taiwan who are clearly not on the asexuality spectrum but who nevertheless “feel it” too, like one of the other core members of Taiwan Asexual Group who doesn’t identify as aspec but nevertheless has continued doing aspec advocacy for over eight years now. My own position is that all of these experiences and people who may not conform to the contemporary logic of aspec identification are all a valid part of this larger conversation and community at the edges of compulsory sexuality. Asexual erotics strikes me as a framework that can gather these supposed “anomalies” together in a way that asexual identity cannot. 

Like Kim TallBear and her platonic polyamorous triad with Noriko and Jun. In a keynote talk, TallBear shares: “I may be more dedicated to my triadic relationship with Jun and Noriko than I have ever been dedicated to a dyadic romance” (2021). The three of them do regular visits across Canada and Japan, TallBear spending December and New Years in Toyko, Nori and Jun doing sabbaticals in Edmonton and requesting that TallBear “keep a room for them” in the future. I was especially excited to see you engage TallBear’s scholarship further in your most recent work because there are so many resonances between TallBear’s relational practices and your articulation of asexual erotics. Here’s an excerpt from a 2019 podcast interview she did that I think we can both appreciate together: 

I think if we defetishize sex and we get away from sex as an object … that will enable us to acknowledge that we’re already in multiple kinds of relations; we have multiple responsibilities, and by the way, that can carry over or loop back into what we would now call our “sex life” or our “love life.” I should also say there are asexual polyamorists. Asexual people have taught me a lot. And why should they even have to identify as asexual? Because you’re categorizing sex into genitalia probably at that point, right? So that’s what I mean about objectifying sex. So why do they have to out themselves as asexual? Why can’t they just say “I’m in multiple loving relationships” or “I’m in one loving relationship”? … [T]here are many different people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, that are engaged in all kinds of relations with other people and with non-humans, but they are compelled in a settler society to categorize themselves as monogamous, as straight, as queer, as this, as that. You know, there’s all these silos and categories that are anti-relational. If we are really thinking about being in good relation, that will actually deemphasize our need to categorize ourselves like we do and like settlers tell us we have to do so they can manage us (TallBear 2019).

There’s a similar movement here from identity (“Why do they have to out themselves as asexual?” to erotics (“Why can’t they just say ‘I’m in multiple loving relations’ or ‘I’m in one loving relationship’?”) like we’ve been discussing throughout this letter. There is even the bold suggestion that the will-to-identity is “anti-relational” (“Well, fuck em’!”)—but let’s not get stuck there. 

I think that it’s fair to say that, while (a)sexual identity cannot be taken as a universal, perhaps relations—or what some philosophers might call our “constitutive relationality”—can. I read Asexual Erotics as moving away from identity and towards a space where relationality and the erotic overlap, a space that is much more open to capacitating all nonsexual ways of relating regardless of aspec identification. Though you rightfully question “the validity of seeking a transcendental erotics ‘as a concept that can be universally applied to various communities’” (26), I wonder whether this caveat is premature given all of what is already gathering under the sign of asexual erotics, such as writing in epistolary voice, making music with friends, and spending New Years in Tokyo. If asexual erotics refer to “the ‘asexual’ currents, moments, and erotic energies in all lives” (27), then what exactly is the limit of “all”? I think that asexual erotics has the potential of wielding a degree of universality in a way that asexual identity fails to do. What do you think?

Sincerely,
Yo-Ling 

References:

Owen, Ianna Hawkins. 2018. “Still, Nothing: Mammy and Black Asexual Possibility.” Feminist Review 120 (1): 70-84. 

Singh, Pragati. 2022. “Asexuality Activism in India and Its Unique Position.” International Journal of Sexual Health 34, sup1 (2022): 148. https://doi.org/10.1080/19317611.2022.2017618.

TallBear, Kim. 2021. “Love in the Promiscuous Style.” Unsettle. https://kimtallbear.substack.com/p/love-in-the-promiscuous-style.   

