Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives

Description

What is so radical about not having sex? To answer this question, this collection of essays explores the feminist and queer politics of asexuality. Asexuality is predominantly understood as an orientation describing people who do not experience sexual attraction. In this multidisciplinary volume, the authors expand this definition of asexuality to account for the complexities of gender, race, disability, and medical discourse. Together, these essays challenge the ways in which we imagine gender and sexuality in relation to desire and sexual practice. Asexualities provides a critical reevaluation of even the most radical queer theorizations of sexuality. Going beyond a call for acceptance of asexuality as a legitimate and valid sexual orientation, the authors offer a critical examination of many of the most fundamental ways in which we categorize and index sexualities, desires, bodies, and practices. As the first book-length collection of critical essays ever produced on the topic of asexuality, this book serves as a foundational text in a growing field of study. It also aims to reshape the directions of feminist and queer studies, and to radically alter popular conceptions of sex and desire. Including units addressing theories of asexual orientation; the politics of asexuality; asexuality in media culture; masculinity and asexuality; health, disability, and medicalization; and asexual literary theory, Asexualities will be of interest to scholars and students in sexuality, gender, sociology, cultural studies, disability studies, and media culture. Cover Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments Introduction: Why Asexuality? Why Now? PART I Theorizing Asexuality: New Orientations 1 Mismeasures of Asexual Desires 2 Inhibition, Lack of Excitation, or Suppression: fMRI Pilot of Asexuality 3 “There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship”: Asexuality’s Sinthomatics PART II The Politics of Asexuality 4 Radical Identity Politics: Asexuality and Contemporary Articulations of Identity 5 Stunted Growth: Asexual Politics and the Rhetoric of Sexual Liberation 6 On the Racialization of Asexuality PART III Visualizing Asexuality in Media Culture 7 Spectacular Asexuals: Media Visibility and Cultural Fetish 8 Aliens and Asexuality: Media Representation, Queerness, and Asexual Visibility 9 Compulsory Sexuality and Asexual/Crip Resistance in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus PART IV Asexuality and Masculinity 10 “Why Didn’t You Tell Me That I Love You?”: Asexuality, Polymorphous Perversity, and the Liberation of the Cinematic Clown 11 Masculine Doubt and Sexual Wonder: Asexually-Identified Men Talk About Their (A)sexualites PART V Health, Disability, and Medicalization 12 Asexualities and Disabilities in Constructing Sexual Normalcy 13 Asexuality and Disability: Mutual Negation in Adams v. Rice and New Directions for Coalition Building 14 Deferred Desire: The Asexuality of Chronic Genital Pain PART VI Reading Asexually: Asexual Literary Theory 15 “What to Call That Sport, the Neuter Human . . . ”: Asexual Subjectivity in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People 16 Toward an Asexual Narrative Structure Contributors Index