Przybylo (2011, p. 446) uses the term “sexusociety” to describe “the diluted omnipresence of sexuality in our western contemporary present”, and Gupta (2015, p. 132) uses the phrase “compulsory sexuality” to describe “the assumption that all people are sexual and to describe the social norms and practices that both marginalize various forms of non-sexuality… and compel people to experience themselves as desiring subjects, take up sexual identities, and engage in sexual activity.” The binary opposition implied by both concepts is between allosexual and asexual–between those who do and do not experience sexual attraction or desire of some kind. Although the terms imply that social institutions privilege allosexuals at the expense of asexuals (aces), it would be erroneous to assume that these institutions are wholly repressive (Gupta, 2015, 2017).
In contemporary Western societies, greater legal, political, and cultural acceptance is being won by lesbians, gays, and other sexual minorities who have been historically oppressed, but the idea that one might lack a sexual orientation or sexual attraction altogether remains as culturally alien as ever (Scherrer, 2008). In terms of intimate or sexual citizenship (Plummer, 2003; Richardson, 2017; Weeks, 1998), aces confront a paradox: if sexuality has become the grounds for claims to inclusion and belonging in society, then to what extent does that include those who lack sexual orientation or desire altogether? On one hand, the increasing recognition and acceptance of diverse sexualities provides an opening for recognition of those who reject sexuality altogether; on the other hand, as sexuality becomes an increasingly prominent axis of claims-making in society, it is possible that aces are facing a new form of exclusion.
In this paper, we examine how aces can achieve recognition, acceptance, and belonging in a society where the absence of sexual attraction challenges the very notion of sexual citizenship. First, we describe the literature on asexuality, compulsory sexuality, and sexual citizenship. Then, using data from exploratory, semi-structured interviews with 17 ace-identified youth in the central United States, we show that aces’ discourse about their experiences contains a mixture of themes signifying both citizenship (engagement/advocacy, self-acceptance, validation, and inclusion) and alienation (passivity/conformity, self-denial, invalidation, and exclusion). Finally, we demonstrate that aces’ experiences with institutions of compulsory sexuality— intimate relationships, religion, media, and sexual communities—can either hinder or facilitate the development of asexual citizenship. We argue that there appear to be multiple pathways to sexual citizenship for aces, which depend not only upon how compulsory sexuality intersects with other dimensions of inequality (like gender, race, and class), but also upon the nature of their experiences with compulsory sexuality.
Asexuality And Compulsory Sexuality
Asexuality has been studied from biological, psychological, and sociological perspectives. From a biological perspective, asexuality is the low level of sexual attraction experienced by a small minority of the population (Bogaert, 2004). Asexuality does not necessarily imply identification as asexual, although identity is important in online communities (Van Houdenhove et al., 2015); and it does not necessarily imply the lack of sexual activity, although those who identify as asexual express little interest in it (Hille et al., 2020). Historically, asexuality was seen as related to biological factors, like sex and age, and to disabilities and disorders, like Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD); however, researchers now view asexuality as a legitimate sexual orientation (Bogaert, 2015; Brotto & Yule, 2017).
Psychological perspectives on asexuality focus on attitudinal, identity, and personality factors that distinguish aces from non-aces. Regarding attitudes towards sex and romance, aces have more negative explicit attitudes about passion and commitment and more negative implicit attitudes about sex (Bulmer & Izuma, 2018). Regarding identity, researchers have argued that the relative invisibility of asexuality in mainstream culture makes asexual identity a threat to aces’ overall self-concept, but that asexual identity can also can be protective when it shelters aces from negative threats (MacNeela & Murphy, 2015). Regarding personality, aces score lower on measures of extraversion relative to people with other sexual orientations but score similarly along other dimensions (Bogaert et al., 2018).
Sociological perspectives emphasize the impact of interactive contexts and broad social structures on asexual identity, relationships, and community. One strand of research focuses on the ways that identities and intimate relationships must be negotiated (Chasin, 2015; Dawson et al., 2016; Scott & Dawson, 2015). These studies illustrate how the meanings of asexuality are not innate but are relationally constructed in interaction. Online communities like the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) and those on platforms like Tumblr and Reddit are also important for aces because they provide valuable informational resources, social supports, and spaces to build a subculture (Gupta, 2017; Renninger, 2015; Scherrer, 2008).
“Compulsory sexuality” describes the ways that social institutions produce the invalidation and erasure of asexuality in everyday life. In Gupta’s (2015) elaboration of the concept, the cultural practices and norms found in sexual communities and relationships, biomedicine’s pathologization of asexuality, and the capitalist media system are all named as key institutions of compulsory sexuality. Compulsory sexuality is also embedded in U.S. marriage law, since failing to consummate a marriage can make it void in some states, and since marriages are favored over other types of non-sexual intimate relationships, like cohabitation (Emens, 2014).