TallBear, Kim. 2019. “Decolonizing Sex.” Interview by Matika Wilbur and Adrienne Keene. All My Relations. Audio, 43:24, https://www.allmyrelationspodcast.com/podcast/episode/468a0a6b/decolonizing-sex.

Vaid-Menon, Alok. 2014. “What’s R(ace) Got To Do With It?: White Privilege & (A)sexuality.” Media Diversified. https://mediadiversified.org/2014/05/03/whats-race-got-to-do-with-it-white-privilege-asexuality/. 

Wong, Day. 2015. “Asexuality in China’s sexual revolution: Asexual marriage as coping strategy.” Sexualities 18 (1-2): 100-116. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460714544812.

 Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics is a refreshing take on interpretations of asexuality as a way of understanding, as well as a separation from its usual binary attachment to sexuality. Przybylo uses asexuality here to examine the complexity of asexual identity, by analyzing asexuality in relation to protest, failed lesbian erotics, childhood development, and aging. Engagement with these themes shows us as readers how complex understandings of asexuality can be. 

On Nonsexuality

In the introduction, Przybylo lays the groundwork for her approach to studying asexuality. She describes using the terms asexuality as well as nonsexuality. Przybylo states that:

“Nonsexuality” is also a useful term because it helps make sense of the ways that various articulations and iterations of low sexual desire and sexual absence, although they have always existed, have not always been nameable as “asexuality” or coalesced under an identity of asexuality that has subjective meaning for those who use it (29).

I can’t help but examine my own experiences with this concept of nonsexuality. Growing up Mexican American in a predominantly Latiné and Catholic area, it felt as if nonsexuality was expected of me. I learned the term “asexuality” before college, but before then, I was never able to give a name to my sexual orientation. The social norms that I grew up with in Mexican culture told me that my experience as nonsexual was common, even though I knew it wasn’t. 

While Przybylo notes that the label of asexuality is more often aligned with and understood in terms of white bodies, a different kind of whiteness imposed by the colonial history of Latin America resulted in a hyper sexualization and villainization of Indigenous women, while simultaneously imposing nonsexuality on colonized women (Lugones 2008). We can see this villainization of Indigenous women through historical accounts of women like Malitzin, also known as La Malinche, a Mexican Indigenous woman who was given as a slave to Spanish conquistadors and who ultimately came to serve as a translator and advisor for the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes (Alarcón 2002) Despite her reality of forced servitude, Malitzin is often portrayed as a willful traitor to Indigenous Mexico; a power hungry, calculating, and promiscuous woman who became Cortes’ mistress. This is because Mexican ideas of feminine sexuality fall under the maria paradox, with virgin-like sexuality being attributed to Marianismo and motherhood, which often ties behavior to strict Catholic practices (Gil and Vasquez 1996; Lara 2008). The story of Malitzin is often portrayed as the other; as disobedient and overtly sexual, and therefore, the opposite of what is expected of women who comply with the expectations of Marianismo. The story of Malitzin serves as a warning for young women of what happens when you go against expectations.

The concept of Marianismo describes the social norms of femininity amongst Catholic Latinas, with meekness, dutifulness, chastity, and sexual purity being a part of this understanding (Gil and Vasquez 1996). Strict behavioral norms and scripts came to dominate the expectations of how Mexican, and in my case, Mexican American women should behave in relation to Marianismo. The Spanish used Catholicism as a tool to impose white supremacy amongst the Indigenous populations in Latin America. Conquistadors claimed that the firm standards of Catholicism would correct the “backwards” nature of the Indigenous populations. The Spanish also intertwined Catholicism with strict patriarchal values in Mexico, imposing rigid expectations of obedience and purity from women (Powers 2005). Although purity, celibacy, and chastity do not equate to asexuality or non-sexuality, the expectations of Marianismo usually go beyond simple celibacy and chastity. There is often an expectation of absolute disinterest, and in some cases, repulsion by the idea of sex and sexual attraction. The act of sex itself is deemed a “necessary evil,” meant only for procreation (Gil and Vasquez 1996).

