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

by Sherronda J. Brown

Asexuality is, simply, self-contained sexuality.

This is what British philosopher Miranda Fricker calls epistemic injustice, “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.”

I will always revere queer sex as manifesto, as concert, as affirmation. As cherished and sacred, celebratory and subversive. As an avenue to gender euphoria and healing, as both political and apolitical, as simply a matter-of-fact part of many people’s queer existence.

White supremacy is a slippery, dishonest adversary, setting the clock but never allowing the pendulum to swing freely. It bends time to its will to suit whatever ugly need it has. In this temporal distortion, Black children never exist.

-A bored/angry young man is the most dangerous person in the world.

What does it mean for Black asexuals when we are told that sex is a prerequisite to be considered human under compulsory sexuality, even as Black people always already fail at being human under white supremacy, and that dehumanization is achieved through the myth of Black animalistic hypersexuality?

so many have swallowed the lie that white desire is somehow evidence of care for Black life.

Horniness speaks.… I may be a late bloomer, but that is no reason not to bloom at all.

asexuality is an orientation that regards a partner as nonessential to sex, and sex as nonessential to a satisfying relationship.”