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 I.
Sitting in front of the television, all I remember is my confusion. There were bodies on screen, pulsing with an urgency that soured in my chest somewhere between fascination and fear. Intertwined and spit-slick, they moved along each other as though everything were ending but what they were could make new.
I couldn’t look away because I wanted, desperately, to understand why this entanglement of body and language was worth what it required in return. I consumed media relentlessly as a teenager in search of some kind of recognition and, in doing so, it consumed me.
As a young person, I quickly became aware that I was an outlier in my innocence. It was not that I hadn’t done stuff, but rather that my lack of interest in continuing to do stuff created a fundamental site of division between experience, empathy, and imagination.
I knew what it was like to find a partner’s fingers slowly inching towards mine across the rickety expanse of a dorm room bed; I had wound my way down the length of their waist with my lips and watched as their breath became a syncopated song—but I wanted to go no further than wonder. When my hand found its way between shorts and skin, it was never my pleasure I thought of.
In Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, Angela Chen writes “Asexuality explained why I had been so perplexed when a high school classmate got pregnant. It was so easy to never have sex, I thought. It was the default state and it took real effort to do anything else. What could have compelled her to take such risks? Now I understood why it hadn’t been so easy” (14). When friends asked me to describe my perfect relationship, they laughed at my struggle to lend language to what I wanted. What, they may as well have asked, could there possibly be but this?
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Long known as one of the primary online community hubs for the asexual community, The Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) identifies that “An asexual person does not experience sexual attraction – they are not drawn to people sexually and do not desire to act upon attraction to others in a sexual way” (“Overview”).
I am as drawn to this clarity as I am wary of its simplicity. There is an absoluteness to this construction of asexual positionality that doesn’t waver or flex as the body does. Sexuality accounts for far more than the act of sex—relationality and desire between bodies must account for attraction, yes, but also for curiosity, fantasy, and exploration.
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When I moved to Ireland, I assumed my partner would follow. We had discussed the lives we could make or find or stumble into and she had come with me to help me find an apartment and prepare for the start of graduate school. She was living in New York City, and to the city she returned. She never came back. In our eternally long-distance relationship, I had an uncomfortably comfortable attachment to the premise of distance itself—when I didn’t have to look her in the eyes, I could pretend that I mourned the loss of our physical closeness in the ways that she did.
Just before the move, my long-time mentor gave me a copy of Julia Koets’s collection Pine. Throughout the duration of my life in Ireland, the book stayed nearby. It was a companion through ten moves in two years and one of the few books I was able to bring back with me to Turtle Island. During those two years, I never read it. Something in the energy of the physical object of the book felt necessary enough to prioritize, but scared me off of reading it, almost as though I was getting too close to something that could be hot to the touch.
So much of that collection continues to inform the work I make on the page, but the first poem is a monolith in my negotiation of language in relation to (a)sexuality. In “The Science of ____,” Koets renders what cannot be made known in language known through embodiment, as she writes “Let’s agree on a word for ____ in case / we ever succeed in ____ing.” Language in this poem is both invention and insistence—the speaker and the beloved know what to do before they can access a word for what they have done. The punctuation of the poem is both a haunting and an invitation of possibility.
In many ways, the languagelessness is the point. I have long resisted trying to articulate a definition of asexuality and asexual poetics precisely because trying to span such a vast absence with language feels as fruitless as it does reckless. Yet, how else to gesture to where absence by its very nature makes apparent what it has disappeared? I have always been drawn to “thin places,” to the notion of rupture. Something in me finds kin in absence even while recognizing the danger in defining myself by it. I’m interested in the mutually constitutive elements of absence and presence made possible through failings of language. When you are not something, what are you?
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Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” offers a portal into a reading of the erotic that both includes and transcends the sexual. As Lorde writes:
The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. (Lorde 56-57)
Many of the experiences I most associate with eroticism are ones often designated as “innocent” or “naive” in their broader readings: gradually inching my foot towards a beloved’s while watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as a seeking of validation that, yes, she felt it too; curling up beside a beloved with the smell of baking bread wafting in the apartment; or reading a poem to a friend, my voice hushed and reverent. This dismissal or infantilization of eroticism does the disservice of rendering the erotic solely within the realm of sexual pleasure rather than illustrating the erotic as a construct of the full breadth of space, time, and touch.
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The wounds of compulsory sexuality have led me to begin, so often, with justification rather than exploration.
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I came of age at the height of internet fandom. My first encounter with the concept of sex was through fanfiction—so much of what I knew about bodies only existed in the theoretical space of the page. I had just finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time and was entranced by Legolas, the elven archer of the trilogy’s Fellowship. Though he appeared in very few scenes, I felt a kinship with him that I could not articulate. I was not satisfied with the narrative that he had been written into and sought out alternatives.
