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

by Sherronda J. Brown

They can never refute us as epistemic authorities on our own lives, as knowers of ourselves.

All of our lives we have experienced ourselves as queer, as not belonging, as the essence of queer … queer not as being about who you’re having sex with—that can be a dimension of it—but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.

Centering queerness around sex leaves very little room for queer folks for whom sex is insignificant, or for whom sex is never or rarely possible, or for queer folks who have never had sex before, or for queer folks whose only sexual experiences have been violent. It also leaves a lot of queer people, especially young ones, feeling pressured to have a certain amount or a certain type of sex in order to legitimate or prove their queerness to themselves or to someone else.

We owe more to our queer selves than rearticulating the cunning violences and mandates of cisheteropatriarchy and imposing them on ourselves.

We are allowed to map out our lives according to our own queer desires and aspirations, because queer timelines need not align with the chrononormative mandates of cisheteropatriarchal systems.

Again and again we see the conflation of sex, marriage, and reproduction with true adulthood, and the criteria for that adulthood is tied to capitalism and the patriarchal nuclear family—which takes its moniker from the belief that this particular family structure is and should be the nucleus, or the center, of society.