Ela Przybyło | Illinois State University (original) (raw)
Books by Ela Przybyło
Ohio State University Press, 2019
Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality draws on Audre Lorde’s work on erotics... more Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality draws on Audre Lorde’s work on erotics and the burgeoning scholarship in asexuality studies to propose an alternative language for discussing forms of intimacy that are not reducible to sex or sexuality and that challenge compulsory sexuality.
https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214046.html
Palgrave, 2018
Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—i... more Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—it has long functioned as a social category that demarcates access to social, cultural, and political spaces and capital. The editors of and authors in this collection harness intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches in order to examine ugliness as a political category that is deployed to uphold established notions of worth and entitlement. On the Politics of Ugliness identifies and challenges the harmful effects that labels and feelings of ugliness have on individuals and the socio-political order. It explores ugliness in relation to the intersectional processes of racialization, colonization and settler colonialism, gender-making, ableism, heteronormativity, and fatphobia. On the Politics of Ugliness asks that we fight against visual injustice and imagine new ways of seeing.
Edited Special Issues by Ela Przybyło
Feral Feminisms, 2022
Digital painting done for the Carnival of Aces, March 2021. Caption written at the time: "never d... more Digital painting done for the Carnival of Aces, March 2021. Caption written at the time: "never did a painting as a carnival post, but I think I might try to do them more from now on-this one's messy lol, but drawn recalling my feeling being in dreams that seem sexual but not in a really human-bodily way-either I'm a humanoid form surrounded by abstract forms that press in on me, or I myself am an abstract, cloudy being touched by more humanoid figures-no skin on skin contact, just a lot of pressure and thought and emotion, if those sound different enough-here, messy as this kind of is, thinking about lying on my stomach and getting a back massage from whatever forces are moving around in my dream lol." Ulysses Constance Bougie (he/they) is a creative writer, visual artist, and academic bitch with bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the University of Missouri, respectively. He is currently a graduate instructor with focuses in asexual and aromantic studies, composition studies, and multimodal + neuro/queer rhetorics at Illinois State University. They recently published a chapbook of old poems entitled my god(s)(?). Find him on Twitter as @5tephendeadalu5 or via their website, https://cpbwrites.wordpress.com/. Credits Feral Feminisms Issue 10.2. Spring 2022 www.feralfeminisms.com Feral Feminisms is an independent, inter-media, peer-reviewed, and open access online journal committed to equitable knowledge-making and knowledge-sharing. We are part of the Radical Open Access Collective, a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses committed to horizontal alliances and creative experimentation. As a journal ran by volunteer/unpaid editors, we welcome your support through donations, which will go toward maintaining the journal. If you donate, your support will be acknowledged on our website and in our forthcoming issues.
Feminist Formations, 2020
Introduction to special issue on The Erotics of Asexualities and Nonsexualities: Intersectional A... more Introduction to special issue on The Erotics of Asexualities and Nonsexualities: Intersectional Approaches.
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, 2018
In this issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, we invited contributors to ... more In this issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, we invited contributors to engage with how protest is visualized, that is, rendered visual in the form of iconography and through social media, and imagined as a utopian project of feminist, queer, and anti-racist worldmaking. Inviting scholarship and creative engagements from the overlapping perspectives of feminist media studies, transnational feminist theory, critical race studies, visual studies, and postcolonial digital humanities, this special issue examines the aesthetics of feminist protests in terms of their networked circulations as well as their affective bonds and material contexts. Exploring the emerging modes of visibility, networked solidarity, and collaborative knowledge production, “Visualizing Protest: Transnational Approaches to the Aesthetics of Dissent” examines the relationships between the aesthetics of feminist transnational protest and digital revolt in a dynamic, polymedia context characterized by amateur remixing, instantaneous sharing, immaterial labour, corporate ownership of digital platforms, and institutionalized state surveillance of social media. Read the intro here: https://adanewmedia.org/2018/11/issue14-przybylo-novoselova-rodrigues/
English Studies in Canada (ESC), 2014
(Derritt Mason and Ela Przybylo) Recognizing that we cannot wholly pin down a concept that circul... more (Derritt Mason and Ela Przybylo) Recognizing that we cannot wholly pin down a concept that circulates in defiant resistance to definition, this issue understands hysteria as a diagnostic trope assigned to a series of symptoms—performed, manifested, and/or expressed at the level of the body—and functioning in every case as an index of cultural norms that hysteria always exceeds and sometimes resists. Today, hysteria commonly circulates with reference to collective and individual social performances of excessive behaviour, and although it has been by and large disarticulated from gender and medical discourse hysteria remains haunted by its history and etymology.
Articles and Chapters by Ela Przybyło
Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies (Routledge), 2024
In this chapter, I provide a genealogy of asexuality for Women's and Gender Studies (WGS). Focusi... more In this chapter, I provide a genealogy of asexuality for Women's and Gender Studies (WGS). Focusing on political asexuality of the sixties and seventies, or an articulation of asexuality connected to the critique of the institutions of heterosexuality, romantic love, and the role of sex, I wish to disprove two common ideas that have implicitly surfaced within WGS: that political asexuality was of relevance only to white feminist politics, and that it was not only unqueer but actually at odds with queer politics. Drawing on antiracist formulations of political asexuality, I hold that political asexuality is a conceptual tool of feminist change-making and worldmaking. By thinking about political asexuality on expanded terms, I suggest that WGS might effectively develop a critical approach to compulsory sexuality through examining the importance of another antiracist feminist concept--that of erotics--as a distinctly feminist paradigm for rethinking intimacies.
Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, 2024
This article develops "menstrual methodologies" for ungendering menstruation and attending to the... more This article develops "menstrual methodologies" for ungendering menstruation and attending to the chronic pain and dysphoria present in menstrual embodiment. Specifically, it unfolds from the experiences of a nonbinary person with undiagnosed endometriosis through developing a series of menstrual methodologies, including ungendering menstruation; thinking with pain through crip time, crankiness, and autoethnography; and a justice-based approach to menstruation; followed by an application of these methodologies to a recent case study. Following on an autobiographical prelude, I begin with an introduction to menstrual methodologies and next outline each one. Menstrual methodologies, I argue, provide a toolkit not only for those who study menstruation and menstruators but for researchers across disciplines who are interested in questions of gender, embodiment, pain, medical science, justice, and disability.
