As one of the first book-length collections of critical essays on the topic of asexuality, Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives became a foundational text in the burgeoning field of asexuality studies. This revised and expanded ten-year anniversary edition both celebrates the book’s impact and features new scholarship at the vanguard of the field.
While this edition includes some of the most-cited original chapters, it also features critical updates as well as new, innovative work by both up-and-coming and established scholars and activists from around the world. It brings in more global perspectives on asexualities, engages intersectionally with international formations of race and racialization, critiques global capital’s effects on identity and kinship, examines how digital worlds shape lived realities, considers posthuman becomings, experiments with the form of the manifesto, and imagines love and relation in ecologies that exceed and even supersede the human.
This cutting-edge, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary book serves as a valuable resource for everyone—from those who are just beginning their critical exploration of asexualities to advanced researchers who seek to deepen their theoretical engagements with the field.
Introduction Part I: Beyond Sexuality, Beyond the Human 1. Sexuality is Over. Long Live Asexuality: Post-Sexuality in the Post-Post Era 2. Asexual Ecologies 3. Ace-ecologies: The Asexual Erotics of Loving Kin Part II: Asexuality, Identity, and the Political Sphere 4. Radical Identity Politics: Asexuality and Contemporary Articulations of Identity 5. “There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship”: Asexuality’s Sinthomatics 6. “Jarek, Get on Tinder”: Anti-Nonsexual Slogans at Polish 2020 Abortion Protests 7. A Brief Manifesto Against Asexual Respectability Politics Part III: A/sexologies: Measuring Desire 8. Asexual Desires? Mismeasures in the Sexual Sciences 9. Between the Bedroom and the Laboratory: Clinical Intimacies, Paraerotic Potential, and Therapeutic Excess 10. Deferred Desire: The Asexuality of Chronic Genital Pain Part IV: Asexualities in Place and Space 11. Toward Asexual Geographies: void-publics and spaces of refusal 12. (SA)fe Sp(aces): Conjugality and Sex in Online South Asian Asexual Discourses 13. Erasure, Camouflage, Exceptionalism, and Cultural Criticism: Asexuality and Masculinity Threat Part V: Reading Asexually 14. Subjective Limits of Imagination: Race, Gender, and Sex in the Archives 15. Compulsory Sexuality and Asexual/Crip Resistance in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus 16. “What to Call That Sport, the Neuter Human…”: Asexual Subjectivity in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People 17. Toward an Asexual Narrative Structure Part VI: Asexual Kinship and Platonic Intimacies 18. Asexual Kinship: Capitalism, Reproduction, and an Imperiality of Asexuality 19. #Platonic Intimacy: Asian North American Asexualities and Their Fairytales 20. Girltalk: Reflections on Testosterone, A/sexuality, and Libido Part VII: Ace Solidarities/Ace Futures 21. Asexuality and Disability: New Directions for Coalition Building 22. Toward an Ace & Aro Friendly Society: Reconstructing the Sexual Orientation Paradigm 23. Toward a Global Asexual Solidarity Beyond Identity 24. “Freedom Lover”: Blackness, Asexuality, Abolition Coda - “Never Enough”: Then, Now, and Tomorrow
KJ Cerankowski is the author of Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming (2021). He is Associate Professor of Comparative American Studies and Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies at Oberlin College. Megan Milks is the author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body (2021) and Slug and Other Stories (2021). They teach writing and gender studies at The New School and Pace University.
