Asexuality and Its Implications for Sexuality Studies

[Lord Happy Toast]

Asexuality and Its Implications for Sexuality Studies.

This is an article by Mark Carrigan, and according to his site:

This is a pre-print of a paper published in Psychology of Sexualities Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, Autumn 2013.

I think the article is pretty good. It's a review article, so it's largely summarizing what has already been said about the topic. It does a good job of talking about a number of the theoretical issues, and summarizing some of the qualitative work on asexuality, although quantitative work is discussed less. (However, much of that work is reviewed in another recent review article on asexuality: Asexuality: Few Facts, Many Questions).

One important contribution to the literature that it makes is its discussion of some the social/political issues pertaining to the interaction between asexual communities and researchers studying asexual communities in a digital age--not surprising, if you've read much of Carrigan's blog (researchers' use of new media is a topic he's very interested in). The relationship between "lay" asexual discourse and academic discourse about asexuality is a personal interest of mine, and it's something that I hope to see more research on in the future (and that I have already done some unpublished research on myself).

[elainetta]

That stuff looks informative. Thanks for the links! ^_^

[zea]

Thank you for sharing the paper! I like the broader view it provides.

Looking forward to your results:)

[Lambda Corvus]

It's always good to see asexuality represented in the literature. I am curious about the idea of the "asexuality umbrella". To me, it seems like this umbrella is only necessitated by the assumption that (a)sexual? + (a)romantic? = orientation. That is, rather than exploring separation between sexual orientations and romantic orientations, the literature seems to have assumed that the two are linked.

I can understand why this has happened, because most researchers, as human beings, are sexual and tend to experience sexual attraction congruent with romantic attraction. Still, this sort of assumption seems to have necessitated a complex explanation (or umbrella of terms) where it would be much simpler to explore the disconnect between sexual and romantic orientations. Arguably, exploring this disconnect would be more enlightening.

[Kellam]

Thanks for that, I'm not so good at finding such articles... It was indeed a good read.