2013 NWSA Asexuality Interest Group Preliminary Schedule

[morthia]

Here is the preliminary schedule for the asexuality panels that will be at the National Women's Studies Association's (NWSA) 2013 conference on Friday, November 8th and Saturday, November 9th in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CIiS6rkqfWqvhHLMOAfSOYNI-4cmfIMOqceLREW6ibs/edit?usp=sharing

[gilnokoibito]

This is in Cincin? (Yes, I have a cute nickname for Cincinnati lol)

Wow I never knew there was anything about asexuality so close to me (well, like 4 hrs away, but that's close when you consider how I'm in the middle-of-nowhere.) Sounds interesting too. If I'm able to, I might just attend this.

Thanks for the info! :)

[Lord Happy Toast]

Using the NWSA website, I've put together all of the (preliminary versions of the) abstracts for the talks about "asexuality" (although sometimes this is done by "expanding" the definition of asexuality to cover whatever their personal research interest happens to be.)

*Karli June Cerankowski (Stanford University)

If You Can’t Beat Them, Don’t Join Them: Mobilizing Social Media to Counter Pop Culture Representations of Asexuality

In 2006, talk show hosts from Montel Williams to the co-hosts of The View flocked to cover the hot topic of asexuality. Because sex sells, they sold the American public a sensationalized story of sexual others, a non-sexual spectacle of our greatest imagining. While this visibility brought asexuality into public vocabulary, it did little to make asexuality legible to the audience. Recently, asexuals have utilized social media to mobilize their own visibility and education campaigns. This paper examines how blogs, vlogs, and YouTube series like “Hot Pieces of Ace” work to expand public discourse and reveal a multiplicity of asexualities.

*Jana Fedtke (Asian University for Women)

“I bet you anything that I can find a medical reason…”: Mis/Representations of Asexuality in House, M.D.

This paper presents a critical analysis of the mis/representations of asexuality in “Better Half,” an episode of House, M.D. that aired January 23, 2012. It argues that, while the show creates visibility about asexuality, it does so at the expense of people who identify as asexual. The existence of asexuality is denied by “exposing” the male character’s “cause” for asexuality as a brain tumor and by presenting the female character as a liar about her a/sexual identity. This shows that more work needs to be done to bring about changes in the representations of asexuality in popular media.

*Regina M Wright

Pedagogical Approaches to Asexuality in the Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies Classroom

This paper examines pedagogical approaches to teaching about asexuality in the Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies classroom by using the documentary film (A)sexual by Director Angela Tucker. I argue that while this film offers a beneficial introduction to the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), the asexual activist David Jay, and the emerging relationship between asexual and queer communities at public events like San Francisco Pride, it still includes problematic scenes in which undergraduates would benefit from teacher commentary. This presentation will serve as a resource for teachers thinking about how to incorporate information about asexuality into their classrooms.

Peter Vielehr (Vanderbilt University)

Destabilizing Desire: Asexuality, Masculinity, and Erotic Capital in Queer Space

This analysis utilizes the sexual fields approach and intersectional feminist theory of the body to situate asexuality, masculinity, and desire within queer spaces. Sexual desire is an important homonormative signifier of masculinity. Having little or no desire for sexual activity alienates asexual bodies from their ability to be interpreted as masculine and to participate in sexual status orders. Further, I draw upon news articles relating to asexuality and queer community to analyze how asexual identities challenge implicit assumptions about masculinity and desire. Avenues for empirical research on asexuality are also addressed.

*Nathan Erro (Louisiana State University)

Asexy Reading: Asexuality and Literary Criticism

As a marginal and often unknown identity, asexuality has seen little application in literary criticism. Its implications, however, are great. In this talk I outline the ways asexuality challenges literary critics to rethink the conventions of sex, sexuality, and human nature by disentangling sexual attraction from intimacy, physicality, pleasure, aesthetic attraction, love, sensuality, and companionship—those concepts, motivations, drives, and desires often overshadowed by the presence of lust and sexual attraction. In this way asexual literary criticism moves beyond simply the study of asexual characters and offers a fruitful deconstructive tool to interrogate all sexual identities and acts in literature, thus challenging and reshaping traditional readings along the way.

