title: "And Now I'm Just Different, but There's Nothing Actually Wrong With Me": Asexual Marginalization and Resistance.
abstract: This article explores the relationship between contemporary asexual lives and compulsory sexuality, or the privileging of sexuality and the marginalizing of nonsexuality. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews, I identify four ways the asexually identified individuals in this study saw themselves as affected by compulsory sexuality: pathologization, isolation, unwanted sex and relationship conflict, and the denial of epistemic authority. I also identify five ways these asexually identified individuals disrupted compulsory sexuality: adopting a language of difference and a capacity to describe asexuality; deemphasizing the importance of sexuality in human life; developing new types of nonsexual relationships; constituting asexuality as a sexual orientation or identity; and engaging in community building and outreach. I argue that some of these practices offer only a limited disruption of compulsory sexuality, but some of these practices pose a radical challenge to sexual norms by calling into question the widespread assumption that sexuality is a necessary part of human flourishing.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies , Wake Forest University , Winston-Salem , North Carolina , USA.
authors.forename: Kristina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Gupta
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D012746:Sexual Abstinence; D012725:Sexual Behavior; D019529:Sexuality; D062487:Social Marginalization
keywords: Asexuality; compulsory sexuality; identity; marginalization; resistance; sexual norms; stigma