Polish Literature as World Literature, Bloomsbury’s “Literatures as World Literature” series, 2022
This chapter argues for the importance of rethinking both world literature and Polish literature ... more This chapter argues for the importance of rethinking both world literature and Polish literature from the perspective of queer Polish literature. Focusing on Tomasz Jedrowski’s novel, Swimming in the Dark (2020), the chapter considers the use of water in the novel with an attention to how it plays on the themes of border imperialism, sexuality and national identity, and transnational circulation of queer texts. Jedrowski’s novel, set in state socialist Poland of the seventies and eighties, is a queer love story that mounts a challenge to the heterosexualization of Polish literature, and—being written in English from the diasporic standpoint of Jedrowski who was born in Germany to Polish parents but who continues to be invested in Polish culture and identity—it demands a rethinking of what can count as Polish literature. The chapter argues that by reading against the tide and being attentive to queer movements in writing through an analytics of water, Polish and world literatures can continue to be reimagined and reinvigorated.
For edited collection, Polish Literature as World Literature, edited by Piotr Florczyk and K. A. Wisniewski. London: Bloomsbury for Bloomsbury’s “Literatures as World Literature” series. 161 – 176.
Queering Sharing in the Marketized University, 2023
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Sexuality Education, 2022
In her groundbreaking and educational popular nonfiction book ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About ... more In her groundbreaking and educational popular nonfiction book ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, Angela Chen (2020) reflects on the importance of creating asexual representations and stories for asexual (ace) people by ace people. While on the one hand, she acknowledges the importance of educating allosexual (or non-asexual) people on asexuality, on the other, she anticipates the day when that will no longer be necessary, and when as aces “we will move closer to not feeling that any explanation is necessary” and “when aces reject the gaze that evaluates our identities so narrowly” (p. 84). The goal of this piece is to help bridge the gap between those two positions by moving closer toward that “feeling” of not needing “any explanation” for asexuality that Chen refers to. First, I examine in this entry definitions central to the lexicology of ace identities, paying particular attention to both ace and aromantic (aro) identities as well as to the significance of rethinking attraction. Next, I explore who asexuals are, drawing on prevalence rates and community composition. Finally, I explore the significance of compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity as conceptual frameworks. Knowledge of asexuality and aromanticism as well as compulsory sexuality, amatonormativity, and the dynamic possibilities of attraction are vital to sexuality education, which often neglects to include ace and aro related content both in schol- arship and pedagogical practice.
Introducing the New Sexuality Studies (Fourth Edition), 2022
QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking , 2021
In this article, we explore and discuss the role that zines play in asexual and aromantic communi... more In this article, we explore and discuss the role that zines play in asexual and aromantic community and worldmaking. Drawing on intersectional feminist zine studies and asexuality studies, we consider how zines, and in particular Taking the Cake, Brown and Gray, and An Aromantic Manifesto, have provided an important Do-It-Yourself (DIY) platform for asexual (ace) and aromantic (aro) people to navigate their identities, challenge compulsory sexuality, and reimagine ace and aro worlds. Adopting the framework of Lordean erotics, we focus in our analysis on how ace and aro zinesters navigate questions of queerness, gender, ability, race, and racism. We enter the little backroom in the stationary store where rows of zines are kept in place with twine. It's a queer little space but we might not find asexuality or aromanticism here, just as we didn't find it in the gay bookstore. Instead, we bring the a-zines with us-everywhere we go-in case the place needs them, in case someone needs them, in case someone doubting their own existence needs a voice to tell them that asexual and aromantic people do exist.
Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2021
This article draws on the field of asexuality studies and the growing work of aromanticism studie... more This article draws on the field of asexuality studies and the growing work of aromanticism studies to think about whether and how we can theorize lesbian studies from asexual (ace) and aromantic (aro) perspectives. Aces experience "the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity" (Asexual Visibility and Education Network) and aros experience little or no romantic attraction to others. While lesbian studies has countless examples of "asexual resonances," or lesbian theorizations that focus on intimacy between women in ways that do not centralize sex and sometimes do not centralize romance-such as those of Boston Marriages and intimate friendships, women identified women, single lesbian figures and spinsters, and lesbian kinship networks that are erotic if not sexual or romantic in nature-little work thus far has explored lesbian identities using the frameworks of asexuality and even more so of aromanticism. This piece explores ace and aro lesbianism by focusing on two artists: abstract expressionist Canadian-American painter Agnes Martin (1912-2004) and pop art multi-media Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b.1929). Martin has been regarded as lesbian and Kusama as a sexually repressed heterosexual, with neither artist widely understood nor celebrated for the ace and aro elements of their identities, despite evidence suggesting that both artists might be ace and aro. Opening up understandings of lesbianism beyond the sexual and romantic, I argue, allows for a dynamic positioning of lesbianism as a relational quality that can be extended to countless artists, figures, literary texts, and films.
Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media , 2021
Examining the powerful protest art piece Rainbow Mary [Tęczowa Madonna] by Elżbieta Podleśna, thi... more Examining the powerful protest art piece Rainbow Mary [Tęczowa Madonna] by Elżbieta Podleśna, this piece considers the reasons for Polish homophobia and transphobia as expressed by recent events including the rise of the conceptual right-wing framework of 'gender ideology', efforts to create 'LGBT-free' zones, and attempts at preventing Pride Parades. It argues that Polish right-wing hatred towards LGBTQ+ people is rooted in unresolved trauma and melancholia stemming from centuries of colonisation and occupation. Through a nationalistic insistence on Polish innocence and on messianic suffering, Polish LGBTQ+ people are framed by the right-wing as a threat to Polish sovereignty and thus understood as in need of expulsion. The piece argues that Polish feminist and queer protest art, and specifically Podleśna's Rainbow Mary, partakes in what José Esteban Muñoz names disidentification, or the remaking of mainstream symbols so that they better serve LGBTQ+ people, remaking in the process what it means to be Polish.
Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, 2021
The practice, theory, and critique of allyship have been central to feminist scholarship and acti... more The practice, theory, and critique of allyship have been central to feminist scholarship and activism. Identities once not regarded as identities at all but as neutral givens, such as maleness, whiteness, cisnormativity, heterosexuality, abledness, and settlerhood, have all become politicized planes of analysis and action. Yet little scholarship, praxis, and activism has held people with thin privilege accountable for the role they play in fueling the fires of fatphobia in the day to day. Even while fat studies and fat activisms have worked to dismantle fatphobia, thin people have rarely been asked to play pivotal roles in dismantling fatphobic worldviews. In this piece, we draw on anti-racist feminism, disability studies, and fat activism to think about what it might take to become a fat ally. Grounded in our collaborative corporeality as a (very) fat and (very) thin person, we hone the method of research-practice in this part theoretical essay and part action zine. Specifically, we argue that for fat allyhood to be possible, allies need to hone anti-rather than non-fatphobic commitments and practices grounded in what Mia Mingus frames as "access intimacy."
SEX AND DIVERSITY IN LATER LIFE Critical Perspectives, 2021
In this chapter, I unpack how compulsory sexuality operates alongside desexualisation for ageing ... more In this chapter, I unpack how compulsory sexuality operates alongside desexualisation for ageing adults in western countries at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, where the pressure to have sex and remain vigorous into late life looms strong. Following asexuality studies and critical disability studies scholar Eunjung Kim (2010), I mark a difference between asexuality and desexualisation. Asexuality, or low-to-no sexual attraction to others, I take for granted as a real sexual identity and orientation that can exist at any age as well as emerging later in life (Przybylo, 2016). Further, I mark desexualisation as a harmful process of barring or preventing access to sex, sexual fulfilment, and sexual identity. Understood in this way, asexuality and desexualisation are not one and the same, since asexuality is affirmatively embraced as a component of identity, and desexualisation is a process by which equitable access to sex and sexual expression is prevented.
UGGA Art Exhibit Catalogue, 2020
The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies , 2020
Przybylo and Fahs examine a series of new menstrual product advertisements, arguing that they pus... more Przybylo and Fahs examine a series of new menstrual product advertisements, arguing that they push consumer capitalist goals of selling menstrual gear with an “empowered” message at the expense of co-opting feminist discourses of body and menstrual positivity. Drawing on feminist menstrual scholarship, they argue that menstrual positivity is thinned and transformed when commodified. They argue that “positivity”—while important to feminist menstrual activism, praxis, and theorizing—is easily co-optable within neoliberal marketing cultures. While the authors acknowledge the importance of affirmative messaging, they nevertheless develop a “menstrual crankiness” that draws on positivity but also holds it critically at bay. Aligned with queer theoretical work on the political import of negative affects, they assert the importance of menstrual crankiness in pushing at sexist, transphobic, ableist, and white discourses around bodies and embodiment, arguing that menstrual crankiness is vital to thinking about the material pains and pleasures of menstrual bleeding.
Exploring discourses of menstrual negativity and menstrual contagion, we argue for a feminist que... more Exploring discourses of menstrual negativity and menstrual contagion, we argue for a feminist queer crip approach to menstrual pain. Understood as imagined and exaggerated, menstrual pain has been rendered illegible by redemptive models of pain and straight, ableist structures of temporality. We respond to this context of pain-denial
by drawing on crip and queer theories on pain and temporality and feminist work on menstruation to argue that menstrual pain is chronic and cyclical pain. Through our own autobiographies of the material and structural conditions of menstrual pain, we offer a contribution to thinking about menstrual pain and its accompanying contagions
and chronicities. We do so by exploring discourses of menstrual containment, negativity, and pain-denial. Next, using one of our experiences of a misdiagnosis of menstrual pain as adolescent “growing pains” as a jumping-off point, we formulate a model of growing pain that centralizes pain in embodied and social imaginings of the body. Finally, we envision a cyclical menstrual time, which can provide the ground for coalitional, relational, social, and political approaches to menstrual pain.
Ohio State University Press, 2019
Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality draws on Audre Lorde’s work on erotics... more Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality draws on Audre Lorde’s work on erotics and the burgeoning scholarship in asexuality studies to propose an alternative language for discussing forms of intimacy that are not reducible to sex or sexuality and that challenge compulsory sexuality.
https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214046.html
Palgrave, 2018
Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—i... more Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—it has long functioned as a social category that demarcates access to social, cultural, and political spaces and capital. The editors of and authors in this collection harness intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches in order to examine ugliness as a political category that is deployed to uphold established notions of worth and entitlement. On the Politics of Ugliness identifies and challenges the harmful effects that labels and feelings of ugliness have on individuals and the socio-political order. It explores ugliness in relation to the intersectional processes of racialization, colonization and settler colonialism, gender-making, ableism, heteronormativity, and fatphobia. On the Politics of Ugliness asks that we fight against visual injustice and imagine new ways of seeing.
Feral Feminisms, 2022
Digital painting done for the Carnival of Aces, March 2021. Caption written at the time: "never d... more Digital painting done for the Carnival of Aces, March 2021. Caption written at the time: "never did a painting as a carnival post, but I think I might try to do them more from now on-this one's messy lol, but drawn recalling my feeling being in dreams that seem sexual but not in a really human-bodily way-either I'm a humanoid form surrounded by abstract forms that press in on me, or I myself am an abstract, cloudy being touched by more humanoid figures-no skin on skin contact, just a lot of pressure and thought and emotion, if those sound different enough-here, messy as this kind of is, thinking about lying on my stomach and getting a back massage from whatever forces are moving around in my dream lol." Ulysses Constance Bougie (he/they) is a creative writer, visual artist, and academic bitch with bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the University of Missouri, respectively. He is currently a graduate instructor with focuses in asexual and aromantic studies, composition studies, and multimodal + neuro/queer rhetorics at Illinois State University. They recently published a chapbook of old poems entitled my god(s)(?). Find him on Twitter as @5tephendeadalu5 or via their website, https://cpbwrites.wordpress.com/. Credits Feral Feminisms Issue 10.2. Spring 2022 www.feralfeminisms.com Feral Feminisms is an independent, inter-media, peer-reviewed, and open access online journal committed to equitable knowledge-making and knowledge-sharing. We are part of the Radical Open Access Collective, a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses committed to horizontal alliances and creative experimentation. As a journal ran by volunteer/unpaid editors, we welcome your support through donations, which will go toward maintaining the journal. If you donate, your support will be acknowledged on our website and in our forthcoming issues.
