Every month I repost an article from my archives. Since this week is Ace Week, I thought it might be appropriate to repost one of my articles about asexuality. This is a fairly recent article, from 2018, summarizing an academic paper from 2014.
I borrowed a copy of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, which is an anthology of scholarly articles published in 2014. Sennkestra wanted to write summaries of each chapter, but ran out of time, so now I’m doing that. For the first chapter, I selected “On the Racialization of Asexuality“, by Ianna Hawkins Owen. You might remember the author from our interview with her several years ago.
In the introduction, Owen says,
Many authors have claimed, in one way or another, that “little or no” scholarly attention has been directed to asexuality in humans prior to the twenty-first century. In response to such observations, I offer that asexuality as a concept has long been invoked in the study of race.
So what you can expect from this article, is the reinterpretation of historical images and ideas as “asexual”. Now, this is something that ace activists commonly complain about in academic approaches to asexuality: using overly broad definitions of asexuality in order to include historical examples that at best are irrelevant to the modern day, and at worst are basically stereotypes.
But this is different! Owen writes about historical stereotypes and misunderstandings of asexuality, and explicitly describes them as such. Then she shows evidence that these misunderstandings still influence reactions to asexuality today.
