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

by Sherronda J. Brown

Compulsory sexuality is a cage. If we cannot make our own determinations about our sexual lives because of social convention and gendered or racialized expectations of sexuality; if we cannot make our own reproductive choices because we are called on to use our bodies to produce future laborers to be exploited by racial capitalism or to counteract the mythical “white genocide”; if we cannot honor the natural ebb and flow of sexual desire because “low” desire is pathologized as an individual psychological or physiological dysfunction; if we cannot fathom untethering humanness from allosexuality because sexlessness, or near-sexlessness, makes asexuals into animal-like or mechanistic figures in the social imagination; if we cannot envisage and honor a genuine Black asexuality because Blackness and the Black body are hypersexualized, because anti-Black logics relegate the Black asexual to a space of distinct impossibility, then we are not free.