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Freud's readings of Shakespeare are notorious for their universalizing claims about human sexuality. What is less commonly noticed, and what this article foregrounds, is the asexuality that underwrites psychoanalytic theories of sex. Venus and Adonis shows that Shakespeare's poem is replete with asexual encounters. In other words, it is not Adonis alone who spurns sexual romance. Venus's insatiable kissing is a textbook example of Freud's point about the paradoxicality of sex: when it comes to the pleasures of kissing, Freud says, "It's a pity I can't kiss myself." This essay reads asexuality not as a particular orientation; rather, it asks how asexuality, psychoanalysis, and Shakespeare disorient our readings of sex.

Some literature on asexuality has claimed that it is inherently radical and contains the potential for resistance. Unfortunately, this literature has tended to be unempirical, has imagined asexuality as a disembodied entity, and has marginalised the multiple identities held by asexual people. This article, inspired by Plummer's critical humanist approach, seeks to explore how individuals understand their asexuality to encourage forms of political action in the areas of identity, activism, online spaces, and LGBT politics. What we found was a plurality of experiences and attitudes with most adopting a pragmatic position in response to their social situation which saw large-scale political action as irrelevant. We conclude by reflecting on what these results mean for those who see asexuality as potentially radical.

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.