What Desire Makes Me: Arriving at a Personal Asexual Poetics
Content Warning: This piece contains references to, and descriptions of, transphobia, eugenics, ableism, sexual assault, acephobia, and sexual harrassment.
Part II.
Growing up with a mother who was also a clinical psychologist, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was a constant companion. It was a doorstop, it was after school reading material, it was a wedge for unbalanced furniture. I had little grasp of the degree to which it dictated the context of my body and my relationship to the medical industrial complex until much later.
In the DSM-5, hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) pathologizes asexuality by inscribing sexual desire as a hegemonic norm (Chen 86). Anything outside of that norm, accordingly, is framed as something that must be fixed.
Asexuality’s intersection with disability is a fraught one. While there have been attempts at cure, like the ironically named “EROS clitoral therapy device” (Chen 87), much of the ongoing tension exists between doctors seeking to diagnose a “problem” and the push from the broader asexual community to embolden autonomy in self-definition. However, as a disabled asexual, my body sits at the center of a historical, medical, and rhetorical tug-of-war. I am at once pushing for recognition of the validity of asexuality as a sexuality and aware of the legacy of disabled bodies being violently desexualized, often to the point of forced sterilization. I come from the convergence of these plates of earth.
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My family is one that has always specialized in a particular strain of silence. The things we do not talk about include my great-grandfather’s affair with a sex worker and the daughter it birthed. The way alcohol makes my aunt unavailable to reason. Debbie. When my mother first told me about Debbie’s existence, the family had agreed upon a narrative to fill the silence that ableism and shame had wrought. The narrative was this: Debbie, my mother’s cousin, was infantilized because of her Down syndrome to such a degree that it was understood amongst the family that she would never have, and should never have, a family of her own. When a child appeared, far too young to belong to Debbie’s mother, she was claimed to be a late gift and little else was said of the matter.
It wasn’t until my grandfather’s passing in 2023 that I learned that this wasn’t the whole story. Debbie’s sister gave birth to a child while still in high school and rather than acknowledge the shame of this truth, the child was raised as her grandparents’ child. However, in the absence of this information, my family believed the child to be Debbie’s. After all, they must have reasoned, how could a disabled person possibly consent? My mother remembers my grandmother saying to Debbie’s mother that this was what happened when disabled people weren’t sterilized.
There is a long lineage of this thinking. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 8-1 to forcibly sterilize a young woman named Carrie Buck on the grounds that “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind … Three generations of imbeciles are enough” (United States, Supreme Court). Buck was the daughter of a mother who had been deemed “feebleminded” and was separated from her at a young age. After being raped by the nephew of her foster parents, the resulting pregnancy led to her foster parents deeming her “feebleminded” to institutionalize her as a way of distancing themselves from the shame (Chen 93). As Chen points out, this decision has yet to be overturned and was eventually a model for the Nazis as they developed their own eugenics programs (94).
At its core, eugenics is a failure of imagination. Disabled pleasure and asexual intimacy can inspire similar fears as they illustrate the multiplicity of possibilities available as vehicles of desire. The idea that desire, embodiment, and gender can be expansive rather than narrowly prescribed is an undermining of the mechanisms through which power has been established and maintained within white ableist cisheteropatriarchy.
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Delegitimizing disabled people’s experiences of sexual desire and attraction is central to the dehumanization that is used to justify eugenics. Because sex and sexuality are so commonly understood to be “an important component of personhood” (Gupta 349), there have been considerable efforts by generations of disabled activists to assert disabled people’s rights to, and experiencing of, complex and nuanced sexual lives.
However, in doing so, these efforts often turn to the rhetorical strategy of emphasizing how “natural” a desire for sex is and how “normal” it is that disabled people “too” have such desires. As a result, the message is that those who do not experience sexual desire are “unnatural” and “abnormal,” thereby pathologizing asexuality while trying to depathologize disability.
Within these intersecting communities, there can be a reluctance to legitimize the presence of those whose lived realities encompass both disability and asexuality. For the asexual community, there is a fear that doing so will affirm asexuality as resulting from disability and chronic illness, while for the disabled community there is a fear of reinforcing the desexualization that continues to enact such violence. For those of us who exist at that intersection, the complexity is compounded.
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I want to bend the hot metal of my own history until the shape is something I can recognize in myself.
For so long, I have felt the pressure, both external and internal, to trace routes of origin and intersection regarding my disabled body, my transness, my whiteness, my queerness, in order to understand the why of asexuality. Implicit in that, of course, is the impulse to understand as a means through which to isolate and eliminate. To “cure.”
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Many things can be true at once. I am the disabled child of disabled parents. Disability is too often conflated with asexuality, yet they do inform each other. I dream of having top surgery partly because of the dissonance between my breasts and my conceptualization of my gender and partly because of their exacerbation of my chronic shoulder pain. It is a dangerous what if game to think of alternative modes of being—I will never know to what degree my body rejects the premise of particular pleasures because of its experience of pain. Not knowing can itself be a kind of knowing.
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Years ago, my then-partner and I had agreed that we would have sex once every week. That, she told me, would be enough for her. What she did not tell me, was that her expectation was for me to initiate. She wanted to feel wanted and, given what she knew of my hesitance around sex, wanted to be sure that I wanted to do it at all.
