What the Project Team does

[Lord Happy Toast]

Visibility and education are of vital importance for the asexual community. From its beginnings, the asexual community has been very much a grassroots movement., and this means that visibility and education work is not done by some asexual elite somewhere. It is done by ordinary members of the asexual community and our allies who have made a decision to contribute in their own way, whatever that may be. Vital work is done in everyday conversations with people explaining asexuality to others. It is done when people come out as asexual. It is done in media articles and in talking with the media, in blogging, vlogging, writing articles for magazines, zines, and newsletters. It is done in research on asexuality, in writing papers for class, and in making alliances, especially with LGBT groups. It is done in incorporating asexuality into areas that participants in the asexual community are interested in.

The Project Team (PT) consists of five members dedicated to promoting asexual visibility and education who are elected annually by members of AVEN. The PT has four primary functions.

1) To work with and to provide help to people working on vis/ed projects.

2) To create resources that will be of value to the asexual community, to people wanting to know more about asexuality, and to people working on asexuality-related projects. This includes, but is not limited to, AVENues, Asexual Perspectives, Post of the Week, and working on AVEN’s wiki.

3) To moderate the Visibility and Education Projects forum.

4) To be leaders in asexual visibility and education work.

The PT is not the only group on AVEN working on visibility and education projects. Bringing Asexy Back is a group devoted to outreach to the LGBT community. AVEN’s media teams lead work in coordinating with the media in their respective areas. Formerly, there the AVEN DSM Taskforce lobbied the DSM-5 Sexual Dysfunctions Subworkgrouop to try to make Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder more asexual friendly in DSM-5.

If you have a visibility or education project in mind that you would like to do, feel free to make a thread about it in the Visibility and Education forum to get feedback from people on AVEN, and feel free to contact one of the members of the PT to see how we might be able to help you out in working on that project. To help get an idea of which member you think would be best to contact regarding your particular project, the following is a rough description of the responsibilities of each member of the PT.

Ellie J. - Online media

mandrewliter - Online resources and research

Henrik - Wikimaster

michaeld - Offline UK activities

Southpaw - Offline US activities

[Pandoren]

Is the Project Team dedicated solely to asexuality and its recognition/acceptance or does it also do projects and suchlike for demisexuality/grey-A?

[Lord Happy Toast]

We are certainly not committed to only doing visibility and education work around some kind of "true asexuality" that ignores the existence of anyone who is somewhere between asexual and not asexual. At present, we don't really have any particular position on visibility and education regarding gray-Aness or demisexuality. As for my own personal opinion, I don't think that it is possible to do vis/ed work for either of these concepts/groups without doing asexual vis/ed work because these conceptualizations crucially depend on understanding asexuality. As such, I wonder whether it is even possible to do vis/ed for these except in contexts that are explicitly about asexuality. (I am setting aside the issue of whether demisexuality is a subset of asexuality or not--some people who identify as demi do so in addition to identifying as asexual, and others instead of identifying as asexual.) Personally, I think that in discussing asexuality, it is important to make clear that there is no clear line between asexual and not asexual.

[Siggy]

Bringing Asexy Back is devoted to outreach to the LGBT community, not the asexual community. The team's main project was getting a workshop into NGLTF's Creating Change conference, though they haven't been successful yet. They also organized Asexual Awareness Week, which was in September.

[Lord Happy Toast]

Bringing Asexy Back is devoted to outreach to the LGBT community, not the asexual community. The team's main project was getting a workshop into NGLTF's Creating Change conference, though they haven't been successful yet. They also organized Asexual Awareness Week, which was in September.

Oops. Sorry about that. I really did mean to say "outreach to the LGBT community." I had known that Bringing Asexy Back organized Asexual Awareness Week, but I didn't realize that the main project was getting a workshop into the NGLTF Creating Change conference.

It looks like you already fixed the version on the PT page on the Wiki.

[Loren Worsley]

Dear AVEN Project Team,

My name is Loren Worsley and I'm currently a second-year student at New York University. At the moment, I find myself taking on a field work project--the topic of which is, understandably, asexuality--for my Anthropology: Human Society & Culture class. In accordance with Anthropology's origins in both the social sciences and humanities, the project requires first-person involvement with a given group, with the aim of developing an accurate picture of its function from the perspective of the members themselves.

I'd originally posted a message on the meet-up mart forum as to whether members of the local meet-up group would be comfortable with me attending their next get together, in the hopes of familiarizing myself with some of the people and, possibly, contacting any individuals who would feel comfortable partaking in an interview or Q&A, one on one, at some later date. Not everyone was comfortable with the prospect of my attendance, understandably enough, although I get the impression that some of the discomfort may have issued from my own mischaracterization of the project as more coldly scrutinizing or scientific than I'd at all intended. As a result, I was told it might be more fitting for me to contact the Project Team, as you seem to be the hub of activity for projects pertaining to asexual visibility and education (two areas which, clearly, my project is particularly concerned with).

In light of this, I was wondering if there were any Project Team members who might have a recommendation for me as to another meet-up or venue in the area which would be an appropriate place to spend some time with a group of asexuals and asexual allies? Also, if there are any other sources for or means of contacting groups/individuals in the area that I may not have thought of, I would be phenomenally grateful for the advice. Any assistance that could be provided pertaining to anything outlined here would be very sincerely appreciated. If there are any questions or concerns, or if anyone would just prefer to contact me in private, my e-mail address is ljw268@nyu.edu. Thanks so much for your time and attention.

Best regards,

Loren Worsley

[answered by email - AVEN PT]

[desertfox]

Is the Project Team dedicated solely to asexuality and its recognition/acceptance or does it also do projects and suchlike for demisexuality/grey-A?

I'm interested in the 2012 World Pride celebrations in london... :P Please tell me some more about it.

[Lord Happy Toast]

Is the Project Team dedicated solely to asexuality and its recognition/acceptance or does it also do projects and suchlike for demisexuality/grey-A?

I'm interested in the 2012 World Pride celebrations in london... :P Please tell me some more about it.

Discussion about 2012 World Pride can be found in the World Pride forum.