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

by Sherronda J. Brown

All queer communities are facing the same enemy: white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy and sexual, relational, and gender normativity.

Our very concept of breakfast in the morning, lunch in the afternoon, and dinner in the evening is informed by white supremacy and colonial violence.

The eternal failure of Black people to meet the white standards set before us—and that failure significantly being marked by our mythologized hypersexuality and lack of innocence—is an integral part of white supremacist logics and the eternal project to define whiteness as “normal.”

Therefore, cisheterosexual sex itself becomes a means of productivity because it is understood to ultimately lead to marriage, procreation, and nuclear families, all of which are integral to patriarchal and white supremacist capitalist systems.

Order and disorder, function and dysfunction, normal and abnormal, healthy and unhealthy are largely socially constructed and socially determined.

Cisheteropatriarchal expectations also dictate that women must strive to live up to the constant pressures of fitting into racist, ableist, anti-fat, capitalist beauty standards and follow established gender roles by never showing “too much” sexual enthusiasm, but always being congenial when their male partners initiate sex, as “turning him down” is perceived as selfish and insubordinate.