Crisis and safety: The asexual in sexusociety

Abstract

This article provides a discussion of the implications that asexuality, as an identity category emerging in the West, carries for sexuality. Asexuality provides an exciting forum for revisiting questions of sexual normativity and examining those sex acts which are cemented to appear ‘natural’ through repetition, in the discursive system of sexusociety. Drawing especially on feminist and postmodern theories, I situate asexuality as both a product of and reaction against our sexusocial, disoriented postmodern here and now. This article also addresses the question of whether or not, and on what terms, asexuality may be considered a resistance against sexusociety.

Rethinking asexuality: A Symbolic Interactionist account

“…In doing so, asexuality operates as a 'non-normative' sexual orientation (Sanger 2010:23) which, in problematising the dominance of 'Sexusociety' (Pryzbolo 2011 'liberal-democratic' selfhood (Gressgård 2013) and political expression (Fahs 2010). In this sense asexuality is posited as a form of anarchist politics, opposed to all forms of contemporary political domination (Pryzbolo 2011, Fahs 2010 or as a 'method' which challenges dominant conceptions of sexuality and intimacy (Pryzbolo 2013).…”

“…In this sense asexuality is posited as a form of anarchist politics, opposed to all forms of contemporary political domination (Pryzbolo 2011, Fahs 2010 or as a 'method' which challenges dominant conceptions of sexuality and intimacy (Pryzbolo 2013). …”

A multidimensional view? Evaluating the different and combined contributions of diaries and interviews in an exploration of asexual identities and intimacies

“…For example, within cultural and gender studies, research and theorising has considered how asexuality problematises the dominance of 'Sexusociety' (Pryzbolo, 2011). However, the research project we discuss here shifted the focus away from asexuality in terms of what it does, and the individualised ways in which it is acquired as an identity, to a consideration of how plural asexual identities develop through social interaction.…”

Unwilling Consumers: A Historical Materialist Conception of Compulsory Sexuality

“…Certainly, radical groups, most prominently a number of anarchist-feminist collectives in the 1970s and 1980s, have made this claim (Fahs, 2010). With proper valence, asexual positionality can be used as a tool to illuminate the distinctly capitalist nature of compulsory sexuality and the modern sexusociety it undergirds and to examine this part of overall social reproduction (Przybylo, 2011).…”

“…Resisting the reification of the identity category of asexual as a new, dialogically structured identity opposed to the allosexual, I attempt to determine its nature as the historically structured and contingent emergence of a particular moment in neoliberal capitalism. From this, I argue there need be no tension between the notions of compulsory sexuality and sexusociety (e.g., Emens, 2014;Przybylo, 2011), and social reproduction analysis (e.g., Federici, 2014;Fraser, 2013;Hennessy, 2000). 1 Instead, asexuality can be used as a positional tool to reveal the totality of sexuality as a reified, commodified entity under late capitalism, which is useful to understand and resist the capitalist historical (re)organization of "the human potential for sensation and affect" (Hennessy, 2000, p. 72).…”