In a portrayal of asexuality on Fox network’s medical drama House in 2012, a couple enters the doctor’s office. They are white, young, attractive, presumably able-bodied, heterosexual, and married. They also both identify as asexual. Getting caught in the orbit of Dr. Greg House (played by Hugh Laurie) and his team of doctors due to a simple bladder infection, the wife and her husband become promptly suspect in their asexuality and subject to a series of medical tests. As the episode unfolds, Dr. House persists in his disbelief of asexuality, and asexuality becomes undermined, erased, and misrepresented on two fronts. Whereas the husband is found to have a brain tumor that “caused” his asexuality, his partner is found to be lying about her asexuality in order to make her husband happy. Together and asexual for ten years, House teaches its audience that the couple’s asexuality is impossible. In the words of Dr. House, we learn only that sex is “the fundamental drive of our species, sex is healthy” and that “the only people who don’t want it are either sick, dead, or lying” (House).
The goal of this chapter is to challenge such ideas of compulsory sexuality. Asexual or ace activism along with asexuality studies scholarship has in the last two decades begun to name and analyze the centralization of sex and sexuality, particularly in Western contexts. This centralization includes beliefs that sex is at the heart of a romantic relationship, that it is key to coming of age and maturation, and that it is vital to keeping bodies healthy across the lifespan. Sex is used in service of building intimacy, seeking pleasure and orgasm, playing and recreation, and creating and maintaining social bonds and companionship. It is widely talked about in the media as a source of pleasure and health. Similarly, sexuality features centrally in Western contexts as the innermost expression of who we are as individuals.
Terms such as compulsory sexuality explain the social expectation that sexuality is a universal norm, that everyone should be sexual and desire sex, and that to not be sexual or desire sex is inherently wrong and in need of fixing (Emens 2014; Gupta 2015; Przybylo 2011). In House’s pernicious portrayal of asexuality, we see compulsory sexuality at work. Sexual attraction and the pull to sex is portrayed as so central to human life, that asexuality is represented as impossible, as a fabrication, and as a problem to be resolved. Such representations erase the experiences of asexual people in a social context where sex and sexuality are understood as central to the self, to health, and to a meaningful relationship. As this chapter will outline, asexuality scholars and activists push back against such ideas of compulsory sexuality, arguing that asexuality is a viable form of self-identification that can foster new forms of communities, ways of relating, and vocabularies of understanding the self.
As with many other sexual orientations, asexuality encompasses a broad range of practices, feelings, and self-narratives. The Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), an online gathering space of asexual knowledge and community formation, outlines “an asexual person [as] a person who does not experience sexual attraction” and asexuality as “the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity” (AVEN). Although sexual attraction is relative in terms of social, historical, and relational contexts, asexuality refers to the sexual orientation of those people who have low levels of interest in sex, in having sex with others, and in thinking of others in terms of sex. Asexuality, then, is an umbrella term for all individuals who have a disinterest or aversion to sex, sexual practices, and the role of sex in relationships. It cuts across other sexual orientations such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, and straight as well as monogamous and polyamorous.
One way for thinking about asexuality is through an asexual-sexual spectrum, on which everyone can be placed, with a few people occupying the extreme ends (Storms 1980). Just as few individuals are strictly straight or gay, but instead manifest an intricate mixture of attractions, desires, and practices, thinking about an asexual-sexual spectrum moves us away from a binary model of “sexuals” (or allosexuals) versus “asexuals.” Such an approach suggests that no one is categorically “sexual,” and thus questions around asexuality are relevant and salient for everyone. In this way asexuality is not separate from sexuality but the two rely on each other for meaning.