There is something deeply ironic in my childhood affinity for male characters in books. Despite not yet having come into an understanding of my own queerness and transness, they felt familiar. In Legolas’s relationship with his companion Gimli, I registered an undercurrent of playful desire that the books could not tend. Legolas, like many elves remaining in Middle Earth in the Third Age, experienced the “sea-longing,” calling him away to the Grey Havens. “Sea-longing” functioned almost like an elven death drive—though he had never been to the sea, he knew he could only resist its pull for so long. Without having seen the object of it, he knew the tenor of his desire.
This yearning was something I recognized innately: the simultaneity of ecstasy and obliteration. When Gimli began to show the effects of aging, the immortal Legolas built them a boat and sailed his friend to the Undying Lands—the first dwarf to be allowed in that realm. My interest in Legolas and Gimli was about language, but it was also about absence. I was drawn to what was unsaid and what could have happened.
In fanfiction, there was the opportunity for radical revision. When I searched the internet and encountered stories in which Legolas and Gimli were exploring intimacy and companionship with each other. Upon first read, I did not notice the sex—there were too many words I did not recognize for it to be legible to me as such. When I did, I became interested in the premise of bodies far from my own experiencing a kind of desire I could neither imagine nor replicate.
“Asexuality” was a word I stumbled across while reading fanfiction, which so often stages the writer’s self-actualization or self-discovery through the bodies of beloved characters. At the time, the only relationships I was interested in reading into were those between gay men, something that baffled me for years after. It took several rounds of coming out for me to realize that I hadn’t wanted my body implicated in the action of sex. I cleaved closer to it because it felt more like voyeurism than prophecy.
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In Boston Marriages: Romantic but Asexual Relationships Among Contemporary Lesbians, Lillian Faderman notes that it was not until the popularization of psychoanalytic theory in the twentieth century that sexual behavior began to signify a particular identity. Where nineteenth-century views assumed an absence of libido in everyone but cis men, the turn of the century brought forward the idea of a universal sexuality, one that “generally failed to acknowledge varying levels of erotic interest and drive in individuals” (Faderman 36).
Before the conflation of sexual acts and sexuality, women could (and did) cohabitate in ways that were deemed unthreatening to their future marriages due to the lack of imagination around possible intimacies that women could explore with each other.
Often referred to as “Boston marriages,” these relationships are notable for their common lack of sex. Many of the women had other lovers or made intentional choices around the sexual parameters of their relationships in order to access specific kinds of intimacy with their partner. Boston marriages invite a resituating of the patriarchal model that places only certain sex acts at the center of import and the defining of relationship status by whether a couple is having sex.
When configuring an understanding of relationality and language, asexuality assumes nothing as a given. If everything is a construct, then so much more can be built.
Moving understandings of asexuality away from associations of “lack” or “deficiency” serve not only to depathologize the identity but also to make room for expansive models of language, identification, and dreaming beyond compulsory sexuality.
In this configuration, asexuality is variable and can change over the course of a life. Welcome in survivors of trauma still wary of touch, welcome in disabled people whose medications have decreased their libidos, welcome in stone butches triangulating gender and pleasure within inherited modes that do not rest easily. Welcome in those who will someday leave.
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Upon telling someone about my aceness, the prevailing sentiments tend to be reminiscent of homophobic responses to queerness: “but you’re so pretty” or “maybe you just haven’t met the right person.” There is an assumption, one I have internalized, that the road can only ever end in loneliness. In such conversations, I find myself wanting to communicate that I have had sex, as though there is something to prove, an urge motivated largely by the prudishness and naivety that I can read in other people’s responses to what they cannot fathom.
Even here, I find myself feeling the pressure to include descriptions of my encounters with partners who not only assumed that my aceness was malleable, but that their sexual desire took precedence. The latter was nearly always deemed more important to fulfill than the former. I find myself thinking of Legolas and the yearning for an elsewhere you cannot name but somehow know.
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Poetry presents a site of exploration as much as it does a site of irony: writing over and against the “frigidity” of the blank page. This is a poetics of intimacy, a poetics of erotics, a poetics of eros-as-what if.
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One night, my then-partner and I were lying next to each other and looking upside-down at the stars through their window. We were sweaty from both summer and sex. While we had been touching each other, my gym shorts had stayed on—I had wanted to give them pleasure but was terrified of the limitations of my own. If I kept my focus on what they wanted, I did not have to think about my lack of response to their touch. I could make of myself the sweetest distraction.
Continue reading this Manifesto in Part II.
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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.