#radical black studies

[ethicopoliticolit]

In this incarnation, she appears in the archive of slavery as a dead girl named in a legal indictment against a slave ship captain tried for the murder of two Negro girls. But we could have as easily encountered her in a ship’s ledger in the tally of debits; or in an overseer’s journal—‘last night I laid with Dido on the ground’; or as an amorous bed-fellow with a purse so elastic ‘that it will contain the largest thing any gentleman can present her with’ in Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or as the paramour in the narrative of a mercenary soldier in Surinam; or as a brothel owner in a traveler’s account of the prostitutes of Barbados; or as a minor character in a nineteenth-century pornographic novel. Variously named Harriot, Phibba, Sara, Joanna, Rachel, Linda, and Sally, she is found everywhere in the Atlantic world. The barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the master’s bedroom—turn out to be exactly the same place and in all of them she is called Venus.

—Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” (2008)

[dearlyjess]

assata is such a powerful autobiography and it’s giving me more to think of as i think of what i will concentrate on for my english ma

[bohemian-rhapsody-in-blue]

Beboptober 2024 Day 1: Eyes + Introduction

Thanks to @bebopcrew for the prompt list! Am I seriously doing Beboptober on top of all the other stuff I have to do during October this year, fellowship applications (although those are mostly done and filed away for now, at least) and grad school applications and thesis work and all the normal senior-year-of-college stuff? You bet your ass I am!!! Maybe I can just call it a writing exercise, a warm-up for my thesis...and if my insomnia's going to keep me up until horrific hours anyway, I may as well do something productive with it! And even if I don't get to all 31 days, at least we can say I tried...

If anyone's interested, you can see my prompts from Beboptober 2022 here (on Tumblr) and here (on AO3). I can't wait to see what everyone comes up with this year!

His eyes were gray. It was hard to tell at a distance, small and hidden as they were under a thick brow and bushy eyebrows, and in different lighting they could be mistaken for a mousy brown or a light blue. Not that he was given to romantic descriptions of things like eye colors, or anything. He wasn’t much of a poet—not in that way, at least.

The right one had a scar running vertically through it and a metallic piece reinforcing the skin underneath. No one had ever asked about that piece, and he’d never told. It didn’t do to dwell on the past if it didn’t help you in the present. And he could still see out of both eyes just fine. In any case, he supposed the enhancements around his eye weren’t as distinctive as the metal arm, nor as clear a reminder of the betrayal in his past. Losing his arm was dramatic, something he’d never let himself forget. Getting your eye a little damaged, a little scarred? Just an occupational hazard. All part of the job.

~~~~~

Her eyes were green, sparkling like gemstones. Emeralds. She had a pair of emerald earrings—probably fakes, but they looked the part—that brought out her eyes; she’d worn them that day at the opera, when she was trying to find out about Mao Yenrai. They made her feel fancy and beautiful, the way every woman deserved to feel at least once—like a delicacy, a luxury few could afford.

She was proud of having mastered the art of seduction, especially with just her face: a well-timed eyebrow raise, or narrowing of the eyes, could make men fall all over themselves to bend to her will. It was a delicate act. Like so many parts of her life. They said the eyes were the windows to the soul, but maybe hers were more like computer screens, projecting whatever she wanted them to project—so it didn’t matter if there wasn’t anything behind them at all. Or anything that wasn’t locked away deep where she couldn’t find it, where she searched, reached out for it in desperation, and came back with her hand grasping nothing but air. She was a luxury that wasn’t accessible to many. Not even herself.

~~~~~

Her eyes were gold, as unique as she was. Gold and gigantic, practically taking up half her face, gazing out at the world with wonder, with curiosity, with an unflinching, unsettling intensity—unless, of course, they got distracted and flitted elsewhere. Because the whole world fascinated her, and she wanted to explore every nook and cranny of it, divulge its every secret.

