Asexualities

Feminist and Queer Perspectives

Karli June Cerankowski, Megan Milks, Karli June Cerankowski, Megan Milks

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134692538
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Études relatives au genre

What is so radical about not having sex? To answer this question, this collection of essays explores the feminist and queer politics of asexuality. Asexuality is predominantly understood as an orientation describing people who do not experience sexual attraction. In this multidisciplinary volume, the authors expand this definition of asexuality to account for the complexities of gender, race, disability, and medical discourse. Together, these essays challenge the ways in which we imagine gender and sexuality in relation to desire and sexual practice. Asexualities provides a critical reevaluation of even the most radical queer theorizations of sexuality. Going beyond a call for acceptance of asexuality as a legitimate and valid sexual orientation, the authors offer a critical examination of many of the most fundamental ways in which we categorize and index sexualities, desires, bodies, and practices.

As the first book-length collection of critical essays ever produced on the topic of asexuality, this book serves as a foundational text in a growing field of study. It also aims to reshape the directions of feminist and queer studies, and to radically alter popular conceptions of sex and desire. Including units addressing theories of asexual orientation; the politics of asexuality; asexuality in media culture; masculinity and asexuality; health, disability, and medicalization; and asexual literary theory, Asexualities will be of interest to scholars and students in sexuality, gender, sociology, cultural studies, disability studies, and media culture.

Part I

Theorizing Asexuality

New Orientations

1 Mismeasures of Asexual Desires

Jacinthe Flore

At the heart of scientific research and documentation of human sexuality is the presupposition of a hidden, yet discoverable innate sexual desire. In fact, the existence of sexological and psychiatric sciences arguably depends on this intractable assumption of discoverability.¹ The use of scales, measures, paradigms, and models pertaining to “functions” of “the sexual instinct” pervades scientific studies of sexuality. These diagnostic tools not only build on the idea that having a sexuality—and experiencing sexual desire—is non-contestable, they also presuppose the existence of a healthy sexuality. Hence those individuals whose sexualities, or absence thereof, do not fit into a scientific model of sexual normalcy appear in psychiatric frameworks, in particular, as disordered and pathological. In the case of asexuality, individuals are presented as absent and lacking.

Asexuals, understood as “people who experience little or no sexual attraction and/or who self-identify with asexuality,”² are peculiarly absent from research on human sexuality. Their sporadic presence is characterized largely in the terms of a syndrome that demands both explanation and medication, mostly through psychiatric and sexological tools. However, over the past five years or so, asexuality has begun to garner significant academic interest. Communities of like-minded individuals on online platforms such as the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) compel theorists and researchers of human sexuality to take seriously the fact that some people do not experience sexual desire and attraction. In the space of a few years, researchers have actively started to consider asexuality as an identity category, similar (and sometimes in opposition) to heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual identities.

This chapter seeks to explore and perturb the concept of “asexual identity” as it appears in the discourse of psychiatric science. I begin by discussing the idea of sexuality as a necessary attribute of the human condition vehiculated by sexology and psychiatric sciences. I proceed with a critical observation of the enterprise of American sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson, especially with respect to their elaboration of the “human sexual response cycle.” This is followed by an exploration of asexuality as a diagnostic category found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA)—with its emphasis on “sexual dysfunctions” and the diagnostic category of “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” (HSDD). The relationship between asexuality and its disordered other, HSDD, is closely related to questions pertaining to the necessity of sexual desire in humans. In the twentieth century, sexologists singled out disturbances at the level of sexual desire as conditions demanding mediation. States of low or no sexual desire were conceptualized as defects likely to cause harm to individuals. Psychiatric discourses of sexual desire build on an understanding of sexual desire as instinctive and, insofar as it is natural, it is deemed the marker of healthy sexuality. As such, an asexual identity in keeping with medical models can only be articulated in terms of what it lacks.

As I will argue, sexual desire as conceptualized by psychiatric diagnosis has been instrumental to the erasure of asexuality as a subject position. Paying attention to the elision of asexual subjectivity, my purpose is to critique medical models of asexuality and genitally focused understandings of sexual desire. I investigate current available research on asexuality that draws on medical models and diagnostic tools. I contend that in order to be intelligible beyond the notion of lack, a study of asexuality must challenge discourses enforcing sexual desire as mandatory, including biological reductionist approaches, while emphasizing the labile aspects of human subjectivity.

HERMENEUTICS OF THE (SEXUAL) SELF

The birth of the sexual sciences, and the development of sexology and psychiatry, were and remain an attempt to define and delimit the meaning of being human itself. This widely quoted statement by Michel Foucault is pertinent:

[Sexuality] is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.³

When researching asexuality and attempting to delineate a space for it to account for itself, it is important to recognize that historically, research into human sexuality has turned existence into sexistence, embalmed in the possibilities and threats of sexuality.⁴ Hence, “sexuality” effectively became tied to humanity via a plethora of discourses, instruments, and institutions.

