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

by Sherronda J. Brown

Excluding asexuals from queerness under the belief that we do not experience discrimination and trauma “enough” only serves to reproduce the same harms as cisheteropatriarchy. Being subjected to and harmed by compulsory sexuality, rape culture, and acephobia is traumatic, and the denial of this works to obscure the very ways in which asexuals have been harmed by people within queer communities. Allosexual queer folks have absolutely been spectators to asexual queering; they have even been participants in moments where we have been queered because of our relationship to sex, attraction, and desire. Acephobic exclusionists must hold two opposing ideas at once in order to maintain their dissonant belief system that if asexuals are not discriminated against in the same ways and to the same degree that they are, then that discrimination either cannot count or must not exist at all.