Feminist Formations, 2020
Introduction to special issue on The Erotics of Asexualities and Nonsexualities: Intersectional A... more Introduction to special issue on The Erotics of Asexualities and Nonsexualities: Intersectional Approaches.
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, 2018
In this issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, we invited contributors to ... more In this issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, we invited contributors to engage with how protest is visualized, that is, rendered visual in the form of iconography and through social media, and imagined as a utopian project of feminist, queer, and anti-racist worldmaking. Inviting scholarship and creative engagements from the overlapping perspectives of feminist media studies, transnational feminist theory, critical race studies, visual studies, and postcolonial digital humanities, this special issue examines the aesthetics of feminist protests in terms of their networked circulations as well as their affective bonds and material contexts. Exploring the emerging modes of visibility, networked solidarity, and collaborative knowledge production, “Visualizing Protest: Transnational Approaches to the Aesthetics of Dissent” examines the relationships between the aesthetics of feminist transnational protest and digital revolt in a dynamic, polymedia context characterized by amateur remixing, instantaneous sharing, immaterial labour, corporate ownership of digital platforms, and institutionalized state surveillance of social media. Read the intro here: https://adanewmedia.org/2018/11/issue14-przybylo-novoselova-rodrigues/
English Studies in Canada (ESC), 2014
(Derritt Mason and Ela Przybylo) Recognizing that we cannot wholly pin down a concept that circul... more (Derritt Mason and Ela Przybylo) Recognizing that we cannot wholly pin down a concept that circulates in defiant resistance to definition, this issue understands hysteria as a diagnostic trope assigned to a series of symptoms—performed, manifested, and/or expressed at the level of the body—and functioning in every case as an index of cultural norms that hysteria always exceeds and sometimes resists. Today, hysteria commonly circulates with reference to collective and individual social performances of excessive behaviour, and although it has been by and large disarticulated from gender and medical discourse hysteria remains haunted by its history and etymology.
Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies (Routledge), 2024
In this chapter, I provide a genealogy of asexuality for Women's and Gender Studies (WGS). Focusi... more In this chapter, I provide a genealogy of asexuality for Women's and Gender Studies (WGS). Focusing on political asexuality of the sixties and seventies, or an articulation of asexuality connected to the critique of the institutions of heterosexuality, romantic love, and the role of sex, I wish to disprove two common ideas that have implicitly surfaced within WGS: that political asexuality was of relevance only to white feminist politics, and that it was not only unqueer but actually at odds with queer politics. Drawing on antiracist formulations of political asexuality, I hold that political asexuality is a conceptual tool of feminist change-making and worldmaking. By thinking about political asexuality on expanded terms, I suggest that WGS might effectively develop a critical approach to compulsory sexuality through examining the importance of another antiracist feminist concept--that of erotics--as a distinctly feminist paradigm for rethinking intimacies.
Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, 2024
This article develops "menstrual methodologies" for ungendering menstruation and attending to the... more This article develops "menstrual methodologies" for ungendering menstruation and attending to the chronic pain and dysphoria present in menstrual embodiment. Specifically, it unfolds from the experiences of a nonbinary person with undiagnosed endometriosis through developing a series of menstrual methodologies, including ungendering menstruation; thinking with pain through crip time, crankiness, and autoethnography; and a justice-based approach to menstruation; followed by an application of these methodologies to a recent case study. Following on an autobiographical prelude, I begin with an introduction to menstrual methodologies and next outline each one. Menstrual methodologies, I argue, provide a toolkit not only for those who study menstruation and menstruators but for researchers across disciplines who are interested in questions of gender, embodiment, pain, medical science, justice, and disability.
Polish Literature as World Literature, Bloomsbury’s “Literatures as World Literature” series, 2022
This chapter argues for the importance of rethinking both world literature and Polish literature ... more This chapter argues for the importance of rethinking both world literature and Polish literature from the perspective of queer Polish literature. Focusing on Tomasz Jedrowski’s novel, Swimming in the Dark (2020), the chapter considers the use of water in the novel with an attention to how it plays on the themes of border imperialism, sexuality and national identity, and transnational circulation of queer texts. Jedrowski’s novel, set in state socialist Poland of the seventies and eighties, is a queer love story that mounts a challenge to the heterosexualization of Polish literature, and—being written in English from the diasporic standpoint of Jedrowski who was born in Germany to Polish parents but who continues to be invested in Polish culture and identity—it demands a rethinking of what can count as Polish literature. The chapter argues that by reading against the tide and being attentive to queer movements in writing through an analytics of water, Polish and world literatures can continue to be reimagined and reinvigorated.
For edited collection, Polish Literature as World Literature, edited by Piotr Florczyk and K. A. Wisniewski. London: Bloomsbury for Bloomsbury’s “Literatures as World Literature” series. 161 – 176.
Queering Sharing in the Marketized University, 2023
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Sexuality Education, 2022
In her groundbreaking and educational popular nonfiction book ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About ... more In her groundbreaking and educational popular nonfiction book ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, Angela Chen (2020) reflects on the importance of creating asexual representations and stories for asexual (ace) people by ace people. While on the one hand, she acknowledges the importance of educating allosexual (or non-asexual) people on asexuality, on the other, she anticipates the day when that will no longer be necessary, and when as aces “we will move closer to not feeling that any explanation is necessary” and “when aces reject the gaze that evaluates our identities so narrowly” (p. 84). The goal of this piece is to help bridge the gap between those two positions by moving closer toward that “feeling” of not needing “any explanation” for asexuality that Chen refers to. First, I examine in this entry definitions central to the lexicology of ace identities, paying particular attention to both ace and aromantic (aro) identities as well as to the significance of rethinking attraction. Next, I explore who asexuals are, drawing on prevalence rates and community composition. Finally, I explore the significance of compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity as conceptual frameworks. Knowledge of asexuality and aromanticism as well as compulsory sexuality, amatonormativity, and the dynamic possibilities of attraction are vital to sexuality education, which often neglects to include ace and aro related content both in schol- arship and pedagogical practice.