The asexual or ace community has generated a new vocabulary that contributes to our thinking on sexuality from an asexual perspective. Organized around the online platform AVEN, other virtual spaces ranging from blogs to Facebook groups, TikTok to Tumblr, and through local gatherings, meet-ups, and conferences, asexual activists also coordinate an annual “Asexual Awareness Week,” partake in Pride Parades in cities including Toronto, San Francisco, and London, and organize an International Asexuality Conference, first held at World Pride 2014 in Toronto. Importantly, though English dominates on AVEN, asexual people and communities exist worldwide, including in Japan, China, India, Poland, and Serbia, to name just a few countries (Batričević and Cvetić 2016; Kobayashi 2017; Kumar 2017; Kurowicka and Przybylo 2019; Wong 2015). One term that has come out of online conversations in the asexual community is gray-asexual or gray-A. Gray-asexual can be used by anyone who experiences some level of sexual attraction but for whom sexual attraction and desire for sex play a minor role, or by those who experience sexual attraction infrequently (AVENwiki).
Demisexual, on the other hand, describes a person for whom sexual attraction develops only after they feel very close and intimate with someone. Both gray-asexual and demisexual are identity terms developed by the asexual community to more fully account for the complexity of lived experiences of asexuality. Many other terms have also been developed, including aroace (being aromantic and asexual), reciprosexual (feeling sexually attracted only if someone feels sexually attracted to them first), and aceflux (or someone who experiences a fluctuating sexual orientation though they are often on the asexual end of the spectrum). These and many other terms demonstrate that it is impossible to come up with a single definition that will work to explain people’s unique engagements with asexuality across social contexts.
Another set of identity-related concepts that have flourished in and beyond the ace community are those of romantic and aromantic attraction. People who are aromantic, or aro, experience little or no romantic attraction to others and may be either sexual or asexual (aroace), as well as queer, lesbian, bisexual, gay, pansexual, or straight as well as polyamorous and monogamous. The concept of romantic attraction relates to the Split Attraction Model developed by ace and aro communities; the model suggests that in addition to an asexual-sexual continuum, there is also an aromantic-romantic one (Elgie 2020). Aromantic people often prioritize friendships, are “friend-focused,” as well as build queerplatonic relationships that decenter the idea of a romantic dyad as the central organizing relationship in life (Chasin 2015: 176). The addition of an aromantic-romantic spectrum on which everyone falls, further adds complexity to understandings of intimacy, relationships, and sexuality, and removes the burden of sexual attraction as the sole indicator of attraction.
Further, asexuality scholar, Mark Carrigan (2011), observes that there are at least three general attitudes to sex among people who are asexually-identified. The first attitude, sex positivity, sees sex as a positive and validating experience even when the person may not necessarily desire sexual activity. The second, sex-neutrality, marks a disinterest in sex. Finally, a sex-averse or anti-sex disposition is a visceral understanding of sex as gross and unpleasant. Also, it is important to point out that being asexual does not preclude a person from having sex or partaking in kink, BDSM, or other practices usually understood as sexual. This is the case for several reasons. First, BDSM is often a site for asexual people to explore power, bodies, and sensuality even if they do not experience sexual attraction (Sloan 2015; Winter-Gray and Hayfield 2019). Second, asexual people might have sex for reasons other than sexual attraction, such as pleasing their partner/s, building intimacy, or because they feel neutral about the experience of sex. To understand this, it is useful to keep in mind that identities and practices/behaviors do not always align, and that having practices that are not in line with one’s identity or orientation does not invalidate one’s orientation (for instance, having sex with a woman – cis or trans – if one is a gay man, does not make one “less gay”).
Scholars who study the physiology around asexuality suggest that people who are asexual are capable of genital arousal but may experience difficulty with so-called subjective arousal. So, although the body becomes aroused, subjectively – at the level of the mind and emotions – one does not experience arousal (Brotto and Yule 2011; also see Carrigan 2011). Based on the existing scientific body of literature, asexuality has been defined in a variety of ways, including as a low level of sexual attraction, as not practicing sexual behaviors, or simply as self-identifying as asexual (Aicken et al. 2013; Van Houdenhove et al. 2014). Psychologists Morag Yule, Lori Brotto, and Boris Gorzalka have developed an Asexuality Identification Scale (2015) that, through a series of 12 questions, can be used to assess whether or not someone is asexual. The questions ask, for instance, whether the person experiences sexual attraction to other people, whether they avoid situations where sex might be expected, and whether an ideal relationship from the person’s perspective would have sexual activity (159–160). Quantitative studies cite prevalence rates of asexuality as between 0.4% to 1.05% of the general population (Aicken et al. 2013; Bogaert 2004), with some studies even indicating rates of up to 5.5% (Poston and Baumle 2010). At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that these studies draw on preexisting data and only draw on survey content from specific first world, Western countries (both Aicken et al. and Bogaert look at the United Kingdom; Poston and Baumle look at the United States).