*Mark Alan Smith (Emory University)

Asexuality as Erotic Presence: Exposing the Limits of Sexual Desire and “Lack”

Asexuality is often described as a lack or absence of sexual attraction/desire rather than as the presence of something existing in its own right. The discursive elaboration of asexuality is scantly intelligible as anything other than an asymmetrical response to sexuality. Lack and negation bind asexuality to the limits of sexual logic. In order to expose the limits of sexuality, this paper invokes Eros as an asexual transgression of desire. In turn, thinking beyond the confines of sexuality shall enable a reformulation of asexuality as presence rather than lack. The paper will explore poststructuralist theory by Foucault, Butler, and Lacan.

*Mercedes Poll (University of Leeds)

Who is Asexual? Deconstructing Asexuality Studies

This paper will locate Asexuality Studies within a context of multidisciplinary approaches that have been taken over time to investigate a perceived “lack” of sex in certain people’s lives. It will consider asexuality as an encompassing term that includes not only persons who (as per popular definition) do not experience sexual attraction, but individuals who fall into the liminal space of living “sex-free” lives without taking up the label “asexual”. It will look at how the recent emergence of Asexuality Studies has constructed a very specific understanding of asexuality, and attempt an assessment of how this affects both academic scholarship and social communities.

*David Hennessee (california polytechnic state university)

Asexual Austen

In Jane Austen’s novels, heterosexual marriage seems “universally acknowledged” as the most desirable state. However, each novel presents characters who do not marry or re-marry, and who seem content outside the marriage market. Can they be read as 19th century examples of asexuality?

I think that they can, and I will explore how doing so can enrich our understanding of gender and sexuality in Austen’s works. On one hand, Austen’s protagonists must find a middle ground between asexuality and hyper-sexuality. At a certain point in several of the novels, the protagonist risks falling into asexuality due to a dearth of worthy men, or disillusionment with the “marriage market.” However, asexuality is also portrayed as a viable state of existence in itself – not merely the sad result of disappointment in love – through each protagonist’s rational attraction to it, and also through other characters who seem not to feel and express sexual desire, ones who have cathected other, non-sexual activities and concerns. Reading Austen’s novels against the grain shows them to present forms of asexual embodiment that complicate our understanding of spinsterhood and bachelorhood, as well as presumptive heterosexuality.

*Stephanie Marie Metzger (University of Kansas)

(A)sexy Cyborgs: Affinity and Embodiment in the Asexual Community

In her now classic formulation of cyborg theory, Donna Haraway asks why our bodies must end at the skin. In my paper, I respond to Haraway by investigating the ways in which the asexual community explores gender and sexuality independent of what is physically inscribed on the body. The community's predominantly online interactions offer a fluidity of gender and sexual embodiment that helps its members move past the dualisms so often encountered in “real life.” These online interactions do not necessitate a complete detachment from the body, however, and this flexibility allows the creation of the asexual cyborg.

*CJ DeLuzio Chasin (University of Windsor)

Defining Asexuality Into (Or Out Of) Its Radical Potential

Academic work has largely defined asexuality as lifelong lack of sexual attraction. Considering the psychiatric diagnosis of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD), this definition is politically safe. It clearly distinguishes between a) “real” asexuals whose embodied experiences should be respected and left intact), and b) “real” HSDD sufferers who should be “fixed” through clinical intervention. However, this distinction conceals other normatively unacknowledged embodied asexualities, and avoids questioning why people (especially women) are distressed about not wanting sex, in a context of compulsory sexuality. Social change challenges HSDD's claim on the bodies and minds of asexuals and women.

*Christine Mary Labuski (Virginia Tech)

Deferred Desire: The Asexuality of Chronic Genital Pain

Most women diagnosed with chronic and unexplained genital pain go years without engaging in sexual activity. Though symptoms often make a range of behaviors possible, including anal and oral sex, most patients defer all sexual activity until they can begin or return to vaginal-penile intercourse. This paper discusses the complicated realities surrounding this choice, and proposes that the narratives of vulvar pain patients offer unique insights into a feminist investigation of asexuality. Based on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, the paper explores the bodily and sociocultural experiences of a group of women who take comfort in the fact that their marriages and intimate relationships are “not about sex.”