Introducing the New Sexuality Studies (Fourth Edition), 2022
QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking , 2021
In this article, we explore and discuss the role that zines play in asexual and aromantic communi... more In this article, we explore and discuss the role that zines play in asexual and aromantic community and worldmaking. Drawing on intersectional feminist zine studies and asexuality studies, we consider how zines, and in particular Taking the Cake, Brown and Gray, and An Aromantic Manifesto, have provided an important Do-It-Yourself (DIY) platform for asexual (ace) and aromantic (aro) people to navigate their identities, challenge compulsory sexuality, and reimagine ace and aro worlds. Adopting the framework of Lordean erotics, we focus in our analysis on how ace and aro zinesters navigate questions of queerness, gender, ability, race, and racism. We enter the little backroom in the stationary store where rows of zines are kept in place with twine. It's a queer little space but we might not find asexuality or aromanticism here, just as we didn't find it in the gay bookstore. Instead, we bring the a-zines with us-everywhere we go-in case the place needs them, in case someone needs them, in case someone doubting their own existence needs a voice to tell them that asexual and aromantic people do exist.
Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2021
This article draws on the field of asexuality studies and the growing work of aromanticism studie... more This article draws on the field of asexuality studies and the growing work of aromanticism studies to think about whether and how we can theorize lesbian studies from asexual (ace) and aromantic (aro) perspectives. Aces experience "the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity" (Asexual Visibility and Education Network) and aros experience little or no romantic attraction to others. While lesbian studies has countless examples of "asexual resonances," or lesbian theorizations that focus on intimacy between women in ways that do not centralize sex and sometimes do not centralize romance-such as those of Boston Marriages and intimate friendships, women identified women, single lesbian figures and spinsters, and lesbian kinship networks that are erotic if not sexual or romantic in nature-little work thus far has explored lesbian identities using the frameworks of asexuality and even more so of aromanticism. This piece explores ace and aro lesbianism by focusing on two artists: abstract expressionist Canadian-American painter Agnes Martin (1912-2004) and pop art multi-media Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b.1929). Martin has been regarded as lesbian and Kusama as a sexually repressed heterosexual, with neither artist widely understood nor celebrated for the ace and aro elements of their identities, despite evidence suggesting that both artists might be ace and aro. Opening up understandings of lesbianism beyond the sexual and romantic, I argue, allows for a dynamic positioning of lesbianism as a relational quality that can be extended to countless artists, figures, literary texts, and films.
Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media , 2021
Examining the powerful protest art piece Rainbow Mary [Tęczowa Madonna] by Elżbieta Podleśna, thi... more Examining the powerful protest art piece Rainbow Mary [Tęczowa Madonna] by Elżbieta Podleśna, this piece considers the reasons for Polish homophobia and transphobia as expressed by recent events including the rise of the conceptual right-wing framework of 'gender ideology', efforts to create 'LGBT-free' zones, and attempts at preventing Pride Parades. It argues that Polish right-wing hatred towards LGBTQ+ people is rooted in unresolved trauma and melancholia stemming from centuries of colonisation and occupation. Through a nationalistic insistence on Polish innocence and on messianic suffering, Polish LGBTQ+ people are framed by the right-wing as a threat to Polish sovereignty and thus understood as in need of expulsion. The piece argues that Polish feminist and queer protest art, and specifically Podleśna's Rainbow Mary, partakes in what José Esteban Muñoz names disidentification, or the remaking of mainstream symbols so that they better serve LGBTQ+ people, remaking in the process what it means to be Polish.
Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, 2021
The practice, theory, and critique of allyship have been central to feminist scholarship and acti... more The practice, theory, and critique of allyship have been central to feminist scholarship and activism. Identities once not regarded as identities at all but as neutral givens, such as maleness, whiteness, cisnormativity, heterosexuality, abledness, and settlerhood, have all become politicized planes of analysis and action. Yet little scholarship, praxis, and activism has held people with thin privilege accountable for the role they play in fueling the fires of fatphobia in the day to day. Even while fat studies and fat activisms have worked to dismantle fatphobia, thin people have rarely been asked to play pivotal roles in dismantling fatphobic worldviews. In this piece, we draw on anti-racist feminism, disability studies, and fat activism to think about what it might take to become a fat ally. Grounded in our collaborative corporeality as a (very) fat and (very) thin person, we hone the method of research-practice in this part theoretical essay and part action zine. Specifically, we argue that for fat allyhood to be possible, allies need to hone anti-rather than non-fatphobic commitments and practices grounded in what Mia Mingus frames as "access intimacy."
SEX AND DIVERSITY IN LATER LIFE Critical Perspectives, 2021
In this chapter, I unpack how compulsory sexuality operates alongside desexualisation for ageing ... more In this chapter, I unpack how compulsory sexuality operates alongside desexualisation for ageing adults in western countries at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, where the pressure to have sex and remain vigorous into late life looms strong. Following asexuality studies and critical disability studies scholar Eunjung Kim (2010), I mark a difference between asexuality and desexualisation. Asexuality, or low-to-no sexual attraction to others, I take for granted as a real sexual identity and orientation that can exist at any age as well as emerging later in life (Przybylo, 2016). Further, I mark desexualisation as a harmful process of barring or preventing access to sex, sexual fulfilment, and sexual identity. Understood in this way, asexuality and desexualisation are not one and the same, since asexuality is affirmatively embraced as a component of identity, and desexualisation is a process by which equitable access to sex and sexual expression is prevented.
UGGA Art Exhibit Catalogue, 2020
The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies , 2020
Przybylo and Fahs examine a series of new menstrual product advertisements, arguing that they pus... more Przybylo and Fahs examine a series of new menstrual product advertisements, arguing that they push consumer capitalist goals of selling menstrual gear with an “empowered” message at the expense of co-opting feminist discourses of body and menstrual positivity. Drawing on feminist menstrual scholarship, they argue that menstrual positivity is thinned and transformed when commodified. They argue that “positivity”—while important to feminist menstrual activism, praxis, and theorizing—is easily co-optable within neoliberal marketing cultures. While the authors acknowledge the importance of affirmative messaging, they nevertheless develop a “menstrual crankiness” that draws on positivity but also holds it critically at bay. Aligned with queer theoretical work on the political import of negative affects, they assert the importance of menstrual crankiness in pushing at sexist, transphobic, ableist, and white discourses around bodies and embodiment, arguing that menstrual crankiness is vital to thinking about the material pains and pleasures of menstrual bleeding.