Intrinsically, compulsory sexuality implies repression of asexuality, and Gupta (2017) documents four ways that aces feel negatively impacted by it: pathologization, isolation and invisibility, unwanted sex and relationship conflict, and the denial of epistemic authority. However, Gupta also documents five ways that aces resist the negative influence of compulsory sexuality and warns against “essentialist thinking” that society is wholly repressive of asexuality (Gupta, 2015, p. 145). Thus, a complete understanding of compulsory sexuality should also attend to the ways that institutions create space for asexual identities, relationships, and communities. To that end, this paper demonstrates how four key institutions of compulsory sexuality–intimate relationships, religion, media and popular culture, and sexual communities–figure into discourses of citizenship and alienation, which suggests that these institutions can both repress and facilitate the development of asexual identities and asexual citizenship.
Asexual Citizenship
In the Western tradition, citizenship has at least three dimensions: a legal-political dimension that connotes the civil, political, and social rights guaranteed to members of a polity by the state (Marshall, 1950); a practical-behavioral dimension that connotes the everyday responsibilities and practices of citizens (Tocqueville, 1966); and a cultural-identity dimension that connotes recognition of shared membership in the larger collective (Benhabib, 2002; Fraser, 1992). Historically, debates about citizenship focused on the first two dimensions; however, because prominent dimensions of social inequality (e.g. class, gender, race, etc.) have served as grounds for denial of citizenship, scholars have increasingly problematized the cultural-identity dimension. In recent decades, “zones of intimacies” like gender and sexuality have increasingly become the basis for political claims-making (Plummer, 2003, p. 14).
“Sexual citizenship” was originally coined by David Evans (1993) to describe how sexuality is produced and constrained by demands of neoliberal capitalism and the state. Viewed through a legal-political and practical-behavioral lens, “sexual citizenship” signals the distinction between the rights, protections, and responsibilities that are extended to heterosexuals and that have been historically denied to individuals with deviant sexualities. Viewed through the cultural-identity lens, the concept also describes the extent to which diverse sexual identities, practices, and desires are recognized as legitimate in society. As Weeks (1998, p. 37) puts it, the LGBTQIA + movement’s “moment of citizenship” included both demands for legal equality and its “claim to inclusion, to the acceptance of diversity, and a recognition of and respect for alternative ways of being, to a broadening of the definition of belonging.” More recently, Hirsch and Khan (2020, xvi) argue that sexual citizenship “denotes the acknowledgment of one’s own right to sexual self-determination, [and] importantly, recognizes the equivalent right in others.” (For a review of the literature, see (Richardson, 2017)).
In this paper, we focus on the practical-behavioral and cultural-identity dimensions. We conceptualize sexual citizenship as the development and ongoing production of sexual identities that are accepted by one’s self, validated by others, included in the broader community of diverse sexualities, and enacted through engagement and advocacy. As illustrated in Table 1, sexual citizenship maybe contrasted with sexual alienation, which is characterized by passivity/conformity, self-denial, invalidation from others, and exclusion from the broader community.
Table 1
Sexual Citizenship and Sexual Alienation
Dimension | Stakes | Citizenship (+) | Alienation (-) |
Legal-Political | Rights | Rights/Protections | Deviance/Discrimination |
Practical-Behavioral | Responsibilities | Engagement/Advocacy | Passivity/Conformity |
Cultural-Identity | Recognition via – Identity – Others – Community | Self-Acceptance Validation Inclusion | Self-Denial Invalidation Exclusion |
[INSERT Table 1 ABOUT HERE]
The ambiguous status of asexuality as a sexual orientation exposes two tensions within this conception of sexual citizenship. First, there is no necessary or simple relationship among the three dimensions, such that different groups can experience varying combinations of citizenship and alienation. For instance, unlike homosexuality, asexuality has not historically been the grounds for the denial of legal rights; yet aces today remain culturally alienated. Thus, aces (especially heteroromantic aces) experience a denial of recognition without the explicit marginalization and oppression that is also experienced by other sexual minorities.
Second, if sexuality is one basis of membership and belonging in society, then how can sexual citizenship include the recognition of sexuality’s absence as valid and legitimate? Logically, of course, the concept of sexual citizenship readily encompasses asexuality, just as the concept of religion can include atheism; but as a socio-logical matter, “nothing” is a particular phenomenon that warrants analysis (Scott, 2018). This paper is concerned with aces’ discourses of citizenship and alienation in a society that generally fails to recognize asexuality as legitimate.
An Intersectional Approach
Intersectionality provides a valuable framework for analyzing asexual citizenship because it assumes that different kinds of people experience asexuality differently, due to the ways that compulsory sexuality is impacted by other forms of social stratification, like race, gender, and class. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) coined the term to describe how discrimination against Black women is attributable neither to race nor gender alone, but to both together; hence, Black women’s experiences of race are fundamentally different from those of Black men, and Black women’s experiences of gender are fundamentally different from those of White women. Intersectionality now encompasses an array of theoretical and methodological orientations toward analyzing identities, experiences, and patterns of stratification (Choo & Ferree, 2010).
