The next meeting of Queer STS will be on Thursday 24th October from 5pm-6pm in room B15 of the STS department (22 Gordon Square, WC1H 0AW).
This week, we’ll be discussing Ela Przybylo’s (2012) article: “Producing facts: Empirical asexuality and the scientific study of sex”. As the author notes in this article, asexuality (or nonsexuality) is/has been an emergent category of inquiry within the humanities and social and natural sciences and increasingly articulated as an identity category and/or political subjectivity. In this essay, Przybylo unearths the role of science (as a practice and set of discourses) in the shaping of asexuality-as-category’s emergence and uptake. Przybylo’s work thus (i) contributes to work in the history of sexuality that has indicated contemporary Western sexual subjectivites to be, in part, constituted through the scientific search for sexual abnormality and (ii) diverges from this work in mapping the trajectory and implications of nonsexuality (vis-a-vis “compulsory sexuality”) in science and culture.
The essay can be found here (let me know if you have difficulty accessing it for any reason): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959353512443668 And for reference the abstract is as follows:
Asexuality, quickly becoming a burgeoning sexual identity category and subject of academic inquiry, relies at this budding moment of identity demarcation on a series of scientific studies that seek to ‘discover’ the truth of asexuality in and on the body. This article considers the existing scientific research on asexuality, including both older and more obscure mentions of asexuality as well as contemporary studies, through two twin claims: (1) that asexuality, as a sexual identity, is entirely specific to our current cultural moment – that it is in this sense culturally contingent, and (2) that scientific research on asexuality, while providing asexuality with a sense of credibility, is also shaping the possibilities and impossibilities of what counts as asexuality and how it operates. In the first section, I consider how older scientific research on asexuality, spanning from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, is characterized by a disinterest in asexuality. Next, turning to recent work on asexuality, the beginning of which is marked by Anthony Bogaert’s 2004 study, I demonstrate how asexuality becomes ‘discovered’, mapped, and pursued by science, making it culturally intelligible even while often naturalizing, in the process, what I argue are harmful sexual differences.