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. The very unfortunate reason that we must concern ourselves with the fact that allosexuals overwhelmingly misunderstand asexuality or deny its existence is because of what that misunderstanding and denial leads to: violence and discrimination.

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. If you can place yourself or your representatives at a border and police who can and cannot traverse its threshold based on how they have been categorized, by you or by someone else, that is about power. The people policing the border may change, the intention behind the policing of the border may change, the criteria by which people are categorized may change, but the refusal or permittance of bodies at the border will always be about power.

Historical precedence for this attitude was set by the institution of slavery and the systematic sexual violence it relied on. The rape of Black women and girls—regardless of the race of the rapist—was legal and socially acceptable during chattel slavery and the post-Civil War era.14 In 1918, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that, in cases of statutory rape—the rape of a minor—it would only be considered rape if the victim had been a virgin prior to the assault. Cloaking itself in the mantle of legal reasoning, the court states that most young white women are virgins, that most young Black women [and girls] are not, and that unchaste women are immoral. The traditional law of statutory rape at issue in the [aforementioned] case provides that women who are not “chaste” cannot be raped. Because of the way the legal system considered chastity, the association of Black women with unchastity meant not only that Black women could not be victims of statutory rape, but also that they would not be recognized as victims of forcible rape.15 When we look at this adultification and sexualization of Black children alongside the chrononormativity our society upholds, it both complicates and further highlights how much of the predetermined timeline is rooted in white values, interests, and understandings of the world. Black people never truly get to be seen as innocent or as children, as separate from sexuality, and yet the same colonial thought processes that adultify Black youth also dema...

The connection between sex, capital, and the economy inevitably makes way for the constitution of sex as productivity, and our productivity is the bedrock of the capitalist system as the principal driving force behind the wealthy class’s ability to hoard capital. Under capitalism, being productive is what makes us valuable to the system itself, and this has long been conflated with our value as human beings. If we are not being productive and using whatever free time we have to work toward ways to become even more productive or “useful,” then we are not doing enough to make ourselves valuable. This system, which encourages us to understand ourselves and our value through our productivity and labor, makes it more and more difficult to view ourselves as having any purpose outside of laboring within and for the system. We become only bodies for the nation-state’s use, and our bodies become instruments for amassing capital that marginalized workers will never be able to partake of as long as this system persists. Those who deprioritize or divest from sex—and often marriage and reproduction along with it—regardless of the reasons why, become a threat to the established systems that rely and thrive on the exploitation of and extraction of labor from our bodies, including sexual and reproductive labor. In this system, those who exist outside of normative sexuality, particularly those socialized as women who do not perform adequate sexual and reproductive labor for male partners, ...

In order to further entrench myths about the natural superiority of white men, gender policing became a means to help establish whiteness as “civilized” and all other races as inferior savages. In Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, Gail Bederman details how “‘civilization,’ as turn-of-the century Americans understood it, simultaneously denoted attributes of race and gender. By invoking the discourse of civilization in a variety of contradictory ways, many Americans found a powerfully effective way to link male dominance to white supremacy.”1 In white civilized society, “women were womanly—delicate, spiritual, dedicated to the home [and] civilized white men were the most manly ever evolved,” and these differences were an “intrinsic and necessary aspect of higher civilization.”2