Her eyes were gold, but they didn’t always look it—not when they were covered with her great green goggles. They reflected the text on the screen of her beloved computer as she net-dived, hacking her way through the world. Even before she’d gotten off the little shack she’d cobbled together on Earth, those goggles, that computer, were how she flew through the universe and learned all its tantalizing bits of information, all she needed to know. Maybe they weren’t quite rose-colored glasses. But they were as close to it as this crew was ever going to get.

~~~~~

His eyes were two different colors. Technically, both were brown. But the right one was slightly lighter than his left, having been replaced with a cybernetic one after he’d long ago lost the real one in an accident. People said he was an incredible marksman owing to his keen eyesight—that he could see where people were going almost before they even arrived, then move as fluidly and rapidly as water so his bullet met them there. And it was true that he rarely missed a shot; it was one of the reasons he was such a feared bounty hunter. Was it attributable to his sight, though? He didn’t know. He tried not to dwell on things like that, to just take action.

His girl, once, had said that people got a strange feeling if they kept looking straight into his eyes. He hadn’t known she’d said that until later, after everything, after he’d made an unsettled half-peace with having lost her forever. He’d heard her say it secondhand, from a man he’d met briefly on Callisto—someone who, quite unexpectedly, knew people from his past—and then lost, too. People just didn’t seem to stay in his life long. Or he didn’t stay in theirs.

Maybe that’s why he lived in the past so much. His left eye saw the past, and his right eye, the present. That was what he was really seeing, all this time. Only patches of reality. No wonder looking into his eyes apparently felt strange, disorienting—people who said that should imagine what it was like to actually live it. And no matter how much he tried not to dwell on the past, it was always there following him, always in his eyes.

[maxellminidisc]

The amount of popular white and non black leftists I've had to block for being antiblack as fuck this week is genuinely ridiculous. It fills me with so much fucking shame and anger as a non black person having to see it be perpetuated over and over again from those within my specific community and outside of it. Like why is it so fucking hard for y'all to give a fuck about Black people as people? Why can you not respect the history and the continued history of Black activism, especially given how much radical action and history is so influenced by it? The answer is quite simple, and no matter how much you'd deny it: you're all fucking racist.

What I find sickeningly ironic too, is that so many of you are perpetuating this shit in Bushnell's name. Who, from what I've seen and read of him, was compelled to educate himself on the US's history of state sanctioned violence after the murder of George Floyd. His friends have said enough as well to indicate (and quite literally said) he had an awareness of his privilege as a white man in larger society, and perhaps more of you should take that lesson from him and from his actions too. This kind of behavior and constant reframing of Black anger and frustration at antiblackness as a "psyop" is disgusting, and the tarnishing of Bushnell's name with the perpetuation of that antiblackness in it is a fucking disgrace. You should all feel fucking ashamed of yourselves, but knowing how so far up your own asses some of you are....

[trendynewsnow]

Yale University Launches Course Focused on Beyoncé's Cultural Impact

Beyoncé to be the Subject of a New Yale Course In a groundbreaking move that reflects her monumental impact on music and culture, Beyoncé will be the focus of a new course at the prestigious Ivy League institution, Yale University, starting next year. The course is titled Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music and will examine her artistic…

[loneberry]

Moderating a conversation at Harvard with the authors of two of my most anticipated books of the year: Charisse Burden-Stelly's Black Scare / Red Scare and Orisanmi Burton's The Tip of the Spear.

Jan 23, 3pm at the Hiphop Archive. More info here:

https://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/event/conversation-burden-stelly-burton?delta=0

[protoslacker]

The evolution of my thinking comes from a combination of elevating my own political education by reading the works of Black radical thinkers and being in conversation with Black radical organizers. These are the types of experiences that helped to inform the work and political framework of Know Your Rights Camp, a nonprofit organization I co-founded in service of building power in our communities.

Colin Kaepernick in interview with Indigo Oliver in The New Republic. “Black History Is an Absolute Necessity.”

