#sherronda j. brown

[bookcub]

I will always advocate for every queer person's right to be a fully autonomous sexual being-and that always must and always will include asexuals. Recognizing the significance of queer sex should not mean that every queer person should be mandated to meet an arbitrary sexual prerequisite in order for their queerness to be affirmed. Centering queerness around sex leaves very little room for queer folks for whom sex is insignificant, or for whom sex is never or rarely possible, or for queer folks who have never had sex before, or for queer folks whose only sexual experiences have been violent. It also leaves a lot of queer people, especially young ones, feeling pressured to have a certain amount or certain type of sex in order to legitimate or prove their queerness to themselves or to someone else.

-Sherronda J. Brown, Refusing compulsory sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture

[lgbtqreads]

Happy International Asexuality Day 2023!

Happy International Asexuality Day! Today we’re celebrating books with main characters all along the ace spectrum, so check out these titles and find your perfect next read! As usual, all links are affiliate and earn a percentage of income for the site, so please use them if you can! Please note this roundup only features titles that were not previously featured [with covers] in past…

[smokefalls]

When sex is compulsory, it fosters the sense that we are each duty-bound to consistently engage in a certain arbitrary amount of sexual activity—regarding it as something that should be weighed, measured, and quantified, rather than an experience that people should engage in only when all involved have the desire and ability to do so, regardless of how frequent or infrequent that may be. Removing it from the center and the pedestal in our relationships—or, in some cases, our mere existence—would better serve everyone, not only asexuals.

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

[authorkarajorgensen]

10 Books to Add to Your TBR 2024 Edition Part 1

Most years I put out a list of books I greatly enjoyed from the first half of the year some time in June. This year, I decided to do it early because, besides needing a blog for this week, I have read a lot of good books lately, so I’m thinking of making this something I do more than twice a year (and often forget to do in December). The books listed below are not in any order of favoritism, but…

[qbdatabase]

Everything you know about sex and asexuality is (probably) wrong.

The notion that everyone wants sex–and that we all have to have it–is false. It’s intertwined with our ideas about capitalism, race, gender, and queerness. And it impacts the most marginalized among us. For asexual folks, it means that ace and A-spec identity is often defined by a queerness that’s not queer enough, seen through a lens of perceived lack: lack of pleasure, connection, joy, maturity, and even humanity.

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. Brown advocates for the “A” in LGBTQIA+, affirming that to be asexual is to be queer–despite the gatekeeping and denial that often says otherwise.

With chapters on desire, f*ckability, utility, refusal, and possibilities, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality discusses topics of deep relevance to ace and a-spec communities. It centers the Black asexual experience–and demands visibility in a world that pathologizes and denies asexuality, denigrates queerness, and specifically sexualizes Black people.

[iambic-stan]

last book read + last stethoscope used, part 4

I was planning to post this later, but then I remembered that it's International Asexuality Day! :D

The stethoscope: MDF Procardial Titanium Cardiology scope in light pink glitter and kaleidoscope

The book: Sherronda J. Brown’s Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture. Brown opens with a Toni Morrison quote: “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”  I admire Brown for doing just that.  As far as I know, there is nothing else out there like this book, and it’s both a long time coming and far ahead of its time.  How many people are ready to talk about the asexual experience for Black Americans?  That’s truly a rhetorical question that I'm not qualified to attempt to answer anyhow, since I'm white.  I’ve never seen someone put into words how a combination of anti-Blackness, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchal attitudes, and heteronormativity work together to make understanding, disclosing, describing, and living one’s ace identity that much more difficult.  I only have to battle some of those.  I will admit that I was disappointed with Brown’s academic style of writing—I was hoping for something more casual, maybe memoir-esque.  That said, there’s an (all too brief) section in the back with quotes from black aces discussing their experiences.  She devotes an entire chapter to others’ speculations about the identities of Langston Hughes and Octavia Butler, and implications of the assumptions made about them.  I’m not sure about an entire chapter on that subject, but I’m always happy to read anything about Octavia Butler, so her inclusion was a nice (and fitting) surprise.

[ktempestbradford]

This book is AMAZING and has changed my thinking on so much.

Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture

By Sherronda J. Brown

Everything you know about sex and asexuality is (probably) wrong.

The notion that everyone wants sex–and that we all have to have it–is false. It’s intertwined with our ideas about capitalism, race, gender, and queerness. And it impacts the most marginalized among us. For asexual folks, it means that ace and A-spec identity is often defined by a queerness that’s not queer enough, seen through a lens of perceived lack: lack of pleasure, connection, joy, maturity, and even humanity.

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. Brown advocates for the “A” in LGBTQIA+, affirming that to be asexual is to be queer–despite the gatekeeping and denial that often says otherwise.

With chapters on desire, f*ckability, utility, refusal, and possibilities, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality discusses topics of deep relevance to ace and a-spec communities. It centers the Black asexual experience–and demands visibility in a world that pathologizes and denies asexuality, denigrates queerness, and specifically sexualizes Black people.

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.

