Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

by Angela Chen

The Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist lesbian group that existed in the 1970s, would have understood what Selena was expressing. Their famous Combahee River Collective Statement coined the term “identity politics” and discussed the ways that multiple identities overlap. The Combahee members observed, as many would after them, that “major systems of oppression are interlocking.” Racial oppression is difficult to separate from class oppression and from gender-based or sexual oppression because they are experienced simultaneously and “the synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives,” resulting in, for example, “racial–sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual.”4 Asian men and Asian women share a race but not a gender, and sexuality is mediated by both, so the experience of identity and sex for, say, me and for one of my male cousins can be very different. Scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw addressed this phenomenon when she coined the term intersectionality in a 1989 law article that pointed out a major weakness in anti-discrimination law: it only acknowledges a single axis of oppression.5