A conversation with Colin Kaepernick on Black studies, white supremacy, and capitalism

Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies. Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Haymarket Books is a great book publisher and they're offering this book as a free Ebook. It's important to support organizations like Haymarket.

[librarycards]

In the excess is where becoming occurs, and becoming’s inherent nonconformity with being and its sedimented logics act as fertile (demonic) ground for those who might be. Trans/figuration is an ode to those who are not yet permitted to be here but insist on persisting anyway. It attests to not finding or discovering, but cultivating room for the unanticipated to emerge. We are given the honor of awaiting those holographic and hieroglyphic mobilities that might come.

We cannot anticipate subjectivities to come, or even rightly call them “bodies,” because it accosts our agreed-upon requirements for sufficient identification. Indeed, the subject as it might come, as it might emerge, cannot be known beforehand and thus might always—out of definitional necessity—be castigated for its inadequacy, its wrongness. But it is this gesture of subjective wrongness that we must embrace if we are to engender the onset of radically reorienting what might be.

Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism.

[emphasis added; breaks added for accessibility]

[flowersandbess]

Thinking of writing a fic between Tom and Greg to raise awareness of what’s happening with Reddit and their absolutely absurd treatment of third party apps

[ordinaryfailure]

“As an expression of love as radical responsibility, mutual comradeship guides activism and organizing in the Black radical tradition and helps to bridge strategic unity and productive conflict. It does all this in specifically political circumstances, with a specific political goal: the process of envisioning and striving to build a world beyond racial capitalism and imperialism—and of weathering the inevitable backlash for doing so. Moving beyond shared ideology, mutual comradeship is simultaneously an ethical, epistemological, and political practice of solidarity. Ethically, it emanates from the guiding principle of courage—the willingness to place oneself at risk for the betterment of others and shared values of cooperative social activity, a common conception of social transformation rooted in the eradication of racial capitalism, and the establishment and maintenance of expectations and standards through consistent struggle, debate, criticism, and self-criticism. These ethics are in the service of protecting, preserving, and valuing not only movements and organizations, but also each other.”

Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Settle Your Quarrels” (2023)

[reasonsforhope]

The World's Forests Are Doing Much Better Than We Think

You might be surprised to discover... that many of the world’s woodlands are in a surprisingly good condition. The destruction of tropical forests gets so much (justified) attention that we’re at risk of missing how much progress we’re making in cooler climates.

That’s a mistake. The slow recovery of temperate and polar forests won’t be enough to offset global warming, without radical reductions in carbon emissions. Even so, it’s evidence that we’re capable of reversing the damage from the oldest form of human-induced climate change — and can do the same again.

Take England. Forest coverage now is greater than at any time since the Black Death nearly 700 years ago, with some 1.33 million hectares of the country covered in woodlands. The UK as a whole has nearly three times as much forest as it did at the start of the 20th century.

That’s not by a long way the most impressive performance. China’s forests have increased by about 607,000 square kilometers since 1992, a region the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area equivalent to Cambodia to its woodlands, while the US and India have together planted forests that would cover Bangladesh in an unbroken canopy of leaves.

Logging in the tropics means that the world as a whole is still losing trees. Brazil alone removed enough woodland since 1992 to counteract all the growth in China, the EU and US put together. Even so, the planet’s forests as a whole may no longer be contributing to the warming of the planet. On net, they probably sucked about 200 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year between 2011 and 2020, according to a 2021 study. The CO2 taken up by trees narrowly exceeded the amount released by deforestation. That’s a drop in the ocean next to the 53.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted in 2022 — but it’s a sign that not every climate indicator is pointing toward doom...

More than a quarter of Japan is covered with planted forests that in many cases are so old they’re barely recognized as such. Forest cover reached its lowest extent during World War II, when trees were felled by the million to provide fuel for a resource-poor nation’s war machine. Akita prefecture in the north of Honshu island was so denuded in the early 19th century that it needed to import firewood. These days, its lush woodlands are a major draw for tourists.

