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"Sometimes called "A Fourth Orientation", asexuality is a sexual orientation characterized by a persistent lack of sexual attraction toward any gender. This book explores love, sex, and life, from the asexual point of view. This book is for anyone, regardless of orientation. Whether you're asexual, think you might be, know someone who is, or just want to learn more about what asexuality is (and isn't), there's something inside for you"--Page 4 of cover

Lambda Literary Award 2014 Finalist in LGBT Nonfiction Foreword Reviews' INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award 2014 Finalist in Family & Relationships Independent Publisher Book Awards 2015 (IPPY) Silver Medal in Sexuality/Relationships Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2015 Winner in LGBT -- What if you weren't sexually attracted to anyone? A growing number of people are identifying as asexual. They aren't sexually attracted to anyone, and they consider it a sexual orientation--like gay, straight, or bisexual. Asexuality is the invisible orientation. Most people believe that "everyone" wants sex, that "everyone" understands what it means to be attracted to other people, and that "everyone" wants to date and mate. But that's where asexual people are left out--they don't find other people sexually attractive, and if and when they say so, they are very rarely treated as though that's okay. When an asexual person comes out, alarming reactions regularly follow; loved ones fear that an asexual person is sick, or psychologically warped, or suffering from abuse. Critics confront asexual people with accusations of following a fad, hiding homosexuality, or making excuses for romantic failures. And all of this contributes to a discouraging master narrative: there is no such thing as "asexual." Being an asexual person is a lie or an illness, and it needs to be fixed. In The Invisible Orientation, Julie Sondra Decker outlines what asexuality is, counters misconceptions, provides resources, and puts asexual people's experiences in context as they move through a very sexualized world. It includes information for asexual people to help understand their orientation and what it means for their relationships, as well as tips and facts for those who want to understand their asexual friends and loved ones.

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.

While same-sex marriage debates have captured public attention, it is but one component of a broader discussion regarding the role of marriage in a changing society. To inform this discussion, I draw on qualitative, Internet survey data from 102 self-identified asexual individuals. I find that asexual relationships are complicated and nuanced in ways that have implications for a GLBTQ political agenda, including same-sex marriage recognition. In addition, findings indicate that assumptions of sex and sexuality in relationships are problematic and that present language for describing relationships is limiting. Findings suggest a social justice agenda for marginalized sexualities should be broader in scope than same-sex marriage.

AbstractIn recent years numerous reports of prisoner abuse and other militarised violences by British troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have emerged. Drawing on two such incidents – the abuse of detainees at Camp Breadbasket and the murder of Baha Mousa – this article seeks to locate such violences on a continuum that can be traced back to the ways in which British soldiers are trained. Following on from a burgeoning feminist literature on militarised masculinities, and using Avery Gordon's epistemology of ghosts and hauntings, I suggest a conceptual and methodological intervention into the subject that resists generalised stories and the mapping of 'hard' borders. Focusing on the myths of asexuality and discipline that emerge from, and reinforce, the gendered discourses of basic training, I conduct a 'ghost hunt' of the haunting spectres that have attempted to be exorcised from these myths. Making visible these ghost(s) and tracing their (violent) materialisations through multiple sites and across a continuum, militarised violences – in all their ranges – begin to be made explicable.

pt. 1. Theorizing asexuality : new orientations -- pt. 2. The politics of asexuality -- pt. 3. Visualizing asexuality in media culture -- pt. 4. Asexuality and masculinity -- pt. 5. Health, disability, and medicalization -- pt. 6. Reading asexually : asexual literary theory.

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.