Reconsidering Asexuality and Its Radical Potential

Abstract

For the asexual community, asexuality is a matter of self-identifi cation: it is defined as a lack of sexual attraction combined with one’s identification as asexual. Such a definition is certainly circular, but it functions as a way for the asexual community to explain asexuality to non-asexuals — that asexuals are people who do not experience sexual attraction — while simultaneously allowing people to decide for themselves their membership in the asexual community.¹ When I first discovered the asexual community years ago, it was not a defini tion of asexuality per se that struck me or led me to call myself asexual; it was the incredible sense that these people — members of the asexual community — sounded like me. Academic research, in contrast, has largely defined asexuality as a lifelong lack of sexual attrac tion and in doing so has positioned asexuality in line with essentialist discourses of sexual orientation. This has had the impact of allowing people to argue that asexuality should be seen as nonpathological, by distinguishing it from the psychiatric diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) — defined as low sexual desire accompanied by marked distress or interpersonal difficulties — without challenging either the diagnosis or the psychiatric institution governing it.² However, as I discuss below, this politically safe essentialist definition of asexuality is problematic because it establishes a binary opposition

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