Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture

by Sherronda J. Brown

asexuality can exist, does exist, and should exist in such a way that we don’t need to make utility of it.

It understands that sex can be technically consensual, but still unwanted.

Asexuality is, simply, self-contained sexuality.

white asexuals often claim asexual queerness as a property, just as whiteness itself is claimed as a property, as a space that others are barred from entering into.

challenges made against the existence and validity of asexuality are inherently challenges to sexual boundaries and consent as a whole.

I had always failed to perform heterosexuality correctly, but I was not evidencing my deviation from heterosexuality in a way that some could recognize as queer enough.

If we largely define queerness by whether or not we experience these abuses “enough” to be considered authentic, what room does this leave us to embrace our queer identities outside these abuses, especially when our collective goal is to dismantle them altogether?

Gatekeeping is always about power—in the same way that borders are always about power, in the same way that policing is always about power, in the same way that categorization is often about determining who should have power over whom.

Asexual Is Queer

In a capitalist society, this means that these patterns, and the “maximum productivity” of our bodies—including sex and reproduction—become tied to capitalist interests.

Sex becomes yet another means of productivity to sustain the exploitative system.

Of course, their concern is a lie; in projecting and forcing their own ideas of sexual health onto asexuals, they demonstrate that they have no consideration for how emotionally distressing it is to be repeatedly told that you are a failure, you are sick, you should be “fixed,” you need “help” because your relationship with sex and desire makes other people uncomfortable and challenges their narrow worldview.

Bambi-sexuality, which is defined as “Physical interaction centered more about touching, kissing, and caressing than around genital sexuality.”