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Are Queer Theorists Making Asexuality Look Silly?


Pramana

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The asexuality studies literature provides an opportunity to consider the relationship between queer theorists and the communities they write about. Here is a brief summary of relevant points:

1. Influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis and postmodern deconstructionist approaches, queer theorists have variously argued that asexuality is a: 
a. Feminist challenge to the diagnosis of hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). 
b. Feminist challenge to the patriarchy (in the form of a committed sex strike). 
c. Challenge to the replication of sexual society, through providing an escape into a safe space to shelter the body from sexual permeability. 
d. Challenge to neoliberal capitalism and the neoliberal conception of the human. 
e. Embodied performance dance that defies capitalism and the patriarchy. 
f. Possibility of a childlike figure in literature or film who eschews adult responsibilities and the reproductive imperative. 
g. Possibility of a static narrative structure that rejects movement towards sex and death.
2. Claims 1(a-g) are usually advanced without empirical evidence to show that asexual people share this political vision, or even a plausible explanation for how a sexual orientation could present a structural challenge to the system.
3. A group of British academics writing from a pragmatist/symbolic interactionist perspective have published a series of articles criticizing the queer theory asexuality studies literature for failing to use empirical evidence, for making a discursive abstraction out of asexuality that is divorced from human experience, and for exploiting the orientation for a political agenda.


So what do other people think? Are queer theorists making asexuality look silly, is this just harmless academic histrionics which doesn't matter one way or the other, or in the alternative does this political literature have a role to play for community representation?

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I think it does make Asexuality look silly as I don't have a politically motivated agenda to be Asexual, I don't experience Sexual Attraction.

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37 minutes ago, Pramana said:

Are queer theorists making asexuality look silly

 

No, they're making themselves look silly.

 

Is this just harmless academic histrionics which doesn't matter one way or the other

 

Yes.

 

Does this political literature have a role to play for community representation?   No.  

 

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Ya this does seem really silly and embarrassing to me. While this reflects badly on the people doing writing these research reports with no empirical evidence to support it, I think it could have negative connotations with the asexuality community. For instance from an outside perspective of someone wanting to read up on asexual research it can give invalid and unreliable information. I mean really the idea that I would be using my asexuality to "fight the patriarchy"  to support feminism is idiotic. I didn't even know what HSDD was until about two years after identifying as asexual; although, I will admit I do have some conflicted feelings about HSDD as a diagnosis, but again that has nothing to do with the feminist movement.

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My agenda is to just do well in life.

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AmorphousBlob

I'm too lazy to challenge the patriarchy. It sounds like so much effort.

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27 minutes ago, AmorphousBlob said:

I'm too lazy to challenge the patriarchy. It sounds like so much effort.

Must say that from some of the articles I've read, it sounds pretty easy. All you have to do is self-identify as asexual.

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AmorphousBlob

true true

 

Not out tho so thats a bit hard

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3 hours ago, Pramana said:

Must say that from some of the articles I've read, it sounds pretty easy. All you have to do is self-identify as asexual.

Not when we were challenging it 40 years ago, and even now...

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1 - 3 in the OP seem like putting the cart before the horse to me. If asexuality is an orientation, then that's what one starts with and any political or social agendas are, to me, individual add-ons. I think one can only attribute a politico/socio role to asexuality (that is, it can only be used as a  politico/socio tool)  if asexuality is a choice. Trying to think  how to explain myself more clearly... one chooses to use a tool but one doesn't choose to be asexual. So, I don't see how asexuality can, generically, challenge anything (except the notion that everyone wants sex).  

And I do think it matters if these voices are out there with their research as, often, it's those who shout loudest who are heard, believed and get media exposure. I don't think I'd identify with any of the 1-3 in the OP and I don't particularly want them speaking for me.

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3 hours ago, Tunhope said:

1 - 3 in the OP seem like putting the cart before the horse to me. If asexuality is an orientation, then that's what one starts with and any political or social agendas are, to me, individual add-ons. I think one can only attribute a politico/socio role to asexuality (that is, it can only be used as a  politico/socio tool)  if asexuality is a choice. Trying to think  how to explain myself more clearly... one chooses to use a tool but one doesn't choose to be asexual. So, I don't see how asexuality can, generically, challenge anything (except the notion that everyone wants sex).  

And I do think it matters if these voices are out there with their research as, often, it's those who shout loudest who are heard, believed and get media exposure. I don't think I'd identify with any of the 1-3 in the OP and I don't particularly want them speaking for me.

