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Thesis Help


j_beth

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Hello all, 

 

I hope this is the right place to post this. I am currently a social work graduate student and I am wanting to pursue a thesis. I would really like to focus on asexuality.  I know I haven't been very involved in the ACE community, and I wanted to receive some feedback or guidance about my research ideas. I have been looking at the existing literature and here are some of the rough ideas I've discussed with my supervisor. 

 

  • Experiences of ACE individuals coming out. 
  • Experiences of ACE individuals seeking LGBTQ+ supports. 
  • Experiences of ACE individuals in relationships. 
  • Exploring adverse childhood reactions for ACE individuals. (I was reading a lot of articles on the LGBTQ+ population that looked at this. I'm hesitant to pursue this topic for ACE though as I don't want it seem that I'm dismissing ACE as an orientation). 

 

 

Any help, guidance, and feedback would be greatly appreciated. I really do want to bring more awareness and understanding to the ACE community. 

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Hello!
 

Im also interested in pursuing social work in my graduate studies so Im happy to help out! Although, Im only 19 so I don’t exactly have much life experience but I’ll answer to the best of my abilities.

 

For the most part I have come out to my friends and my siblings, the reaction has been pretty supportive which I am happy about, although my older brother still thinks Im a bit too young to know if I am asexual or not but Im pretty sure I am in some form. I technically haven’t come out to my parents but its not really because I think they’d be unsupportive because they were supportive of me figuring out my sexuality beforehand when I thought I was bisexual or a lesbian, but more so that they wouldn’t really understand it and I think it would be weird to explain it to them. I might come out to them eventually though.

 

When I had an inclination that I was not heterosexual I desperately wanted to figure out what my sexuality was, with me being asexual and having never experienced sexual attraction it was quite hard for me to wrap my head around. I also didn’t have much dating experience either and I haven’t really had much romantic experience as well, so I spent a good year just questioning. I looked onto LGBT+ forums from reddit to see if my experiences matched anywhere and I found myself being extremely indecisive between bisexual and lesbian. Although I never really interacted with these forums which I feel like I should have. After exploring more of lesbian reddit, I was convinced I was a lesbian but at the same time I felt unsure; the reason for this was because I never felt sexual attraction to women. I do feel some sort of attraction but I never saw it as sexual. I recall discussing this with my friends and my pansexual friend asked if I ever considered if I was asexual, which lead me to seek out some asexual forums which is where I found AVEN. After that I finally figured out that I do belong to a sexuality and I like posting on this forum to see if fellow aces felt the same. The rest is history ^


To be frank Ive never had much dating experience, I did have a boyfriend for one month though. I do recall myself being extremely anxious to when I was supposed to kiss and eventually have sex with him. I recall when going on our first date I was freaked out about a lot of uncertainties, specifically with about physical contact. In the end we only gave each other an awkward hug haha. I do feel like my asexuality may cause conflict in a relationship with a sexual person. Im not sex averse but Im also not that willing to have sex often because its just not a priority for me, Id rather do more romantic things like cuddling or going on cute dates with my partner than having sex. With an asexual person, if I ever meet another asexual woman in my life, would be great! But the chances of that happening would be slim.

 

Im definitely no help with the topic of adverse childhood reactions though. I had a normal upbringing and I was very lucky to have a very loving family.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

One minor piece of feedback to start with: most asexual people these days don't use all caps "ACE", as it's not an acronym, but a phonetic shortening of "asexual"  - we usually just say "ace" (sort of like how "bi" is also not all caps). That also helps to avoid confusion with Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) research, which may be especially important in some of your areas of interest. Not a big deal for forum posts as we can figure it out, but something to keep in mind for any future research writing!

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As far as the topics you listed, I think all of these have potential!

 

Regarding your concerns about research on adverse childhood reactions - this is a topic where you would have to tread carefully, but it's certainly not impossible. If you do pursue this I would definitely recommend familiarizing yourself with existing ace writing on the subject (https://asexualsurvivors.org/ might be a good place to start - their focus is on asexual survivors of sexual assault, regardless of whether it was in childhood or adulthood, but they have some good resources and recommended reading in that area - as well as about asexuality and trauma overall). 

 

This topic especially is also an area where you may want to consider reaching out to a few ace community members for feedback at each stage of the process to discuss things like methodology or question wording to gain insight on whether there's anything that might be potentially problematic, although if you have the resources this can be helpful for any research. I know of at least two researchers who have set up ace community advisory boards like this to review sensitive issues, who I'd be happy to connect you with if you wanted to chat with someone who has that experience from the researcher side of things.

 

In addition, if you are interested in general ace research-related resources, I have a collection here that may be of interest to you: https://nextstepcake.wordpress.com/resources/asexual-research/

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You may want to join the Ace Journal Club, a monthly discussion of a scholarly ace article. 
https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/tag/journal-club/

My aspec databases, lists, and resources file has a section for scholarly article lists (under miscellanious)

Hope this helps. Good luck with your research!

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