It’s a similar picture in Scandinavia and Central Europe, where the spread of forests onto unproductive agricultural land, combined with the decline of wood-based industries and better management of remaining stands, has resulted in extensive regrowth since the mid-20th century. Forests cover about 15% of Denmark, compared to 2% to 3% at the start of the 19th century.

Even tropical deforestation has slowed drastically since the 1990s, possibly because the rise of plantation timber is cutting the need to clear primary forests. Still, political incentives to turn a blind eye to logging, combined with historically high prices for products grown and mined on cleared tropical woodlands such as soybeans, palm oil and nickel, mean that recent gains are fragile.

There’s no cause for complacency in any of this. The carbon benefits from forests aren’t sufficient to offset more than a sliver of our greenhouse pollution. The idea that they’ll be sufficient to cancel out gross emissions and get the world to net zero by the middle of this century depends on extraordinarily optimistic assumptions on both sides of the equation.

Still, we should celebrate our success in slowing a pattern of human deforestation that’s been going on for nearly 100,000 years. Nothing about the damage we do to our planet is inevitable. With effort, it may even be reversible.

-via Bloomburg, January 28, 2024

[trans-axolotl]

ID: [A poster created by Sean Saifa Wall and Micah Bazant of a Black parent holding their child. They are dressed in white and almost seem to be glowing, in front of a backdrop of multicolored waves that look like DNA strands. Colorful text reads "Protect Intersex Youth."]

"A Framework for Intersex Justice

Intersex justice is medical justice. Intersex surgeries hurt everyone.

These medical violations bring immediate harm to the child who is subjected to them.

Parents who consent to medically unnecessary surgeries participate in a culture of shame, silence and stigma, perpetuated by doctors, that allows these surgeries to continue. Parents are often left to fend for themselves as they navigate shame and guilt. The issue of parents consenting to these surgeries is especially complex when societies believe that children don’t have individual rights and that parents are always acting in their best interest.

Medical practitioners such as pediatricians, obstetricians, urologists, social workers, and endocrinologists all play a role in upholding an institution that continues to harm children with intersex variations. The practitioners, in turn, are protected by hospitals and state laws that grant them immunity.

This is why intersex justice is important.

Although the framework is evolving, the following is a definition of intersex justice co-created with Dr. Mel Michelle Lewis (they>she), an Associate Professor of Gender/Sexuality in Studio and Humanistic Studies at Maryland Institute College of Art: Intersex justice is a decolonizing framework that affirms the labor of intersex people of color fighting for change across social justice movements. By definition, intersex justice affirms bodily integrity and bodily autonomy as the practice of liberation. Intersex justice is intrinsically tied to justice movements that center race, ability, gender identity & expression, migrant status, and access to sexual & reproductive healthcare. Intersex justice articulates a commitment to these movements as central to its intersectional analysis and praxis. Intersex justice acknowledges the trauma caused by medically unnecessary and nonconsensual cosmetic genital surgeries and addresses the culture of shame, silence and stigma surrounding intersex variations that perpetuate further harm.

The marginalization of intersex people is rooted in colonization and white supremacy. Colonization created a taxonomy of human bodies that privileged typical white male and female bodies, prescribing a gender binary that would ultimately harm atypical black and indigenous bodies. As part of a liberation movement, intersex activists challenge not only the medical establishment, which is often the initial site of harm, but also governments, institutions, legal structures, and sociocultural norms that exclude intersex people. Intersex people should be allowed complete and uninhibited access to obtaining identity documents, exercising their birth and adoption rights, receiving unbiased healthcare, and securing education and employment opportunities that are free from harm and harassment. This framework serves a radical vision where intersex children are protected and survivors of genital cutting are cared for and respected. We owe that to intersex people and we owe that to ourselves.