A core queer theory idea holds that homosexuality was first constructed as pathological by the medical/psychiatric apparatus, and then deconstructed by queer identity politics through claiming lesbian/gay labels. Queer theorists have tried to fit asexuality into this narrative, presenting a picture whereby sexual disinterest was first pathologized through the diagnosis of HSDD, and then depathologized by asexual identity politics. So while the underlying sexual disinterest might have a biological component, it's the decision to identify as asexual that constitutes the orientation. Some queer theorists go father, however, arguing that asexuality can be a standalone political choice to protest the patriarchy and capitalism.

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everywhere and nowhere
14 hours ago, Pramana said:

3. Queer theorists have variously argued that asexuality is a:
     A. Feminist challenge to the diagnosis of HSDD.
     B. Feminist challenge to the patriarchy (in the form of a committed sex strike).
     C. Challenge to the replication of sexual society, through providing an escape into a safe space to shelter the body from sexual permeability.
     D. Challenge to neoliberal capitalism and the neoliberal conception of the human.

I have nothing against it because I believe that sexuality is always political.

I don't have sex first of all because I'm sex-averse and nudity-averse. However, by making this choice, I am making the "sexual market" one person smaller. And it's a good thing because men should realise that sexual availability is not a given and that nobody owes them sex.

 

Specifically ad A: I don't believe in the distinction between asexuality and "HSDD". "HSDD" = asexuality + "I believe this is pathology".

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everywhere and nowhere
23 minutes ago, Pramana said:

Some queer theorists go father, however, arguing that asexuality can be a standalone political choice to protest the patriarchy and capitalism.

I have nothing against it too. I don't believe that an orientation must be inborn in order to be legitimate.

 

Perhaps, though, it's a different thing than asexuality, but that's the point: asexual activism should go beyond saying "asexuality is a separate orientation" or "asexuallity is not pathology", towards arguing that nonsexual lifestyles should be acceptable.

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8 minutes ago, Nowhere Girl said:

I have nothing against it too. I don't believe that an orientation must be inborn in order to be legitimate.

 

Perhaps, though, it's a different thing than asexuality, but that's the point: asexual activism should go beyond saying "asexuality is a separate orientation" or "asexuallity is not pathology", towards arguing that nonsexual lifestyles should be acceptable.

On occasion I've come across this argument in the queer theory literature (if it's alright for asexuals to not want sex, then maybe it's alright for everyone to not want sex), as well as concerns that asexual identity politics could increase stigma against celibacy (if asexuality is the only socially acceptable reason for not wanting sex, then other reasons for sexual disinterest are still repression and unfashionable).

For the most part, however, queer theorists remain enamoured with the language of orientations and genders and identity labels, rather than appealing to ethical principles like liberal democratic social contract theory. This is probably due to a combination of personal experiences/biases that led them to start writing queer theory in the first place, plus scepticism about Enlightenment rationality attributable to working from a poststructuralist theoretical background.

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everywhere and nowhere
9 minutes ago, Pramana said:

On occasion I've come across this argument in the queer theory literature (if it's alright for asexuals to not want sex, then maybe it's alright for everyone to not want sex), as well as concerns that asexual identity politics could increase stigma against celibacy (if asexuality is the only socially acceptable reason for not wanting sex, then other reasons for sexual disinterest are still repression and unfashionable).

And this is exactly my opinion.

I'm against double standards and I already have seen some double standards in relation to asexuality. Particularly the distinction between asexuality and "HSDD", which at its current form looks quite ridiculous - but it's still a good example of trying to acknowledge asexuality and being unable to genuinely build it into the system. One standard - "not pathological" - is not even just for people who are asexual, but for people who happen to have heard of asexuality and decided to identify this way. (Obviously, there may be a lot of people who could be called asexual, but cannot identify as such because they have never heard of asexuality...) And another standard - "pathological" - for people who don't identify as asexual.

So what I want is exactly this: one standard. In case of "sexual disfunctions": help for those who seek help - and acceptance for all, regardless of whether they choose to have sex or not and what are their reasons.

