Tag: asexuality
Revisiting Asexual Awareness Week
This week is 2018’s Asexual Awareness Week (October 21-28), so I want to revisit a post that I wrote four years ago. (Ray Osborn will return with a final installment of poetry next week.) This article below was the first time that I would publicly write about asexuality. I was not out when I wrote
Valuing Difference: An Ace on Food, Friendship, and Fluffy Companionship
[5 minute read] (CW: pet death) For a year, two of my colleagues shared an office across from mine. They were best friends, and they stocked their space with craft beer and a reclaimed yellow armchair, squishy and velveteen, and spent their office hours in conversation together. Maybe it was because my own best
Normalizing Difference: Redefining Asexuality
[5 minute read] The problem with asexuality, as I’ve discussed before, is that it is hard to talk about on its own terms — even in a grammatical sense. For example: If you’re homosexual, you can say, “I’m sexually attracted to people of my same gender.” If you’re pansexual, you can say, “I’m sexually attracted
Abnormalizing Difference: Sexual Normativity in Asexual Sherlock Fanfic
[7 minute read] (CW: discussion of sexual violence in fanfic.) Can I tell you a secret? I knew the titular character of BBC’s Sherlock had become one of the mascots of the ace community before I even watched the show — and I defended his reputation as such before I watched it, too, as evidenced in
Misrepresenting Difference: Objectifying Asexuality in Journalism
[10 minute read] The media we consume shapes our implicit biases. It is one factor among many, but I saw it at work among my Fox News-watching relatives during the 2016 election. I saw it at work among rosary-praying priests putting my femininity on a pedestal. I saw it at work after 9/11, when I
Coda: Asexual Awareness Week and the Future of Queer Theory
Last week, I completed the Safer People, Safer Spaces training my university offers to learn better ways to be an ally, whether you’re a member or a supporter of the queer community. One of the activities we did involved matching vocabulary words (like lesbian, heteronormativity, drag, M2F) to their definitions and then discussing what we
Queering LGBT History: The Case of Sherlock Holmes Fanfic
This summer, I fell for BBC’s “Sherlock” hard1 — hard enough to drive me back to fanfic. Fanfic has grown up in the past decade: it now has activists, “aca-fans” (academic fans), and copyright lawyers, and a nonprofit defending artists’ rights to disseminate transformative works, including fiction. My casual intention to fill the wait till