Exploring discourses of menstrual negativity and menstrual contagion, we argue for a feminist que... more Exploring discourses of menstrual negativity and menstrual contagion, we argue for a feminist queer crip approach to menstrual pain. Understood as imagined and exaggerated, menstrual pain has been rendered illegible by redemptive models of pain and straight, ableist structures of temporality. We respond to this context of pain-denial
by drawing on crip and queer theories on pain and temporality and feminist work on menstruation to argue that menstrual pain is chronic and cyclical pain. Through our own autobiographies of the material and structural conditions of menstrual pain, we offer a contribution to thinking about menstrual pain and its accompanying contagions
and chronicities. We do so by exploring discourses of menstrual containment, negativity, and pain-denial. Next, using one of our experiences of a misdiagnosis of menstrual pain as adolescent “growing pains” as a jumping-off point, we formulate a model of growing pain that centralizes pain in embodied and social imaginings of the body. Finally, we envision a cyclical menstrual time, which can provide the ground for coalitional, relational, social, and political approaches to menstrual pain.
Feminist Teacher, 2019
Online and open access feminist journals have mushroomed in recent years. Constituting a public s... more Online and open access feminist journals have mushroomed in recent years. Constituting a public space, online feminist journals provide unprecedented opportunities for community involvement, for the making of knowledge in various mediums, and for the making of public space itself. As part of this paradigm in feminist publishing, Feral Feminisms (www.feralfeminisms.com) is an independent, online, peer-reviewed, intermedia, open access feminist journal started in 2012. As three managing editors of Feral Feminisms, we explore the possibilities and impossibilities of undertaking online journal work as a form of anti-racist and decolonial pedagogical practice.
Radical Teacher, 2019
Drawing on queer and feminist Digital Humanities (DH) and Indigenous, antiracist, and intersectio... more Drawing on queer and feminist Digital Humanities (DH) and Indigenous, antiracist, and intersectional approaches to publishing, this pedagogy piece reflects on a course designed and taught in Fall 2018 titled “Intersectional Feminist Journal Praxis.” Students read intersectional readings on publishing while creating their own journal through Open Journal Systems Software (OJS). Employing principles of collaboration and praxis, students worked in teams around specific tasks like a call for papers, peer review, copyediting, and introduction-writing while employing critical publishing practices such as remaining reflexive about, for example, accessibility and power inequalities in processes of knowledge production. Their end product was the publication of the first issue of the journal they themselves created by the name of Intersectional Apocalypse (https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/ifj). This piece discusses this pedagogical DH experiment, grounding it in histories of anti-oppressive publishing endeavors and in students’ own words and reflections on the course.
I Confess: Constructing the Sexual Self in the Age of the Internet. Eds.Thomas Waugh and Brandon Arroyo, 2019
In this co-authored piece, we examine the uses and applicability of feminist consciousness-raisin... more In this co-authored piece, we examine the uses and applicability of feminist consciousness-raising to the making of contemporary online feminisms. In doing so, we are specifically interested in how, both historically and in the present, feminisms have been invested in a confessional politics, one that confesses to the feminist community, be it at a small meeting or online to an unknown number of participants. As a particular incarnation of confessionality, certain aspects of consciousness-raising continue to exist today in online feminist engagements. Looking at feminist media such xoJane (2011–16) and Jezebel (launched 2007), we explore the contemporary inheritances of the consciousness-raising technology, with an eye to thinking about how it produces particularly sexed, racialized, and sexual subjects.
Global Encyclopedia of LGBTQ History, 2019
The sexual identity and orientation of asexuality has a rich cultural, historical, and political ... more The sexual identity and orientation of asexuality has a rich cultural, historical, and political life, even as it continues to be overlooked and neglected in LGBTQ2+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, two-spirit, plus) spaces and narratives. Commonly understood as not being sexually attracted to anyone, the very modes of defining asexuality are nuanced and contested. This entry explores various definitions and debates around asexuality from the perspectives of asexual communities, scientific research, and queer and feminist approaches, focusing on Western research and communities. It begins with an exploration of asexual activist efforts to define asexuality and question compulsory sexuality. Following on this, it depicts how scientific research has handled asexuality and some of the ways it seeks to define asexuality. Next, it explores feminist and queer approaches to asexuality as they intersect with gender, race, and ability.
Introducing the New Sexuality Studies Ed. Nancy Fischer and Steven Seidman, 2016
Introductory chapter to asexuality, asexuality studies, and an intersectional approach to compuls... more Introductory chapter to asexuality, asexuality studies, and an intersectional approach to compulsory sexuality.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Jul 2014
This article works on two axes: first, employing queer archiving to push at the parameters of wha... more This article works on two axes: first, employing queer archiving to push at the parameters of what might “count” as asexuality, and second, addressing feminist and queer inattentiveness to asexuality through rethinking queerness from asexual perspectives. We argue that an attunement to asexual “resonances,” however subjective and impossible to measure, makes possible the imagining of a queerly asexual archive, an archive that troubles current understandings of both asexuality and queerness. Throughout, we make two central contributions that challenge both queerness and asexuality. First, we assert that where there is queerness, there is also asexuality. Second, we seek to demonstrate the pervasiveness of asexuality, not by proving its statistical significance, but by shifting away from identity toward a broader understanding of asexuality.
I argue that the new and interdisciplinary study of asexuality not only nourishes a unique set o... more I argue that the new and interdisciplinary study of asexuality not only nourishes a unique set of asexual perspectives but is also of prime interest to scholars in transgender studies. I provide a review of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, edited by Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks.
