UC Irvine

Asexuality, an umbrella term that refers to those who experience low/no sexual attraction, exists at the margins of both the heteronormative and queer worlds. This makes it an invaluable strategic site to examine the relationships between gender, sexuality, and the politics of categorization. In this dissertation, I draw on 77 interviews and email dialogues with individuals under the asexuality umbrella to examine what asexuality can reveal about these relationships. In the first chapter, I examine how gender shapes one’s experience of asexuality. I find that for men, asexuality is seen as impossible, for women asexuality is seen as unremarkable, and nonbinary experiences of asexuality are typically sidelined from participants’ answers altogether. This speaks to the endurance of the gender binary even among a group where nonbinary experiences of gender are common, the deep intermingling of gender and sexuality as systems of social regulation, and the denial of women’s sexual desire as part of the scaffolding of rape culture. In the second chapter, I find that over a third of my participants were resistant to claiming any gender identity. Based on this finding, I coin the term gender detachment, which refers to individually-held notions that gender presentation/identity is unimportant, pointless, and potentially even oppressive. I also consider how the unraveling of common assumptions about sexuality (i.e. that everyone does and should experience sexual attraction) can lead to the unraveling of common assumptions about gender as well. In the third chapter, I explore the apparent paradoxes created by asexual ways of identifying. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory, I examine the (a)sexual borderlands that trouble the queer/hetero binary. I also consider how all three chapters help us think about—and disrupt—the systems of gender and sexual categorization upon which sociologists and everyday people so often rely.