In my own case, I now realize that my lack of sexual interest, which was understood as “normal” and “expected” under Marianismo, was actually just my asexuality. I would often hear people say that sexual attraction was not the most important thing in a relationship, or that sexual attraction would come later, after getting to know someone, or that eventually I would find someone that I would have an interest in. As Przybylo writes here:

Expectations that adults will grow into being sexual—that is, grow into being interested   in sex and propelled by sexual desire—are grounded in ideas about the naturalness of sexuality and reproduction as emblems of a fit, able, and willing white citizenry (93).

Nonsexuality is the presumed default until adulthood. It was “normal” to not feel sexual attraction until it wasn’t. The expectations created by Marianismo meant that, while growing up, it was okay and even expected for me to identify with feelings that I now realize construct my asexuality. Under Marianismo, a “good” daughter was one who had no interest in the opposite sex. When I was considered “too old” to be uninterested in relationships, nonsexuality was no longer understood or acceptable. Przybylo’s point about asexuality not always being namable feels particularly poignant to me here. Family members assumed that because I was not interested in heterosexual relationships, I must be a lesbian. Having no name or explanation to understand me, they defaulted to the terms that they knew. This also falls in-line with the references that Przybylo makes to frames of asexuality as “as a marker of immaturity, closetedness, presexuality, or stunted development” (92). This really shows the limitations of an assumed sexual binary in society. 

While nonsexuality is expected and understood to a certain point under Marianismo, this does not reflect the harmful way that Latina women are understood through the perspective of American whiteness. Przybylo notes: 

Through holding white childhood “pure” and nonwhite childhood “suspect,” childhood is positioned as an uneven terrain, dependent less on age than on race, class, and global location. “Innocence,” including the presumed sexual innocence of asexuality, becomes routinely attributable more to white bodies and white children than to brown and black bodies and children (94).

In American media, Latinas are often portrayed through sexualized stereotypes. They are portrayed as fiery, hot-blooded, aggressive, and sexual. Even young Latinas do not escape these stereotypes, as we can see through the targeting of young Latinas in programs that provide contraceptive education and care (Mann 2013). While there is nothing wrong with these types of programs, and they serve an important purpose, the belief that they are more necessary amongst Black and Brown bodies holds with it assumptions of irresponsibility and impulsivity (Gattamorta, Salerno, and Castro 2019). These assumptions follow Black and Brown bodies into adulthood and are related to the ideas of sex and reproduction “as emblems of a fit, white citizenry” that Przybylo mentions (93). 

Much of the reproductive care provided today still revolves around ideas of pregnancy and pregnancy prevention. The assumption is that “responsible” citizens will take steps to prevent pregnancy if they do not wish to be pregnant (Brian, Grzanka, and Mann 2020). These steps include the use of contraceptives, especially long-acting, reversible contraceptives, which are touted as the “most effective” way of preventing pregnancy (Stoddard, McNicholas, and Peipert 2011). Black and Brown bodies are also presumed to be hyper-fertile. In the case of Latiné bodies, there is a historical interpretation amongst white Americans that envisions Latiné bodies as a hyper-sexual, hyper-fertile, invasive threat (Chavez 2013). 

On Protest Celibacy

Another point that piqued my interest was Przybylo’s mention of anti-racist celibacy, and other forms of protest celibacy. This concept is not modern, as Przybylo mentions Lysistrata, the Greek play in which Lysistrata unites the women of Greece in a pact of celibacy to end the Peloponnesian war. The idea is that if the Greek women abstain from sex with their husbands, their husbands will eventually be pressured into ending the war. While the protest celibacies that Przybylo mentions took place during the 1960s and 1970s, discussions of protest celibacy as a political tactic saw a new resurgence after the Supreme Court ruling on the challenge to Roe v. Wade (Stoya 2022). Protest celibacy was used as a rallying cry by many who were outraged at the result of the Supreme Court decision to restrict abortion access. Calls were made in both public and private, in physical and digital spaces to stop having sex.