Hypatia, 2015
Are the Lips a Grave? is ultimately a joyous academic text intent on resuscitating philosophical ... more Are the Lips a Grave? is ultimately a joyous academic text intent on resuscitating philosophical commitments to an antifoundationalist feminist tradition, on disheveling queer theory's rendition of frumpy, prudish feminism, and on celebrating a queer feminist ethics that provides unique insight on the contemporary suturing of morality with sexuality in modern subjectivity.
Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2013
A nnamarie Jagose's Orgasmology is a glistening tome of a book. Speaking to the critical figure o... more A nnamarie Jagose's Orgasmology is a glistening tome of a book. Speaking to the critical figure of the orgasm, Orgasmology -wittily masquerading as an encyclopedic-type entity -has something to offer to every sexuality and queer studies scholar, student, and practitioner. Jagose dedicates her monograph to a capillary stalking of the manifestations, representations, and discourses of the orgasm in the twentieth century. She chases orgasm through 1920s and 30s marriage manuals that called for the hetero-romantic magic of the "simultaneous orgasm," 50s and 60s behaviour-modification practices that utilized the orgasm to straighten "deviant" male gay desires, cinematic and sexological representations of the orgasm, and contemporary enactments of the "fake orgasm" among heterosexual women. The orgasmmultitudinous, contradictory, and unruly -becomes Jagose's ground and model for rethinking all the big coordinates of sexuality, including practices, identities, ethics, pleasures, and politics.
Psychology & Sexuality, Jun 16, 2011
Understanding non-monogamies, edited by Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge, London, Routledge, 2010... more Understanding non-monogamies, edited by Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge, London, Routledge, 2010, 312 pp., $125.00 (hardback), Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge's Understanding non-monogamies, part of the 'Routledge Research in Gender and Society' series, is an ambitious and dynamic volume. It self-consciously contributes theoretical and empirical research to the broad topic of nonmonogamy -which might be understood as a participation in relationships that exceed the stable model of monogamous coupledom in some way. Significantly, non-monogamy is imagined and articulated in the plural -as 'non-monogamies' -so that 'multiple meanings and understandings both between and within groups and individuals practicing openly non-monogamous relationships' are represented and given voice (p. 5). In collaboration with this, a range of voices are indeed heard in the volume, including academics, therapists and activists, contributing to a plural, diverse and impassioned dialogue. This book review aims not only to synthesise the key insights of Understanding non-monogamies but also to consider how these insights might inform and inflect studies of asexuality -the focus of this special issue of Psychology & Sexuality.
Canadian Woman Studies, 2012
This course will engage with critical literature on the settler colonial and racist legacies of p... more This course will engage with critical literature on the settler colonial and racist legacies of postsecondary institutions and education more broadly while encouraging students to imagine a just university. What does it mean to study, teach, and partake in universities in the U.S. that have historically enhanced and continue to enhance the lives of the mostly wealthy and are founded on enslavement, land theft, and exclusion? How can we work toward imagining and materializing more just universities and modes of education? Students will be asked to build a vision for what education can be by examining a variety of grassroots approaches to educational models such as Freedom Schools, Survival Schools, and the “Flying University.” At the same time, students will be asked to think about their own teaching praxis and to develop a teaching philosophy and syllabus they can use toward job applications. The class will be collaborative and praxis-based.
Environmental destruction has led to widespread concerns over human potential for surviving on th... more Environmental destruction has led to widespread concerns over human potential for surviving on this planet-inaugurating the geological age of the "Anthropocene." Yet polluted land and waterways, high levels of air pollutants, global warming, the melting of the ice caps, rising water levels, and erratic weather patterns have had the most adverse and apocalyptic effects on poor people, women, communities of color, Indigenous people, and people from low and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs). Also, while apocalyptic framings of our environmental future are rampant, many marginalized communities and LMICs often talk about how they have already experienced the apocalypse under colonial rule, occupation, and the legacies of racism and settler colonialism. In this class, we engage with feminist, antiracist, queer, and Indigenous literary theories on environmental destruction, environmental justice, and apocalyptic literatures. Interdisciplinary in scope, this class will look at writing from across the disciplines. We will read work on apocalyptic life conditions with a focus on the US, visions for a more just tomorrow, and research on environmental degradation. "Apocalyptic Feminisms" can be understood multi-directionally as feminisms discussing past and present apocalypses, visions for feminist apocalypses that will eradicate oppression, and toolkits for survival on this planet. Together we will think about what role we can play in building sustainable modes of living for all.
In this course students will explore the global histories and theories of publishing. The study o... more In this course students will explore the global histories and theories of publishing. The study of publishing itself—of its processes, praxes, and methods—is often absent and invisible. When publishing itself is studied, publishing history and theory usually focus on a white, European, and patriarchal canon, ignoring the inventive ways in which people from outside Western colonial traditions have used and developed publishing cultures and technologies. A history of publishing must be globally-alert in order to accurately trace the formation of print and digital publishing. This course will ask students to hone feminist, antiracist, queer, and decolonial perspectives towards exploring what publishing is, has been, and could be.
Publishing is broader and more digital than ever before. From e-books to Wikipedia, open access j... more Publishing is broader and more digital than ever before. From e-books to Wikipedia, open access journals to Twitter, and podcasts to audiobooks, publishing is in the hands of the many at the same time as it continues to constitute a multi- billion-dollar oligarchy consolidated in the hands of a few, fostering continued inequalities of making and accessing knowledge. In this course we will explore digital publishing in its many mediums and
intermedial travels, with special attention to questions of gender, race and racism, access, sexuality, and settler colonialism. As a praxis-based course that merges practice and theory, students will have opportunities to experiment with modes of digital publishing both independently and in collaboration with each other. The course will be grounded in Digital Humanities perspectives; authors we will read include: Moya Bailey, Elizabeth Ellcessor, Kimberly Christen, Simone Murray, and Siobhan Senier.