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Here is my favourite passage from the queer theory asexuality studies literature:

"Lacan observes that “in the labour which he [the subject] undertakes to reconstruct for another, he rediscovers the fundamental alienation that made him construct it like another, and which has always destined it to be taken from him by another.” Since this process of “alienation” from selfhood makes “more profound the alienation from his jouissance,” the subject embodies the double bind Lacan locates within signifiers – that of metonymy and metaphor. Although no subject in Lacan’s metapsychology can achieve jouissance, or ultimate pleasure, the self-delusional fantasy remains intact for those who take on a position in relation to the ultimate signifier: the phallus. In other words, those who partake in sexual pleasure or practice sexual relations with reproduction as the aim are perpetuating the collectively shared fantasy that jouissance can be attained in spite of being “barred” from the object of desire, a fantasy that actually “miss[es] that joiussance that it reproduces – in other words, by fucking.” While “the phallus is our term for the signifier of his alienation in signification,” according to Lacan, the matheme for fundamental fantasy posits a non-symbolic relationship between the subject and the object of desire: this is an “unconscious circuit” that underscores the impossibility of attaining jouissance as, in the process, the subject – like the signifier – is continually “deprived of something of himself” and is therefore “irreducibly affected by the signifier [i.e., the phallus]” and barred from the Other." 

Kahn, Kristian. ““There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship”: Asexuality’s Sinthomatics.” In Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, edited by Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks, 55-76. New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014/2016.

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everywhere and nowhere

This kind of fragment actually can make queer studies look a little ridiculous.

And I don't consider Lacan's theory entirely without merits (though what I find tiresome is that he always remains servile towards Freud - Lacan's theory is impossible to understand and practice without accepting Freud and for me a lot of Freudian theories are bullshit. I have an impression that French people have some strange tendency for ideological ortodoxy: orthodox Freudism when it's clear that a lot of Freud's theories didn't age well and were just sexist, orthodox communism when... well, everyone has seen what orthodox communism has done...). But I simply trust Poetry more than science and I find the whole concept of jouissance more poetic than scholarly.

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Why do people automatically assume being asexual has some sort of agenda?

 

Probably because celibacy itself, sometimes it's a protest.

 

But asexuality itself probably won't be seen as just another sexual orientation until there's more visibility.

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I can barely build up the courage to decline a polite dinner invitation - I have no desire to go challenging society. My only agenda is to get through school and be as non-confrontational as possible 😅.

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14 minutes ago, Nowhere Girl said:

This kind of fragment actually can make queer studies look a little ridiculous.

And I don't consider Lacan's theory entirely without merits (though what I find tiresome is that he always remains servile towards Freud - Lacan's theory is impossible to understand and practice without accepting Freud and for me a lot of Freudian theories are bullshit. I have an impression that French people have some strange tendency for ideological ortodoxy: orthodox Freudism when it's clear that a lot of Freud's theories didn't age well and were just sexist, orthodox communism when... well, everyone has seen what orthodox communism has done...). But I simply trust Poetry more than science and I find the whole concept of jouissance more poetic than scholarly.

I think the difficulty that Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic authors have fitting asexuality into their framework is an indication of problems with the underlying theory. Here's another effort from a different author in the same collected volume:

“My tendency in this chapter to collapse all desire into sexual desire is not without precedent, although the sympathetic reader may have expected better of me. I identify asexuality structurally with stasis, placing it at odds with Freudian Eros, which likewise is not reducible to sexuality but encompasses a broader concept of constructive, end-directed movement that is of course recognizable in narrative. At the same time, though, asexuality is not reducible to the Freudian death instinct. The difference between asexuality and the death instinct is that between stasis and extinction. In seeking to return the organism to its original inanimate state, the death instinct seeks a reversal: it has a goal. Being an instinct, it has direction and movement. Asexuality, as the non-experience of sexual attraction, has no object, no aim, no tendency toward movement in any direction, which is precisely what makes the asexual possibility so disruptive in narrative. It stands still. The asexual possibility is the thing you trip over because it sits smack in the middle of a novel, unseen, and it will not budge. Static and yet disruptive, it sometimes makes its presence (or rather, the presence of its absence) felt in narrative by forcing patterns of movement to change around it.”

Hanson, Elizabeth Hanna. “Toward an Asexual Narrative Structure.” In Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, edited by Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks, 344-374. New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014/2016.

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everywhere and nowhere
37 minutes ago, Pramana said:


Hanson, Elizabeth Hanna. “Toward an Asexual Narrative Structure.” In Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, edited by Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks, 344-374. New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014/2016.

Hey, I have this book! Though I haven't read it yet. Well, it's not going anywhere - it's on my disk and books from the library have higher priority because I have to return them on time. (Once I managed to borrow a book from the closest library* and return it the next day...)