Considering how asexuality intersects with gender and sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, ability, and age, has led scholars to describe numerous, distinct experiences of asexuality. First, sex, gender, and sexual orientation are relationally implicated in one another in complex ways. Traditional gender expectations of cis–gender men and women are dictated by the sexual expectations associated with masculinity and femininity. Culturally, women are expected to be prudent, restrained, and resistant sexually, and these assumptions can make their asexuality less conflictual with their gender identity and therefore less noticeable. However, the expectation of sexual availability puts pressures on asexual women and potentially diminishes their sexual autonomy relative to asexual men. Asexual men, by contrast, are considered deviant given the norms of hegemonic masculinity that position men as dominant and desirous of sex. (Carrigan, 2012; Gupta, 2019; MacNeela & Murphy, 2015; Vares, 2018)
Research also demonstrates that asexuality subverts the gender binary system in fundamental ways, such that a large percentage of aces adopt non-binary identities, such as agender, transgender, and genderqueer (Cuthbert, 2019; MacNeela & Murphy, 2015). In 2018, 25% of Ace Community Survey participants chose “none of the above” instead of the gender binary labels “woman or female” (chosen by 62%) and “man or male” (chosen by 13%). Further, 17% identified as transgender, and the most common identity labels for people with non-binary genders were non-binary, agender, genderqueer, and genderfluid (Weis et al., 2020).
Asexuality intersects with other sexual orientations in complex ways as well, as indicated by the variety of identity labels that exist within the asexual spectrum. The asexual community distinguishes romantic from sexual orientation, such that aces may identify as both asexual and heteroromantic, homoromantic, biromantic, or aromantic; hence, heteroromantic aces may have fundamentally different experiences from homoromantic aces. Other sexual identity labels adopted by those on the ace spectrum include demisexual and gray-asexual, which indicate the experience of sexual attraction under different conditions. The 2018 Asexual Community Survey found that 66% of people identified as asexual, 12% as graysexual, 11% as questioning, 10% as demisexual, and 2% as other; furthermore, 32% identified their romantic orientation as aromantic (Weis et al., 2020). Since some asexual people identify with numerous LGBTQIA + identities, they can face multiple oppressions, like homophobia and transphobia, alongside asexual prejudice.
Second, aces of different racial and ethnic backgrounds experience asexuality differently because of sexualized racial stereotypes. Whiteness, especially White womanhood, has historically been associated with repressed sexuality, while people of color, with the notable exception of Asian American men (Kao et al., 2018), have been hypersexualized in American popular culture. For some Black asexual people, the stereotype of hypersexuality makes asexuality and Blackness seem incompatible, though the ‘Mammy’ stereotype can be alienating for the opposite reason: identifying as asexual for some Black women can feel like playing into stereotypes (Brown, 2019; Owen, 2018). The experience of racial oppression can be a barrier to identifying as asexual, not only because sexual stigmas can compound racial stigmas, but also because information about asexuality often comes through online communities, which are often dominated by Whites and function as culturally White spaces. (Chen, 2021; Owen, 2014)
Third, ability intersects with asexuality because of the pathologization of asexuality and the desexualization of disability–the stereotype of people with disabilities as asexual. As mentioned above, asexuality was historically pathologized as a disorder, and many aces struggle with mental health–doubtless in part because of compulsory sexuality. According to the 2018 Asexual Community Survey, 28% of asexual people consider themselves neurodivergent, 13% consider themselves disabled, 12% consider themselves chronically ill, 6% consider themselves physically disabled, and 6% consider themselves cognitively disabled (Weis et al., 2020). Asexual people with disabilities have sometimes found it difficult to have their identities and experiences validated because they are seen as upholding a harmful stereotype. (Chen, 2021; Cuthbert, 2017; Kim, 2011; Lund & Johnson, 2014)
Fourth, asexuality intersects with age to create different experiences for younger and older asexual adults. This is true not only because of biological changes in sexual desire over the life course, but also because experiences of dating and sex are impacted by age-based norms and stereotypes. For younger adults, romantic relationships and sexual activity are seen as essential parts of this phase of the life course, so young aces can feel isolated and dismissed as immature, prudish, or inexperienced. For older adults, asexuality is seen as congruent with biological aging, and since cultural stereotypes associate aging bodies with the lack of sexuality, older aces may be judged as stereotypical. (Carrigan, 2012; Dawson et al., 2016; MacNeela & Murphy, 2015; Vares, 2018)
In sum, an intersectional perspective shows that experiences of asexuality vary and therefore that we should expect there to be multiple pathways to asexual citizenship. This paper contributes to this literature by demonstrating how this is true not just because of how compulsory sexuality intersects with other forms of social stratification, but also because of how the forces of compulsory sexuality themselves can have disparate impacts. Specifically, we examine how aces describe their experiences with four key institutions of compulsory sexuality–intimate relationships, religion, media and popular culture, and sexual communities–and how those experiences produce different discourses.