In this course students will explore the histories and theories of publishing through focusing on... more In this course students will explore the histories and theories of publishing through focusing on publishing communities created by feminist, queer, of color, and Indigenous communities. The study of publishing itself—of its processes, praxes, and methods—is often absent and invisible. When publishing itself is studied, publishing history and theory usually focuses on a white and patriarchal canon, ignoring the inventive ways in which women, gender nonconforming folks, people of color, and Indigenous people have used and developed publishing cultures and technologies. While some argue that “subaltern people often produce histories that are ephemeral—in oral form, undocumented, unpreserved, difficult to locate, or hard for an ‘outsider’ to interpret,” there are countless ways in which marginalized communities have reinvented what it means to publish (Susan Stanford Friedman). For many marginalized and minoritarian communities, publishing has been a site of radical invention and disruption, a site of social life and activism. Publishing from the margins often involves inventing new modes of publishing and using technology in pursuit of socially just visions. Yet examining histories and theories of publishing from these perspectives provides insight not only into the transformative potential of publishing but also into the shortcomings and limitations of publishing industries. In many ways, studying what was and is published is as instructive as considering what was not and is not published. In the words of the Women in Print Movement and Barbara Smith “freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press.” This course will ask students to hone feminist, antiracist, and decolonial perspectives towards exploring what publishing is, has been, and could be.
Course Description: In this course we will have the opportunity to trouble the categories of "gen... more Course Description: In this course we will have the opportunity to trouble the categories of "gender" and "women" through engaging with contemporary and historical queer and transgender life writing from the 1960s onwards. Feminist, queer, and trans writing has a robust tradition of locating the self as a standpoint from which to analyze society, inequality, and power, and from which to hone reflexivity. Through speaking from the point of view of a socially located self, queer and trans life writing opens up possibilities for imagining gender beyond societal norms and in conversation with racialization, sexuality, Indigeneity, ability, class, immigration, and nationhood. Queer and trans life writing also reinvents writing and form, thwarting writing conventions and imagining new models for writing the self. The goal of our work in this class will be to learn about both gender and writing from queer and trans writers, while empowering each other to write our own lives into existence. As a 200-level course, this course is designed to be welcoming to both those students who have a high level of queer and transgender knowledge as well as to those who might not. Please note that not all the authors we read will identify as women and use the pronouns she/her. We will explore how writers of various genres use their own experiences and identities as a germination point for writing, thinking, and theorizing.
Course Description: Intersectionality, a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, ... more Course Description: Intersectionality, a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, though explored by feminists of colour for decades prior, involves a commitment to investigating multiple points of identity, resisting " single issue " or " single axis " frameworks, while remaining centrally interested in the experiences, communities, and identities of marginalized groups and most especially women and trans people of color. " Praxis, " in turn, has functioned as a feminist term that thinks about " practice " and " theory " in tandem. It stresses the process of creating knowledge, and the reflexivity involved in making feminist theory in particular. This course strives to think about intersectional praxis by way of feminist publishing, drawing centrally on black feminisms and women of colour feminisms.
Intersectional Feminist Journal Praxis is a project-based course that bridges academic and popular feminism, art and text, feminist practice and theory, scholarship and activism. In this advanced seminar, students will be asked to collectively develop—from start to finish—an inaugural issue of a journal that myself, Research Assistant Shahar Shapira, and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies department will help them launch via Open Journal Systems Software. Support will also be offered by Kevin Stranack, Associate Director with the Public Knowledge Project, and funding has been provided by the Teaching and Learning Development Grant.
The goal of the course is to mobilize students to partake actively, at all levels, in feminist publishing and feminist making while learning how to work collaboratively. The course will ask students to come up with a theme for the special issue, write a Call for Papers (CFP), solicit contributions from local activists and artists, work as writers and artists themselves on the issue, coordinate the peer-review and copy-editing of the pieces, author an introduction, undertake the design of the issue in online form, and organize a launch of the journal. Through this collaborative and hands-on course, students will have opportunities to think about the praxis of intersectional feminist action, the meanings of multiple voices and inter-media collaboration, and the dynamics of power flows and injustice. An intersectional, transnational, decolonial, and non-monolingual approach to journal-making will be encouraged. Students will be asked to dream big while having to negotiate the realities of online publishing. Readings will be assigned on feminist, intersectional, Indigenous, and transnational feminist digital practice and cultural production, collaboration, publishing, and praxis. A Feminist Media Lab will be facilitated as part of the course, which will offer students in-class time to work on the creation of the journal.
Course Description: Critical Nonsexualities will provide students with the opportunity to explore... more Course Description: Critical Nonsexualities will provide students with the opportunity to explore the erotic currents of nonsexual forms of relating and their challenge to thinking sexuality studies today. While sexuality studies and queer theory have tended to centralize sex as a dominant mode of intimate relating and resistance, this course will both (a) explore the nonsexual and asexual traces of feminist and queer thinking on sexuality as well as (b) focus on literatures specifically attuned to nonsexual and asexual erotic modes as they intersect with compulsory sexuality, religiosity, gender, ability, race and racism, settler colonialism, transnationalism, mononormativity, and other systems of power. Attention will also be paid to the ways in which individuals and populations are desexualized or barred from being sexual. Drawing on asexuality studies, critical nonmonogamy studies and love studies, feminist and queer theories, critical disability studies, childhood studies, critical race studies, and Indigenous approaches to sexuality, the course will explore various nonsexualities, including but not limited to asexuality, celibacy, political asexuality, chastity, singlehood, kin networks, friendships, and nonmonogamy. The objective of this course is to imagine erotic relating apart from sexuality and sex and with a critical distrust in the modern paradigms of compulsory sexuality.
Educational Goals: Students and instructor will:
• Think about the role sex and sexuality play in modern society as well as in queer and feminist theories on sexuality through a focus on compulsory sexuality and desexualization
• Acquire literacy in asexuality as a sexual identity and asexuality studies as an interlocutor with sexuality studies.
• Explore the possibilities of nonsexual erotics, including, but not limited to: friendship, nonmonogamies, spinsterhood, celibacy, singlehood, kin networks.
• Understand asexuality and nonsexualities through an intersectional lens that engages with systems of power and oppression including compulsory sexuality, ableism, racism, sexism, settler colonialism, secularism, mononormativity.
• Develop the research skills necessary for identifying asexualities and nonsexualities both historically and in the present toward the completion of an original research project.
• Draw on a Digital Feminisms/Humanities framework to create an online archive of the research students undertake throughout the course. \
Psychology and Sexuality, 2013