 

* I live in the Ursynów district in Warsaw and we have our library network called Ursynoteka, spread all over the district. The closest one is at a distance of about 3 minutes walking from my home... Well, readers have to return books at the library where they borrowed it, returning at another library won't work - but it's one system for several libraries and it's just more convenient - it means having one card and using several libraries.

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48 minutes ago, Nowhere Girl said:

Hey, I have this book! Though I haven't read it yet. Well, it's not going anywhere - it's on my disk and books from the library have higher priority because I have to return them on time. (Once I managed to borrow a book from the closest library* and return it the next day...)

I think the book has a fair amount of solid content, with the intersectionality articles on asexuality and disability and the psychoanalytic articles being the weakest in my opinion. Even the psychoanalytic articles weren't that bad when you can just read them as discussions of narrative stasis or clowning in film; it's their attempt to appropriate asexuality as a hermeneutic tool where it becomes problematic.

Like with Elizabeth Hanna Hanson's Toward an Asexual Narrative Structure, talking about asexuals as lacking a sex drive only works if you limit the analysis to nonlibidoist asexuals, but even then I don't see why nonlibidoist asexuals would lack a death drive, unless you just stipulate that asexuality is something which has no object, but then you're talking about an abstraction that has no relation to asexual people. Why not talk about something else which has no object, like the toothpick potential in narrative? Or why not just talk about narrative stasis? I'm guessing because that wouldn't sound nearly as sexy.

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Lord Happy Toast

I've seen a handful of cases where asexuality "research" was cited as evidence of how crazy much of academia has become.  For example a tweet from RealPeerReview about Breanne Fahs' truly awful paper.  I recall an article in Breitbart called "Columbia PhD Student Writes Thesis on ‘Asexual Microaggressions’"  (the article didn't include much commentary or opinion from the author, but I assume that "Microaggressions" is not a very popular idea among readers of Breitbart).  But I don't know how people interpreted these specific cases (i.e. I have no idea if it created any negative associations with asexuality), and they don't seem to be very common.  I doubt that these PoMo/victimological papers are going to have much of an impact on how people view asexuality since most people just ignore them.

 

However, because of the political power of gender studies (and similar fields) in the universities, I strongly suspect that most people outside of those fields who are committed to things like "evidence" know to stay far, far away from anything involving race-gender-sexuality.  I've become pretty pessimistic about the possibility of very much high-quality research on asexuality to come out of academia, although I haven't kept up with things for the past few years.

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On 11/11/2018 at 8:09 PM, Lord Happy Toast said:

However, because of the political power of gender studies (and similar fields) in the universities, I strongly suspect that most people outside of those fields who are committed to things like "evidence" know to stay far, far away from anything involving race-gender-sexuality.  I've become pretty pessimistic about the possibility of very much high-quality research on asexuality to come out of academia, although I haven't kept up with things for the past few years.

I'd be most concerned about situations such as where the 2012 MacInnis/Hodson paper is uncritically cited as an authority by people like Bogaert/Brotto/Yule/Gorzalka to argue that increased rates of mental health problems among asexuals are caused by social stigma. It's one thing when identity politics stays in its queer theory bubble, but it gets worrisome when it starts to infect behavioural psychology.

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Lord Happy Toast

I've long had a sense that (much of) even the psychological has more of a political bent to it than I would like.  Still, at least it a lot of it has actual data about asexuals.

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On 11/6/2018 at 8:11 AM, Pramana said:

A core queer theory idea holds that homosexuality was first constructed as pathological by the medical/psychiatric apparatus, and then deconstructed by queer identity politics through claiming lesbian/gay labels. 

Homosexuality was labeled as pathological by Christianity as a specific religious ideology (although instead of using the word "pathological" they labeled it "sinful").  That happened many centuries before psychiatry was a profession.  

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14 hours ago, Lord Happy Toast said:

I've long had a sense that (much of) even the psychological has more of a political bent to it than I would like.  Still, at least it a lot of it has actual data about asexuals.

Now that analytic philosophers are starting to write about the metaphysics of sexual orientation (including asexuality), it's interesting to see how they place political considerations front and centre. In the debate between Esa Díaz-León and Robin Dembroff over whether sexual orientations should be grounded in psychological states or action preferences, the decision points are understood to be questions of what definition better serves the concept's political purposes.

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