University Honors

Asexuality is a sexual orientation in which someone may experience little, situational, or nosexual attraction. From its complicated existence in queer spaces to its complete invisibility insociety and media representation, why does it continue to lack an understanding even as queertopics continue to enter the mainstream conversation? How is this orientation, seeminglystraightforward, shrouded in confusion, mystification, and false stereotypes? As an asexual andaromantic woman, I believe that the cultural obsession with glamorizing sex and romance andportraying it as essential to a fulfilling life plays a part in confusing the general public on howone could live without the desire to participate fully or at all with these cultural norms andexpectations. To better represent these points and how they affect the lives of asexual people ofvarying intersecting identities, I intend to use an ethnographic approach in this study to betterunderstand these shared experiences and the diversity of the asexual subjectivity. My researchengages with an individual method, including descriptive survey, interview, interaction, andobservation, especially participant observation. My aim in this research is to establish a dialogueon asexuality for a better understanding of an orientation underdeveloped in theory. I identifythis as an opportunity to examine and better understand the spectrum of sexuality. In general, Iintend to interrogate the ways the mainstream norm of sexuality itself still seeps into media andqueer spaces and how to further encourage new forms of asexual inclusivity and acceptance invarious areas of society.