Introduction: Erotics and asexuality: thinking asexuality, unthinking sex -- The erotics of feminist revolution: political celibacies/asexualities in the women's movement -- Lesbian bed death, asexually: an erotics of failure -- Growing into asexuality: the queer erotics of childhood -- Erotics of excess and the aging spinster -- Epilogue: Tyrannical celibacy: the anti-erotics of misogyny and white supremacy.
Drawing on queer and feminist Digital Humanities (DH) and Indigenous, antiracist, and intersectional approaches to publishing, this pedagogy piece reflects on a course designed and taught in Fall 2018 titled "Intersectional Feminist Journal Praxis." Students read intersectional readings on publishing while creating their own journal through Open Journal Systems Software (OJS). Employing principles of collaboration and praxis, students worked in teams around specific tasks like a call for papers, peer review, copyediting, and introduction-writing while employing critical publishing practices such as remaining reflexive about, for example, accessibility and power inequalities in processes of knowledge production. Their end product was the publication of the first issue of the journal they themselves created by the name of Intersectional Apocalypse (https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/ifj). This piece discusses this pedagogical DH experiment, grounding it in histories of anti-oppressive publishing endeavors and in students' own words and reflections on the course.
Asexuality, quickly becoming a burgeoning sexual identity category and subject of academic inquiry, relies at this budding moment of identity demarcation on a series of scientific studies that seek to 'discover' the truth of asexuality in and on the body. This article considers the existing scientific research on asexuality, including both older and more obscure mentions of asexuality as well as contemporary studies, through two twin claims: (1) that asexuality, as a sexual identity, is entirely specific to our current cultural moment – that it is in this sense culturally contingent, and (2) that scientific research on asexuality, while providing asexuality with a sense of credibility, is also shaping the possibilities and impossibilities of what counts as asexuality and how it operates. In the first section, I consider how older scientific research on asexuality, spanning from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, is characterized by a disinterest in asexuality. Next, turning to recent work on asexuality, the beginning of which is marked by Anthony Bogaert's 2004 study, I demonstrate how asexuality becomes 'discovered', mapped, and pursued by science, making it culturally intelligible even while often naturalizing, in the process, what I argue are harmful sexual differences.
Of FindingsDiscussion; Bibliography; 9: The Indiscreet Charms of Spatial Ugliness: An Enquiry into a (Post)colonial City; Introduction; Spatial Ugliness and the Photographic Form; Photography and the City in the West; Photography and a Colonial City; Towards a De-aesthetics of Space in the Post-colony; Conclusion; Bibliography; 10: Stigma Stains: The Somaesthetics of Institutional Abjection; Being Spatial; Being Aural; Being Watched; Bibliography; Part III: Materialities and Representations; 11: Agatha's Breasts on a Plate: "Ugliness" as Resistance and Queerness
This article works on two axes: first, employing queer archiving to push at the parameters of what might "count" as asexuality, and second, addressing feminist and queer inattentiveness to asexuality through rethinking queerness from asexual perspectives. We argue that an attunement to asexual "resonances," however subjective and impossible to measure, makes possible the imagining of a queerly asexual archive, an archive that troubles current understandings of both asexuality and queerness. Throughout, we make two central contributions that challenge both queerness and asexuality. First, we assert that where there is queerness, there is also asexuality. Second, we seek to demonstrate the pervasiveness of asexuality, not by proving its statistical significance, but by shifting away from identity toward a broader understanding of asexuality.
Despite increased awareness of sexual diversity, older people's accounts of sex and intimacy remain marginalised. This edited volume addresses diversity in sexual and intimate experience later in life (50+) and captures international research and analysis relating to intersectional identities. Contributors explore how being older intersects with differences of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class. Offering a critical focus and original contribution to an emerging, although still relatively neglected field, this collection extends knowledge concerning intimacies, practices and pleasures for those thought to represent normative, non-normative and 'new normative' forms of sexual identification and expression