[molsno]

Alongside the notion that being cis and heterosexual is the only acceptable way to exist, cisheteronormativity operates on a foundation of understandings, assumptions, mandates, expectations, and permissions for heterosexual people, What it demands, above all, is compliance with and allegiance to heterosexuality. Asexuals do not meet these demands, and this places us squarely outside of the scripted heterosexual experience. Asexuality is always a site of subversion and resistance to cisheteronormativity itself, and is that not what queerness is? What queer exclusionists claim is the "straight-passing" of asexuals is nothing more than others projecting their own heteronormative assumptions onto us based on their own narrow notions of how queerness should be performed. It's rooted in a fundamental belief—although likely a subconscious one—that everyone is categorically heterosexual until the moment they begin to experience, express, and act on sexual attraction to the same gender or multiple genders. This is just one of the ways that cisheteronormativity becomes reproduced in queer communities and queer modes of thinking. It constructs heterosexuality not simply as a default orientation, but also as the blank slate that queerness must be written onto. An insult to us all.

Asexuals being assumed as heterosexual by others, based on heteronormative beliefs, does not amount to asexuals "passing for straight." We are assumed to be heterosexual because heterosexuality is compulsorily seen as the default orientation, because people continually fail to learn about asexuality and asexual people when presented with opportunities to do so, and because they often refuse to accept our asexuality as a valid orientation to begin with. What other people choose to see—and what they choose not to believe—from their own biased perspective is not the responsibility or fault of asexuals. Being invisibilized, constantly wading through the expectations and projections of compulsory (hetero)sexuality, and having others consistently assert themselves as the authorities on our lives, experiences, and identities while refusing us the right to have this authority ourselves is not and never will be "passing for straight."

—Sherronda J. Brown, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture (2022), p 36

[bookcub]

As scholars of various disciplines continue to interrogate humaness to understand the way certain groups become dehumanized, I also want us to integrate how sexuality has become regarded in the social imagination, so that asexuals are understood as abnormally lacking sexuality to the point of dehumanization while blackness is hypersexualized to the point of dehumanization. We must think more deeply and ask more questions about what it means when these two phenomena happen simultaneously. Black asexuals have the anti Black dehumanization we experience compounded by asexual dehumanization. If Blackness and asexuality are both abjections that cannot live up to humanness, where does that leave the Black asexual- both in terms of narrative explorations like Selah and the Spades and navigating real-world acephobic dehumanization alongside anti-Black dehumanization? Blackness always already fails to be everything that white supremacy names as "normal" and asexuality makes us into failures in the same right.

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

[corainne]

Due to recent developments I wanted to recommend two books for people who might want to educate themselves and/or read up on Asexuality.

The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality by Julie Sonder Decker is a really good primer if you don’t really know anything about the topic, it explains the basics and goes into romantic attraction and sexual activity, talks about common assumption about asexuality and is really catered towards people with no previous knowledge. It’s a decade old now, so it is somewhat dated, but still an excellent start.

Meanwhile Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen talks a lot about the lived experience of asexuals, both as individuals and in relationships, I found it to be very insightful and validating, amd if you want to understand asexuals better I think this might be really helpful

If anyone has other recommendations please feel free to add them, especially fiction books, my bookshelves are severely lacking in that regard

[smokefalls]

It’s time for queer communities to abandon the hierarchy of trauma that supports acephobia with the myth that asexuals do not have “enough” trauma related to our sexual identity to be considered queer. Trauma is not a factor by which queerness should be measured.

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

[aronarchy]

[transgenderpussycat]

if you dont 100% respect a persons choice not to have sex( it doesn't matter if it's with you or anyone else), you dont truly respect consent.

Listen man, you guys can't be like "you guys need to be normal about asexuality" and then turn around and get weirdly judgemental when you find out someone doesn't have sex by choice. Like that's weird that some of you do that.

[specialagentartemis]

"I wish more aro or ace books were good" REAL. I'm not a huge reader these days (a victim of the "read several books a day as a kid to easily distractable ADHD adult" pipeline :/, I'm working on it though) but I stick to mostly nonfiction when I do read, because most fiction is too amatonormative for my tastes and most aspec fiction is. Well. I already struggle with reading books, I need to be able to actually get into them to have a hope of finishing them.

The biggest mood there. Kinda all of it :') Reading books takes so much longer and more Effort than it used to when I inhaled books when I was 12... and SO many books that market themselves on the Aro or Ace Rep are just. They just aren't good books. Most aren't Morally Objectionable or anything, they're just not good books.

I feel like it's normal growing pains for a Queer Identity... god knows how many books I read of high schoolers going "It's okay... to be gay, actually!" when I was in middle/high school--but I kind of wish we could hurry up to the point where there are plenty of good ace and aro ones to choose from. (There are some good ones! The Murderbot Diaries, Ancillary Justice, Michelle Kan's novelettes, Polenth Blake's work, Darcie Little Badger's entire ouvre... I love those. And I haven't read The Bone People but it won a bunch of Real Literary Awards, and Firebreak I've been told is really up my alley... but I have. also read a bunch of aro and ace books that were just mediocre-to-bad.)

[floof-ghostie]

Hey have you guys read "Refusing Compulsory Sexuality; A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture" by Sherronda J. Brown, I really think you should read "Refusing Compulsory Sexuality; A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture" by Sherronda J. Brown

[all-seeing-ifer]

this is the very definition of "if you get me you get me" but this exchange is an ace cordy moment. to me