The weeks passed. Sometimes, I forgot, but most often I could think of little else but how badly I wished that I could tell her that I dreaded the chore of it without having her hear only that the chore was her desire.
When it happened, all I was aware of was the ache of tension in my body—the twin flames in the knuckles of my index and middle finger, the sliding of shoulder from socket as I reached for her. The pleasure was after, in the massage she gave my overwrought muscles, a pleasure so divine I could have wept for want of it.
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I have no interest in origin as a site of dismissal, cure, or apology. I want more than I’ve been told I can ever want. Origin as ancestry. Origin as possibility model. Origin as complication. Origin as resistance. Origin as open wound. Origin as abundance.
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Joy Ladin describes a distinction between a “poetics that is trans” and a “trans poetics” with the former as “an approach to language, naming, syntax, that reflects the poet’s own process of self-identification beyond binary gender categories” (Poubel and Pereira 737) and the latter as “not poetics that reflects a personal act of self-identification, but the more general act of expressing, defining, or making visible selves that don’t fit within established social categories, and so cannot be denoted by readily available terms, metonymies, or other signifiers” (Poubel and Pereira 737).
Reminiscent of similar moves to parse out a denotative relationship between “queer poetry” and “queer poetics,” Ladin’s distinction is one I find myself drawn to when conceptualizing a relationship to an asexual poetics. There is the subjectivity and there is the theoretical capacity of the language, both including and beyond the body.
I have always been fascinated by absence as a site of knowledge production rather than an emptiness to be filled—the cutaways in a violin as the controlled release of air, the path of a pendulum, the relief work in a slab of clay. Despite centuries of attempted erasure, asexuality endures in the bodymind and on the page.
Removing the “X,” just as we are seeing with the American government’s genocidal campaign against trans people’s rights to exist in public space, does nothing to remove the spot it marked. Indeed, when Alfred Kinsey first designed the scale that would come to bear his name, he noted a category outside of his numerical scale, one that he marked with an “X,” for those who did not report sexual experiences. I posit, within the context of my own work, asexual poetry as negotiating non-normative desire with regard to subjectivity—whether the speaker’s, the beloved’s, or the reader’s. Asexual poetics, however, I understand to require a punctuation of promise through which absence is read for its resonance.
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Presence-as-[ ]:
In college, my professors invited me to a dinner with a guest teaching artist who had been leading workshops with us during his stay on campus. During the meal, I felt the teaching artist’s arm slowly drift from its place on the back of the booth above me to rest along my shoulders. While this was happening, he was talking to the rest of the table—distraction—as if to say it was least among his concerns. I warranted little attention beyond the body.
One of my professors pulled me aside when the teaching artist got up to go to the bathroom, his normally gentle face irate and protective, as he told me he wanted me to come sit next to him for the remainder of the meal. The teaching artist’s desire had not been subtle, was what he was trying to tell me. Nor had been my obvious confusion as it morphed into disgust and then to terror.
I was only a body to this “guest,” nothing more. The fact of my queerness lent nothing more than intrigue, or perhaps challenge. I was there, but I wasn’t there.
[ ]-as-presence:
At nineteen, thinking only of the poems I would write them.
At twelve, crying and crying and crying at the torrent of blood between my legs.
At eighteen, telling my mother I had no interest in sex, a truth I would need four years to convince myself of.
At sixteen, standing in my best friend’s basement and holding the stopwatch as she and her boyfriend tried to see how long they could make out—bored, bored, bored.
At twenty-six, a partner asking me, for the first time, what I wanted rather than what I didn’t.
At twenty-three, the guilty beacon of relief at another month of long distance that would delay—for the moment—the weekly sex I had promised as a compromise.
At twenty-five, reading a poem with the word “asexual” in it—a poem I didn’t write—for the first time.
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Searching, always, for language to trace the outline of what I knew was there.
Works Cited
Chen, Angela. Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. Beacon Press, 2020.
Gupta, Kristina. “Asexuality and Disability: Mutual Negation in Adams v. Rice and New Directions for Coalition Building.” Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, Revised and Expanded Ten-Year Anniversary Edition, edited by KJ Cerankowski and Megan Milks, Routledge, 2024, pp. 347-362.
Koets, Julia. “The Science of _____.” Pine, Southern Indiana Review Press, 2021, pp. 5.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Crossing Press, 2007.
“Overview.” The Asexual Visibility and Education Network, https://www.asexuality.org/?q=overview.html.
Poubel, Natália Salomé, and Vinícius Carvalho Pereira. “Language, Body and Trans Poetics: An Interview with Joy Ladin.” Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, vol. 74, no. 1, April 2021, pp. 727-739.
United States, Supreme Court. Buck v. Bell. United States Reports, vol. 274, 2 May 1927, pp. 200-208. Library of Congress, tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep274/usrep274200/ usrep274200.pdf
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About the Author
Jo Bear is a poet, scholar, and educator with an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University and an MA in Drama and Performance Studies from University College Dublin. They are a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee and a 2023 Zoeglossia Fellow. Their poems appear or are forthcoming in Foglifter, Apogee Journal, ONLY POEMS, The Adroit Journal, The Offing, West Branch, Poetry Ireland Review, and elsewhere.