As queer asexuality studies scholar, KJ Cerankowski (2014) mentions, though asexuality is experienced and lived diversely, there has been a tendency toward a singular narrative of asexuality forefronting portrayals of asexuality. As an example, Anthony Bogaert in his book on asexuality talks about the “true asexual” as “the real deal – that is, a complete lack of sexual attraction and/or sexual interest … – not just a middle-age, on-again, off-again, malaise about sex [but] hard-core asexuality” (2012: 5). Although Bogaert’s work has been instrumental to public visibility around asexuality, this sort of statement provides an inaccurate and limiting sense of what asexuality might entail and what it means for people’s lives. Namely, the dominant story that it presents to the public relies on understandings of asexuality as being lifelong, absolute, and constant throughout one’s life, and as innate and categorically not a “choice” but rather as something one is “born with” (Hinderliter 2009; Przybylo and Cooper 2014). Such definitions reproduce a homogenized and inaccurate notion of what asexuality entails. For instance, it is unfair to hold asexual people to the standard of their identities being lifelong and unchanging because sexuality itself is likely to change throughout one’s lifespan, as the conditions and contexts of our lives undergo change. Likewise, to assume that asexuality is never a choice and is something one is “born with” discounts the ways in which our sexualities are made sense of in socially situated contexts, where we choose what we do or do not do sexually based on what is available and possible for us. In other words, our sexuality is never strictly something we are “born with” or “a choice” but a mixture of both these components. Bogaert’s sense of asexuality also undercuts people’s authority to depict for themselves what sexual stance and identification makes sense for them at a certain point in time.
Finally, to assume that to be asexual one must self-identify is to rule out the many ways in which people might not even think of identifying as asexual, either because they have never heard the term or because they do not feel that the term is inclusive of the type of person they are. Bogaert’s stance on asexuality, as exemplified by the preceding passage, makes people who identify as asexual vulnerable to having to “prove” that they are indeed asexual and that they are not undergoing a “phase” or “on-again, off-again” disinclination toward sex (2012: 5). This places stress on asexuals to have to “demonstrate” and “perform” their asexuality, a common discriminatory tactic that erodes the legitimacy of self-identification. Such a definition also serves to limit who can qualify as asexual, scaring away people who might otherwise meaningfully think of their sexualities in terms of asexuality. As queer asexuality studies scholars, Ela Przybylo and Danielle Cooper (2014) point out, statements such as Bogaert’s come to function as part of the “truth archive” of asexuality, which, drawing primarily on physiological and quantitative studies, showcases a very specific story about asexuality and who can “count” as asexual. Such accounts function to push other lived experiences of asexuality to the margins of discourse and possibility.
Given that there are many ways to define, experience, and identify as asexual, it is possible to think of asexuality in the plural, as asexualities (Cerankowski and Milks 2014). A shift from singular asexuality to plural asexualities highlights the various experiences that are possible within the asexuality umbrella, such as those depicted by the terms gray-asexual, demisexual, romantic, aromantic, and beyond. Asexualities in the plural also better accounts for the ways in which sexual attraction is relative in terms of relational, social, and historical contexts. This makes the identity of asexuality highly contingent on the level of sexual attraction that is considered normal in a given social context. As such, asexuality is necessarily a commentary on normative levels of sex and sexual desire and on who should be experiencing them. The following section considers asexuality in conversation with race, disability, and gender, demonstrating that these subject positions contribute to understandings of who is expected to be sexual, and conversely, who is barred from being sexual.