Reactions to this call varied. While many agreed with the need for a demonstration against the court’s regressive ruling, others questioned the impact of these types of protest. Critics also questioned whether this reduced people with wombs to just heterosexual, reproductive bodies (Reece 2022). Critiques were also raised about whether this call for protest celibacy lacked an intersectional perspective. It is important to note that past restrictions on abortion access were rooted in white supremacist and eugenic beliefs. Fear of “irresponsibility” amongst white women and a declining white population spurred the push for the criminalization of abortions (Solinger 2013). While current restrictions on reproductive choice might not be so vocal about their white supremacist leanings, the fact remains that they remain. This is especially true when it comes to discussions of reproduction and population control (Ross 2016). Ultimately, white supremacy and compulsory sexuality both impact Latinas in tandem. Not only have they led to a dichotomous existence under the maria paradox/sexual stereotypes, but white supremacy and compulsory sexuality have also led to violations of human rights, such as forced sterilization (Chavez 2013; Gutiérrez 2008).

References:

Alarcón, Norma. 2002. “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-vision Through Malintzin/ or Malintzin Putting Flesh Back on the Object.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrié L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, 202–11. Berkley: Third Woman Press.

Brian, Jenny D., Grzanka, Patrick R. and Emily S. Mann. 2020. “The Age of LARC: Making Sexual Citizens on the Frontiers of Technoscientific Healthism.” Health Sociology Review 29(3): 312–28.

Chavez, Leo R. 2013. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gattamorta, Karina A., Salerno, John P. and Amanda J. Castro. 2019. “Intersectionality and Health Behaviors Among US High School Students: Examining Race/Ethnicity, Sexual Identity, and Sex.” Journal of School Health 89(10), 800–08. https://doi.org/10.1111/josh.12817

Gil, Rosa Maria, and Carmen Inoa Vasquez. 1996. The Maria Paradox: How Latinas Can Merge Old World Traditions with New World Self-Esteem. New York: Putnam Adult.

Gutiérrez, Elena R. 2008. Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproduction. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Lara, Irene. 2008. “Goddess of the Américas in the Decolonial Imaginary: Beyond the Virtuous Virgen/Pagan Puta Dichotomy.” Feminist Studies 34(1/2), 99–127. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20459183

Lugones, Maria. 2008. “The Coloniality of Gender.” Worlds & Knowledge Otherwise 2 (Spring), 1–17.

Mann, Emily. 2013. “Regulating Latina Youth Sexualities through Community Health Centers: Discourses and Practices of Sexual Citizenship.” Gender and Society 27(5), 681–703. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891243213493961

Powers, Karen Vieira. 2005. Women in the Crucible of Conquest: The Gendered Genesis of Spanish American Society, 1500-1600. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press.

Reece, Brooklyn. 2022. “Stop Telling Women to Do A “Sex Strike” in Post-Roe America.” Medium, June 25, 2022. https://medium.com/bits-of-brooklyn/stop-telling-women-to-do-a-sex-strike-in-post-roe-america-b8b4a2911ce8

Ross, Loretta J. 2016. “The Color of Choice: White Supremacy and Reproductive Justice.” Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Durham: Duke University Press.

Solinger, Rickie. 2013. Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stoddard, Amy, McNicholas, Colleen, and Jeffery F. Peipert. 2011. “Efficacy and safety of long-acting reversible contraception.” Drugs 71(8), 969–80. https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/11591290-000000000-00000

Stoya, Jessica. 2022. “My Wife Is on a Campaign to Get All Our Friends to Stop Having Sex With Their Husbands.” Slate. https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/07/sex-strike-wife-abortion-advice.html