The implementation of an intersex justice framework should include the following components: 1. Informed consent 2. Reparations 3. Legal protections 4. Accountability 5. Language 6. Children's rights 7. Patient-centered healthcare."

-Intersex Justice Project, founded by Sean Saifa Wall, Lynnell Stephani Long, and Pidgeon Pagonis.

[wolrith]

the absolute mentality of the U.S right now should be studied. I can't believe how accurate that saying about democrats snapping defeat from the jaws of victory is.

the old man was up against TRUMP. A convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, accused pedophile, misogynist racist fascist. All the buzzwords rolled into one extremist mental patient. Dems still pushed for Biden to resign because of his age. You know what the stats are for presidents to get a second term? Much higher than convicted felons being sworn in. Sure, Biden isn't ideal, but he is one of the very few qualified candidates who could beat the maga hordes right now.

Ok fine, he resigned. Might've been the selfless move, best for him personally. Dunno how good it is for the nation, probably pretty bad. What now, though?

Well, surely Harris will take up the mantle. V.P, experienced prosecutor, young, charismatic, not to mention extremely progressive to meet all the quotes of democrats. Nah, that would make too much sense. I've already been seeing people argue against her. "Biden's failures are hers too", literally parroting conservatives but switching up the issues, so that instead of said "failures" angering conservatives, they anger dems.

"Careful what you wish for, a black president is how we got trump". literally arguing against diversity and progress out of fear of retaliation. not to mention, its not because obama was black that everyone's a fascist now. Its because he was a convenient scapegoat for corrupt billionaire-controlled media to use for fearmongering and angering the swing voters into maga arms. They used him to radicalize their base and the democrat voters weren't keeping up. lazy voters is how we got trump. I say we, even though im not american, because trump is definitely a global disaster.

Stop your defeatist, pessimist bullshit. stop repeating conservative talking points and stirring up controversy for now reason. stop infighting and disagreeing over candidates and just fucking settle for anyone who's not trump. you're handing this election to the guy who'll end elections. don't be a lazy voter, dont let 2016 happen again. vote blue.

[doberbutts]

Me: I find white, radical feminism to be actively dangerous because it is often used as a weapon of genocide, just painted over racism with a varnish of pretending to care about the lives of women of color while being completely ignorant to how gender plays a role in racial oppression. I think what fits my worldview better is black feminism, specifically the sort founded by black women who have done actual work within the community and who have contributed years of collective and academic study to how we can best address the gendered problems from oppressive society. In fact much of what I'm saying has already been mentioned in published essays and literature discussing these exact problems, as long ago as the 70s and 80s, and we even have records of newly freed slaves trying to work out these exact solutions.

Every goddamn person refusing to examine their own internalized racism because they're too addicted to their man-hate: so you think black women should just die a thousand painful deaths? You want to creep on women and beat your wife? You hate black women? You don't know any of black women's problems and you're hardly able to be counted as black yourself? Checkmate loser.

[max1461]

I think that the average internet Marxist is actually not much of a materialist at all, in fact in their behavior and rhetoric they seem very concerned with moral purity, the redemptive power of suffering, and the ability of narrative to shape the actual world. As myriad as the senses of the word "materialist" have come to be, none of this would seem to comport well with any of them. This all feels very Christian.

In some cases I really do think there is a latent Christianity in it, but I think the stronger source of this trend is simply the leftist emphasis on sloganeering. Somewhere along the line, maybe with the Bolshevik policy of democratic centralism or maybe somewhere else, the importance of the slogan, the party line, the supreme power of the speech act seems to have been elevated for many leftists above all other concerns. From this follows the kind of disingenuous, obviously fallacious argument you so often see from the online ML left. The point is to say the magic words that have been carefully agreed upon, the magic incantation that will defeat all opposition.