Discourses around compulsory sexuality (Emens 2014; Gupta 2015), sexusociety (Przybylo 2011), sexual normalcy (Kim 2014), or sexual normativity (Chasin 2011) constitute a series of ideals around how people should relate to each other sexually. These discourses, or bodies of knowledge, are subject to flux and alteration across historical moments. For instance, contemporary Western culture emphasizes the sexual imperative, a technique that functions to prioritize both sex and sexuality, through (1) privileging sex over other forms of relating, touch, and other activities; (2) centralizing sexuality in the project of self-making and self-knowledge; (3) attaching sex to health; and (4) hinging sex to a coupled relationship, to love, and to intimacy. Together, these ideas about the role sex and sexuality should play in our lives comprise sexusociety, or a society that is heavily organized around the conviction that sexuality is a universal element of our lives and relationships (Przybylo 2011). Compulsory sexuality is also interwoven with what feminist philosopher Elizabeth Brake (2012) names amatonormativity, or the encouragement of romantic relationships, usually in a coupled or dyadic formation, over other types of relationships. Brake (2012: 88) writes that there is a “disproportionate focus on marital and amorous love relationships as special sites of value, and the assumption that romantic love is a universal goal [and that] a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal for humans.” The effect of amatonormativity is that it centralizes romantic coupledom – such as girlfriend-boyfriend arrangements, engagement, and marriage – while sidelining other forms of relationships including kinship networks, friendships, and partnerships that are platonic in nature. Compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity work together to encourage relationships that are both sexual and romantic in nature as the “preferred” and sometimes only form of relationship possible. The presumption of compulsory sexuality is also interlaced with ideas around heterosexuality, race, gender, and ability.
Feminist critical disability studies scholar Eunjung Kim (2014) demonstrates how the expectation of sexuality and the accompanying pathologization of asexuality arose in dialogue with racist, sexist, and ableist discourses. For instance, although we are encouraged to hold sex and sexual desire as a moral good, we are also encouraged to do so on specific terms, and certain forms of sex and sexuality are regarded as more appropriate, healthy, or good. In particular, coupled heterosexuality organized around the centerpiece of coitus (penis penetration of the vagina aimed at male ejaculation) is continually upheld as the most essential type of relationship and vital sex act (Gavey 2005; Rubin 1984).
Ideals of compulsory sexuality and levels of sexual desire are deeply bound to notions of normative bodies characterized not only by a promotion of heterosexuality but also by whiteness, able-bodiedness, and androcentric sexual ideals (or masculine-focused sexuality). As such, “many individuals with disabilities, older people, children, intersex people, transgender people, lesbians, and ethnic, racialized, and impoverished others are often thought of as not being, or not being entitled to be, sexual” (Kim 2014: 250). People with disabilities are routinely met with the forced expectation of nonsexuality. If marked as disabled, you are denied sexual pleasure, presumed to not be physiologically and emotionally capable of sex, and dissuaded from sex to discourage reproduction (Shuttleworth 2012: 176). Barring the disabled from sex is tightly linked with notions of whose life is deemed livable and whose life is considered worthy of reproducing. At its most extreme, people deemed “unfit” to reproduce by the state, such as people with disabilities as well as racialized people, have and continue to be forcibly sterilized (i.e., Lund and Johnson 2015; Davis 1983; Roberts 1997).
Desexualization is a forced imposition of nonsexuality resting on the assumption that some people should not desire and engage in sex and that sex is only for the able-bodied (Kim 2010). This distinction between desexualization and asexuality is important because it allows us to perceive the difference between enforcing nonsexuality as a tool of marginalization, and the self-identificatory claiming of asexuality as a sexual orientation. Whereas with desexualization one is left without say or choice and is barred from sexual expression, claiming an asexual identity is an exercise in sexual expression. Writing on asexuality and disability, Emily Lund and Bayley Johnson indicate that
[w]hereas asexuality may be regarded with suspicion or disbelief in general society, the assumption of asexuality has been forced, usually inaccurately, on many people with disabilities. In other words, “people” are assumed to be sexual whereas “people with disabilities” are assumed to be asexual.
(2015: 129)
In similar ways, aging adults are also frequently desexualized, with the assumption that aging bodies neither desire nor are entitled to sexual pleasure.
