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

by Sherronda J. Brown

many queer people center sex in their queerness and conceive of sex acts as the catalysts for queerness itself. And if that’s where queerness was located, and could only be located according to some, then where did that leave me? I wasn’t fucking back against heteropatriarchy, and what’s so radical about not fucking back? What’s so queer about not fucking, not dating, not loving in the way that society pedestals as the most significant? In order for asexuality to be understood and recognized as the queer identity that it is, sex acts and sexualization would first have to be removed from the center of dominant conceptions of queer identity. It follows that asexuals would never fit seamlessly into a mainstream queer discourse that largely focuses on sex and how queer folks (are thought to) engage in it, especially as terms like top, bottom, and verse go more and more mainstream. Hyperfocus on queer sex and sex roles is a direct result of the oversexualization of queerness as a means to construct it as nothing more than sexual deviance and also to reassert heteronormative gender roles