Whether it's "I don't want to vote for a candidate who supports any amount of genocide" or "The Is-not-rael Zionist entity is on the edge of collapse!" or whatever else, a rational person can recognize the impotence of these words. They don't do anything. They're just words. But the feeling seems to be that once the perfect incantation is crafted—the incantation that makes your opponent sound maximally like a Nazi without engaging with their position in good faith, or the incantation which brushes aside all thoughts of defeat, or whatever else—once the perfect incantation is crafted, all that is left to do is say it and say it and say it, and make sure everyone else is saying it too.

This is not a materialist way of approaching politics. This is a mystical way of approaching politics.

I think it's also worth saying that this tendency in Marxism seems old, it certainly predates the internet. Lots of Marxists today are vocal critics of identity politics, of what they see as the liberal, insubstantive, and idealist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion framework. I share this criticism to a significant degree, but I'm not very eager to let Marxists off the hook here. The modern DEI framework evolved directly out of a liberal/capitalist appropriation of earlier academic ideas about social justice from such sources as Queer Studies, Black Studies, academic Feminism and so on. I say this as a neutral, factual description of its history which I believe to be essentially accurate. In turn, disciplines like Queer Studies, Black Studies, and academic Feminism each owe a great intellectual dept to academic Marxism, and likewise to the social movements of the 1960s (here in the Anglosphere), which themselves were strongly influenced by Marxism.

Obviously as the place of these fields in the academy was cemented, they lost much (most) of their radical character in practice. To a significant degree however, I think their rhetorical or performative radicalism was retained, and was further fostered by the cloistered environment of academia. In this environment the already-extant Marxist tendency to sloganeering seems in my impression to have metastasized greatly. And so I think the political right is not actually wrong, or not wholly wrong, when they attribute the speech-act-centrism of modern American (and therefore, online) politics, its obsession with saying things right above doing things right and its constantly shifting maze of appropriate forms of expression, at least in part to Marxism.

Now I should say that I don't think the right is correct about much else in this critique, and I also don't think this is wholly attributable to Marxism. But I think there's plainly an intellectual dept there.

More than anything else, this is my genuine frustration with both Marxism as it exists today and with its intellectual legacy as a whole. I fundamentally do not believe in the great transformative power of speech acts, I do not believe in the importance of holding the correct line, I do not believe that the specifics of what you say or how you say it matter nearly as much as what you do. I do not think there is much to be gained from playing the kind of language games that Marxists often like to play, and I do not think that playing language games and calling it "materialist analysis" is a very compelling means of argument.

[life-of-an-asexual]

Asexual Non-Fiction

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen

An engaging exploration of what it means to be asexual in a world that's obsessed with sexual attraction, and what we can all learn about desire and identity by using an ace lens to see the world. Through interviews, cultural criticism, and memoir, ACE invites all readers to consider big-picture issues through the lens of asexuality, because every place that sexuality touches our world, asexuality does too.

The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality by Julie Sondra Decker

In The Invisible Orientation, Julie Sondra Decker outlines what asexuality is, counters misconceptions, provides resources, and puts asexual people's experiences in context as they move through a very sexualized world. It includes information for asexual people to help understand their orientation and what it means for their relationships, as well as tips and facts for those who want to understand their asexual friends and loved ones.

How to Be Ace: A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual by Rebecca Burgess

In this brave, hilarious and empowering graphic memoir, we follow Rebecca as they navigate a culture obsessed with sex—from being bullied at school and trying to fit in with friends, to forcing themself into relationships and experiencing anxiety and OCD—before coming to understand and embrace their asexual identity.

A Quick & Easy Guide to Asexuality by Molly Mulldoon and Will Hernandez

Writer Molly Muldoon and cartoonist Will Hernandez, both in the ace community, are here to shed light on society’s misconceptions of asexuality and what being ace is really like. This book is for anyone who wants to learn about asexuality, and for Ace people themselves, to validate their experiences. Asexuality is a real identity and it’s time the world recognizes it. Here’s to being invisible no more! 

Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives edited by Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks

As the first book-length collection of critical essays ever produced on the topic of asexuality, this book serves as a foundational text in a growing field of study. It also aims to reshape the directions of feminist and queer studies, and to radically alter popular conceptions of sex and desire. Including units addressing theories of asexual orientation; the politics of asexuality; asexuality in media culture; masculinity and asexuality; health, disability, and medicalization; and asexual literary theory, Asexualities will be of interest to scholars and students in sexuality, gender, sociology, cultural studies, disability studies, and media culture.

Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture by Sherronda J. Brown

In this exploration of what it means to be Black and asexual in America today, Sherronda J. Brown offers new perspectives on asexuality. She takes an incisive look at how anti-Blackness, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism enact harm against asexual people, contextualizing acephobia within a racial framework in the first book of its kind. A necessary and unapologetic reclamation, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality is smart, timely, and an essential read for asexuals, aromantics, queer readers, and anyone looking to better understand sexual politics in America.

I Am Ace: Advice on Living Your Best Asexual Life by Cody Daigle-Orians

Within these pages lie all the advice you need as a questioning ace teen. Tackling everything from what asexuality is, the asexual spectrum and tips on coming out, to intimacy, relationships, acephobia and finding joy, this guide will help you better understand your asexual identity alongside deeply relatable anecdotes drawn from Cody's personal experience. Whether you are ace, demi, gray-ace or not sure yet, this book will give you the courage and confidence to embrace your authentic self and live your best ace life.

Ace Voices: What it Means to Be Asexual, Aromantic, Demi or Grey-Ace by Eris Young

Drawing upon interviews with a wide range of people across the asexual spectrum, Eris Young is here to take you on an empowering, enriching journey through the rich multitudes of asexual life. With chapters spanning everything from dating, relationships and sex, to mental and emotional health, family, community and joy, the inspirational stories and personal experiences within these pages speak to aces living and loving in unique ways. Find support amongst the diverse narratives of aces sex-repulsed and sex-favourable, alongside voices exploring what it means to be black and ace, to be queer and ace, or ace and multi-partnered - and use it as a springboard for your own ace growth.

Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality by Ela Przybylo

Through a wide-ranging analysis of pivotal queer, feminist, and anti-racist movements; television and film; art and photography; and fiction, nonfiction, and theoretical texts, each chapter explores asexual erotics and demonstrates how asexuality has been vital to the formulation of intimate ways of knowing and being. Asexual Erotics assembles a compendium of asexual possibilities that speaks against the centralization of sex and sexuality, asking that we consider the ways in which compulsory sexuality is detrimental not only to asexual and nonsexual people but to all.

Ace Notes by Michele Kirichanskaya

As an ace or questioning person in an oh-so-allo world, you're probably in desperate need of a cheat sheet. Covering everything from coming out, explaining asexuality and understanding different types of attraction, to marriage, relationships, sex, consent, gatekeeping, religion, ace culture and more, this is the ultimate arsenal for whatever the allo world throws at you.

Ace and Aro Journeys: A Guide to Embracing Your Asexual or Aromantic Identity by The Ace and Aro Advocacy Project

Join the The Ace and Aro Advocacy Project (TAAAP) for a deep dive into the process of discovering and embracing your ace and aro identities. Empower yourself to explore the nuances of your identity, find and develop support networks, explore different kinds of partnership, come out to your communities and find real joy within. Combining a rigorous exploration of identity and sexuality models with hundreds of candid and poignant testimonials - this companion vouches for your personal truth, wherever you lie on the aspec spectrum.

Sounds Fake But Okay: An Asexual and Aromantic Perspective on Love, Relationships, Sex, and Pretty Much Anything Else by Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca

Drawing on Sarah and Kayla's personal stories, and those of aspec friends all over the world, prepare to explore your microlabels, investigate different models of partnership, delve into the intersection of gender norms and compulsory sexuality and reconsider the meaning of sex - when allosexual attraction is out of the equation.