In contrast, some racialized people and communities are thought to be hypersexual, or “excessively” sexual, and thus are met with incredulity if they identify as asexual, whereas others are desexualized, also making it hard to identify as asexual. Critical race and asexuality studies scholar Ianna Hawkins Owen (2014) argues that asexuality is coded as white under white supremacy and that it operates as a demonstration of white sexual ideals of self-mastery, morality, and sexual restraint. She argues that Black people have been generally hypersexualized under white supremacy to justify violence, even while the stereotype of the “mammy” desexualizes Black women to justify their exploitation (Owen 2014). In a different way, whereas Asian and Asian American women are often hypersexualized through imperialist and orientalist discourses stemming from US colonial histories, Asian and Asian American men are paradoxically often desexualized (Shimizu 2007). Further, many women, men, nonbinary, and Two-Spirit people who are Black, Brown, or Indigenous are also hypersexualized in Western contexts (Gupta 2015). Ideals of compulsory sexuality are thus attached not only to particular sexual habits and intensities but also to certain ideas of whose body is most normal, healthy, vital, and socially valuable.
At the same time, because sexuality is taken for granted as necessary to reproducing whiteness, normalcy, and normative bodies (or those bodies who are expected to reproduce, to have sex, and to enjoy sex), asexuality has been in many ways historically diagnosed as a problem in need of medical redress and treatment. For example, there are and have been multiple diagnostic categories focused on pathologizing low levels of sexual desire. Since the late nineteenth century, low sexual desire has been categorized variously as “frigidity,” “sexual anesthesia” (Krafft-Ebing 1886), “inhibited sexual desire” (Lief 1977), “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” (DSM-III-R 1987), and most recently as “female sexual interest/arousal disorder” and “male hypoactive sexual desire disorder” (DSM-V 2013) (also see Kim 2014). Such labels indicate that low levels of sexual desire were seen by sexology and continue to be regarded by scientific medicine as “unhealthy” and abnormal, reflecting more broadly on society’s negative attitudes toward asexuality.
Women are especially vulnerable to being diagnosed as exhibiting low levels of sexual desire. A 2002 study reported that one-third of cisgender women in the United States could fall under the parameters of “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” (Warnock 2002; Kim 2014: 268). The study results suggest that low levels of sexual desire (asexuality included) are a common part of life, especially for cis women. Some feminist theorists argue that women might exhibit lower levels of sexual desire because they do not like the type of sexual activities that are most often encouraged. Namely, feminist theorists have argued that within heteronormative contexts, sex continues to be organized around men’s orgasm, pleasure, satisfaction, and the act of coitus (Irvine 2005; Gavey 2005). In a sense, asexually identified cisgender women challenge patriarchal discourses of women’s sexual availability and notions that sex is necessarily enjoyable and life affirming (Fahs 2010). Asexuality is also historically linked with femininity – and in particular to white, able-bodied, and wealthy femininity – through histories of assuming women’s “passionlessness” while pathologizing women’s “frigidity” (Moore and Cryle 2012). For instance, in marriage advice manuals through the 1950s, “there was a general agreement that wives were more reluctant to have sex than their husbands” (Bourke 2008: 435) and ideas of women’s sexual passivity circulate even to this day (Gavey 2005).
Yet, in contemporary Western culture, to not be sexual is to be positioned as “repressed,” “frigid,” and hostile to projects of sex positivity both on individual and political terms. Moreover, asexual identification also challenges gendered norms of masculinity since it puts a wrench in the “male sexual drive discourse” that holds that men are by default insatiably sexual, driven by the urge to have sex (Hollway 1998: 231). To identify as asexual is to challenge ideas of what “being a man” supposedly means, including virility, health, and sexual aggression (Przybylo 2014).