In accordance, the very use of the term “sexual dysfunctions” to account for deviations related to supposedly insufficient sexual desire makes the pathologizing process inexorable; to be human is to be sexual. If one is expected to be a sexual being, with a sexual body driven by desires, how can one articulate his/her identity and experience of life as asexual? That the asexual-self materialized against a landscape of sexuality, sexual dysfunctions, and medi(c)ation, strongly resonates with Foucault’s questions: “How does it happen that the human subject makes himself [sic] into an object of possible knowledge, through which forms of rationality, through which historical necessities, and at what price?”⁵ The rationality privileged by the sexual sciences jettisons the possibilities of asexuality; sexual desire emerges from the discursive and conceptual assumption of sexuality’s own indispensability. Significantly, Richard von Krafft-Ebing theorized that life consisted of two primary instincts: self-preservation and sexuality.⁶ When sexuality is unmistakably tied to the survival of the species, the direction of one’s sexuality is made central to identity. This conceptualization of sexual identity was especially significant to the works of Sigmund Freud, who posited that the sexual orientation of an individual is revealed in the sex of the person towards whom he/she is attracted.⁷ When we consider the specificities of an asexual identification, and take into account the DSM and discourse of sexology, asexuality has a very limited intelligibility. Because the sexual sciences have come to rely on sexual object choice to explicate sexuality, asexuality is framed through a discourse of medical atypicality.

The DSM, along with the influential discourse of sexological texts, can be considered a form of a “hermeneutics of the self”; central to these discourses is the production of an intelligible life. This particular “hermeneutics of the self” is more accurately phrased as a hermeneutics of the (compulsively, or necessarily) sexual self. Arnold Davidson remarks that the nomenclature of psychiatric manuals is deeply involved in understandings of our humanity and we probably minimize their influence because psychiatry weaves itself so intimately into our self-epistemology.⁸

The scientific study of sexuality was complemented by the manufacture of a master narrative of sexual normalcy. The naissance of sexual science in the nineteenth century was responsible for disseminating specific ideas on appropriate sexuality, or rather on what appropriate sexuality should be, especially through Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis.⁹ Indeed, many of these frameworks implied, if not explicitly stated, that deviations were identified and categorized precisely to establish sexual normalcy both epistemologically and instrumentally.¹⁰ Such ideas were, and remain to this day, grounded in biological determinism, which, as Jeffrey Weeks concisely captures, “insists on the fixity of our sexualities, on their resilience in the face of all efforts at modification.”¹¹ For sexologists, “biological science promised that what is would provide direction for what ought to be.”¹² Biological determinism invested sexuality with a purpose outside of pleasure, a justification, and an unquestionable truth germane to one’s identity.

Essentialist approaches to sexuality remain one of the hallmarks of sexological science. As Janice Irvine reminds us, sexologists posit that “if we can somehow peel off the layers of distracting and distorting cultural influence … we would locate a healthy sex drive.”¹³

If it is this understanding of sexual desire that grounds scientific thinking about sexuality, it is unsurprising that individuals who confess low or no levels of sexual desire should eventually be treated as dysfunctional. Thus, it is rather clear that the medical literature of sexuality has at its basis not a fundamental, natural truism, but rather, is a discursive practice conditioned by social, cultural, and ideological factors. How we learn to understand ourselves as possessors of sexuality, of desires, and as sexual bodies is likewise conditioned by these factors.

A STANDARDIZED SEXUAL DESIRE

Twentieth century sexology furthered investigations into the physiological processes of sexual encounters. American sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson were especially central to this task. Their influential work, Human Sexual Response, unveiled their model of the “human sexual response cycle” (hereafter HSRC). The sexologists claimed that the HSRC “provides anatomic structuring and assures inclusion and correct placement of specifics of physiologic response within sequential continuum of human response to effective sexual stimulation.”¹⁴ The HSRC consists of four phases: excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.¹⁵ Despite claims of neutrality and objectivity, Masters’ and Johnson’s conceptualization of sexual arousal and satisfaction was developed solely through their observations of individuals who reported “a positive history of masturbatory and coital experience.”¹⁶ Such exclusion of variety betrays Masters’ and Johnson’s commitment to the idea that biology could reveal sexuality’s truth in terms of what it should do and how it should function. The HSRC, developed from an extremely narrow subject pool, became a yardstick for sexual normalcy both in sexology and psychiatric science. As engineers of sexual normalcy, it is apparent that the medical sciences were especially interested in ensuring the presence of sexual impulse.

The aim of clinical sexology is to repair the sexual impulse. Because the definition of a problem influences the proposed solutions, “the range of interventions that have been developed have a biomedical cast.”¹⁷ By concentrating on the need to preserve and (medically) restore the sexual impulse, the success of treatments is measured in terms of symptom reversal, which ignores the socio-psychological and cultural contexts of sexual expression, performance, and experience.¹⁸ In fact, in their subsequent work Human Sexual Inadequacy, Masters and Johnson speculate that the greatest obstruction to “proper” sexual response is a “...