*Nathan Erro (Louisiana State University)

Sacred Sex, Profane Lack: The Intersection and Divergence of Asexuality, Celibacy, and Platonic Love in a ‘Go Forth and Multiply,’ ‘Sex Sells’ Society

Unlike celibacy and Platonic Love, asexuality does not presuppose the existence of sexual attraction in an individual. I argue this key distinction creates a problem not only for religious institutions that wish to increase their numbers through reproduction—while holding up and revering certain chaste individuals who do so only to express a greater devotion to God—but as well a consumer-based society where sex and eroticism are quite profitable. This lack of profitability means asexuality is challenged and resisted: not only profane in a religious sense, asexuality is socially profane and unprofitable as well.

*LaChelle Elisabeth Marie Schilling (Claremont Graduate University)

The Celibate Asexual: Sacred Assumptions of Identity vs. Choice

The question of asexuality as an inherent orientation has been debated in sexuality studies, with entities such as AVEN and Anthony Bogaert arguing a distinction between celibacy as choice and asexuality as inherent. My paper addresses the issue of celibacy and asexuality with special attention to the religious/moral/spiritual connotations that celibacy may have but asexuality is seemingly protected against. I show that being able to realize, come out, and express one’s identity has a spiritual component that can be articulated by religious metaphors which make asexuality a queer bedfellow to celibacy in terms of sexual and relational agency.

*Benjamin Kahan (Louisiana State University)

Asexuality / Neutrality / Relationality

This paper theorizes asexuality in relation to several adjacent sexual formations with particular attention to celibacy. The author reads asexuality as an exemplary instance of what Roland Barthes calls “The Neutral,” seeing asexuality as momentarily enacting a cessation of the homo / hetero binary. This temporary bafflement, what the author argues is a Neutralization of object based systems of sexuality, opens a new set of sexed and gender relational possibilities and demands a wholesale rethinking of many of our most fundamental ideas about sexuality and asexuality.

*Jacinthe Flore (La Trobe University)

Traces of Desire: A Medical Historiography of Asexuality

Historicizing asexuality requires mapping its manifestations in the archives of medical knowledge. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of Mental Disorders convey a particular history of asexuality—one of medicalization and physiopathology. Focusing on the female body and its putative syndromes, my paper presents a historical exploration of asexuality grounded in the DSMs and examines the relationship between the history of frigidity and asexuality in the mid-to-late twentieth century. I historicize the concept of desire in relation to medical paradigms of arousal, aversion, pain and orgasm, and question how these influence and complicate current understandings of asexuality and female bodies.

*Breanne Fahs (Arizona State University)

Aggressive Asexuality, “Anti-sex,” and Militant Snubs: Up Your Ass with/by Valerie Solanas

The sexual politics of Valerie Solanas—author of SCUM Manifesto, homeless New York City prostitute, and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol—have typically advocated for arriving at a place of “anti-sex” after engaging in a lifetime of sex. This paper examines the “aggressive asexuality” of SCUM Manifesto (1967) alongside the more playful rendering of her character, Bongi, in her long-lost play, Up Your Ass (1966). By imagining asexuality in the context of more broad sexual “snubs” or refusals rather than a fixed identity-based practice, Solanas reveals the queer and feminist power of the “anti-sex” persona even while still engaging in sex for money, pleasure, or necessity.

*Ela (Elzbieta) Przybylo (York University, Toronto)

*Danielle Miriam Cooper (York University, Canada)

Archiving, Asexually: Notes on Writing Asexual Histories

This paper argues that the concept of the archive, metaphorically and queerly understood, is an effective starting point for a creative, feminist, and queer telling of asexual pasts and presents. We demonstrate that asexuality productively manipulates the terms of the archive and of feminist history, asking what counts as erotic ephemera and re-qualifying what is “archivable.” Archiving asexually thus emerges as a new method for rethinking queer and feminist histories from a distinctly asexual perspective, making it possible to explore asexuality in unexpected places historically.

[AVENger]

wow this looks fascinating. I just might try to go to that.

[morthia]

If you are coming to the NWSA conference in Cincinnati, also check this out!

Asexy Dinner

Saturday, November 9th, 6:30 pm

Arnold's Bar and Grill (210 E 8th St).

About a 5 min drive or a 10 to 12 minute walk from the convention center.
[it has a vegan menu and a gluten free menu along with a regular one.]

RSVP with Alex (ahooper89@yahoo.com) so we know about reservations.