Notably, contemporary asexual identification is also intertwined with transgender and genderqueer identity. For instance, 26% of respondents in the 2016 Asexual Community Survey identified as neither “female” nor “male,” with 63.3% of those identifying as nonbinary and 48.2% identifying as agender (Bauer et al. 2018: 16). This is also confirmed in academic research with a study indicating that from 66 self-identified asexual participants, 18 chose a nonbinary gender identity such as genderqueer, gender neutral, or androgynous (MacNeela and Murphy 2015: 799). Currently, there is only limited research that explores the intersections of transgender and asexual identification, and the ways in which these two identities are experienced in the context of compulsory sexuality (Cuthbert 2019; Sumerau et al. 2018).
Because asexuality is commonly met with hostility, dislike, and bias, it is important to think about the ways people who are asexual or asexually identified are marginalized and discriminated against in various contexts. Feminist and social theorists have long expanded on the vitriolic prejudice against sexual practices and identities that fall outside the limits of what is considered normal. For instance, in her well-known essay “Thinking Sex,” Gayle Rubin (1984) explored the “charmed circle” of monogamous, heterosexual, coupled, and reproductive sex practices and their reliance on marking other sexual practices as “deviant.” Yet, although Rubin called for a radical politics around sexuality that reevaluated routinely despised sex practices (i.e., promiscuity, masturbation, S/M) and sexual identities (i.e., lesbian or gay), she failed to imagine asexuality as a site of discrimination or as part of her radical theory of sexuality. This failure to imagine asexuality marks the work of much sexuality studies scholarship, crystallizing one of the common forms of discrimination leveled against asexual people: erasure.
Psychologists Cara MacInnis and Gordon Hodson (2012), surveying 148 students at Brock University in Canada, found that antiasexual bias or antiasexual prejudice is a pronounced set of attitudes among college-age students. This is characterized by discriminatory intent toward asexual people, including ideas of asexual people as “deficient,” “less human, and disliked” (740). Asexuality scholars KJ Cerankowski and Megan Milks (2014: 13) argue that “[t]he time has come to recognize the ways in which asexual people are marginalized” and unpack “the negativities attached to the word ‘asexual,’ so often seen as synonymous with pathology, dysfunction, repression, aloneness, antisociality, repulsiveness, unattractiveness, and inhumanness.” Recognizing asexual marginalization and discrimination is a significant political act that works against the widespread erasure of asexuality and directs our attention to thinking politically and socially about what makes asexuals vulnerable to negative intentions. To trace discrimination against asexual people is to recognize asexuality as a sexual identity and situate such discrimination in a sociopolitical context of compulsory sexuality.
For one, asexual people face obstacles to participating fully in both heteronormative and queer publics. Heteronormative publics are heavily guided by the assumption that most “normal” people, at specific times in their lives, must have sex in specific ways. In other words, to fully participate in social life, a person must perform both sex and a desire for sex. Sex, and sexual interest, become markers of “normality,” peer group belonging, health and vitality, and a knowledge of the self. For instance, the assumption that a sexual urge is universal is foundational to everyday conversation. Personal disclosure about sexual experiences, evaluations of who is sexually attractive, and telling stories about one’s personal sexuality are all mainstays of Western conversational bonding. As one participant from a study on asexual masculinity discusses, as an adolescent he had to “play along” with his friends who “were all into porn mags” and checking out girls, feigning a desire for sex in order to fit in but ultimately “los[ing] out socially because […] a lot of social activities seem to be […] centered around sex” (Przybylo 2014: 229).
Queer countercultures, on the other hand, are committed to a radical politics of sex and to sex positivity, which seeks to bust open static sexual norms. This commitment to celebrating a whole host of bodily desires directly challenges heteronormative ideals around what sex looks like and around who should be having sex and experiencing sexual desire. Yet, at the same time, queer publics, in assuming that sex is vital to queer relating, are often exclusionary of asexuality as an equally valid and radical mode of relating to others. Asexual people thus often feel unwelcome, inauthentic, or under investigation in queer communities because so much rests on sex as a practice of sex positivity, queer radicality, and social bonding (Cerankowski and Milks 2014). Thus, in both queer and heteronormative contexts, asexual people experience social exclusion and isolation as a result of the assumption that sex and sexuality are universal and inherent to interpersonal bonding.
Second, asexual people are particularly susceptible to unwanted or coercive sex, particularly when in relationships with allosexual individuals (people who feel sexual attraction to others). Asexual people experience the strain of maintaining their relationships through sex, of meeting their partners’ sexual needs, and of doing performative work to convince their partners that they are enjoying sex. As a result, asexual people experience isolation and exclusion; although many may desire romantic relationships, they may feel that the unwanted sex that will be expected of them is not worth the price (Przybylo 2014). Even with the recent changes to the DSM-V (2013), which exempts self-identified asexuals from diagnoses of “low sexual desire” such as “female sexual interest/arousal disorder” and “male hypoactive sexual desire disorder,” (on the basis that asexual people are not “distressed” by their low interest in sex), asexual people are expected to compromise when in relationships with non-asexual partners (DSM-V 2013). Significantly, medical intervention is often leveled against asexual people in a coupled context, where a lack of sex can easily become understood as a “failure” of the relationship. Medical or therapeutic pressure is placed on the asexual partner to adapt and compromise their needs in order to maintain the relationship with their non-asexual partner (Chasin 2015: 174). Pathologization – or the creation of medical diagnoses and concomitant treatments – is a common form of discriminating against all types of sexual minorities. Asexual people are vulnerable to pathologization and medical treatment because they deviate from ideals of compulsory sexuality in terms of levels of sexual desire. As Kristin Scherrer (2008: 623) writes, “[f]or both LGBTQ and asexual people, one of the locations of discrimination is its historical and contemporary connection to institutions of mental and physical health.”
Finally, as already mentioned, asexual people are rendered unintelligible in a context where sex is so crucial to public and relational belonging. Asexuality is routinely disregarded as “a phase,” and asexual people are culturally stereotyped to be any number of things, including “prudes,” “repressed,” sexually unliberated, “in denial,” unhealthy, or in need of treatment. These common stereotypes are vivid in cultural representations of asexuality. For instance, as discussed in the introduction to this chapter, the portrayal of an asexual couple in the American medical drama House (2012) invalidated asexuality through representing it as both a fiction (in the case of the character who “lies” about her asexuality) and as a medical condition in need of treatment (with the character in whom a brain tumor is identified). Such representations participate in an active erasure of asexuality through undertaking denial narratives (MacNeela and Murphy 2015) and invalidating asexuality as a valid sexual identity. Denial narratives by sexual people might include claims that asexuality is a disorder (pathologization), an immature phase, or something that can be fixed if the “right person” comes along (MacNeela and Murphy 2015: 803). Asexual people are regularly exposed to prying questions by skeptical listeners, who see asexuality as illegitimate and inauthentic, in order to “get to the bottom of this” unknown sexual manifestation. Such questions include personal matters such as masturbation, sexual preferences and habits, and orgasmic capacities. Through denial narratives, harmful stereotypes, and interrogative questioning, asexuality is actively erased as a sexual identity and the difficult identity work undertaken by asexuals is invalidated.
It is important politically to recognize the discrimination asexual people experience because asexuality is so often held as an impossible site and erased from view. As we have seen, even sexuality studies scholarship has typically overlooked and failed to see asexuality as a viable sexual identity. By outlining the discrimination asexual people face, we can work against marginalization and against portraying asexual people as spectacles for consumption by a non-asexual public (Cerankowski 2014). Shifting away from viewing asexuality as an individual abnormality to instead examining how sex is held in particular esteem marks a move toward understanding asexuality’s marginalization. Such a move can push us to think about asexuality as a series of identifications worth celebrating as central to the variability of human attraction and desire. Also, a shift to problematizing compulsory sexuality can bring insight to understandings of sexual and intimate life and to sexuality studies scholarship.
Ela Przybylo is Assistant Professor in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Illinois State University, USA. She is the author of Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality (Ohio State University Press, 2019), an editor of On the Politics of Ugliness (Palgrave, 2018), and author of many peer-reviewed articles and chapters on asexuality, including in such journals as GLQ, Sexualities, Feminism & Psychology, and Journal of Lesbian Studies. Ela is a founding and managing editor of the peer-reviewed, open access journal Feral Feminisms.