Thoughtfully Advocating for Inclusion

This post is for the Carnival of Aces. This month’s theme: Cross Community Connections.

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Whenever an asexual person reaches out to engage with another community and advocate for an approach inclusive of asexuality, it’s always risky.

Reactions can range from eager acceptance, to confused tolerance, to a civil refusal to engage because it would constitute “mission creep,” to indignant outrage that anyone would dare suggest that even a small fraction of the community’s time could be spent on asexuality, to even—sometimes—outright abuse.

I’ve seen all of these and more over the past ten years. Lately, I’ve seen more success than failure.

Frequently, communities have no unified front. Different members have different reactions, and whether or not you make any headway largely depends on which people are in charge. If you get a bad response, it can sometimes be worth it to try again after the leadership changes. People do learn from their experiences, and although you can’t count on it, it’s possible that once a leader has seen membership drop due to intersectional frictions that were never addressed, they may become more willing to consider dealing with such issues.

Linkspam: February 27th, 2015

Every Friday, we will share links to news, blogs, and anything else we find interesting.  We can’t catch everything, so you are invited to self-promote in the comments!

There’s an offline ace group organizing in the Netherlands.  See this blog post or this forum thread for more details.

Siggy wrote about sexual repression.

pretty-corny is putting together a Weird Aro/Ace Feels Zine.

The Asexual Census published data on the sexuality of non-ace respondents, and data showing how trans identity is related to sex assigned at birth.

Elizabeth talks about shallow “support” and gaslighting.

Stanford ran an article on a researcher studying asexuality.

killerbe13 wrote about sexual attraction (and how it’s talked about), what demisexuality means to them, and variorientation.

Swankivy wrote an article for Drunk Monkey about being an aro ace.

tristifere found and reviewed an academic article on asexuality in the stories of King Arthur.  aceadmiral also had some thoughts.

cinderace weighed in on the debate over cupioromanticism and asked for sexual content warnings in ace spaces.

epochryphal had some thoughts on the FUCKED zine.

The politics of (in)visibility

This piece was written for an asexual people of color zine.  I was originally planning on waiting ’til the zine was published to post this piece, but this topic has become relevant to some conversations I’ve been having recently, so I figured that I might as well post it now.

This is a piece that grew partially out of thoughts I had after being interviewed for the piece on asexual Latinas, partially out of some experiences with activist work in the past few years, and partially out of the weirdness that is standing in an intersection that not many people openly inhabit.  It is also, I guess, an explanation for anyone who has wondered why I don’t blog about the intersection of race/ethnicity and asexuality more often.

Question of the Week: February 24th, 2015

I spend a lot of my time with a group of assorted queer friends, who have a pretty wide range of opinions and have interesting takes on some everyday issues some take for granted. A recent point of contention was the concept of “gaydar”, which for the unfamiliar, is basically the abilities of a person to determine the sexual orientation of others by going purely off of situational awareness and gut feelings. While I personally believe such a thing plays into stereotypes, my opinion isn’t the only one that matters! Do you personally feel that it’s possible to determine the sexual orientation of someone you just met through just a few interactions? If so, is it okay to do so, or ethically questionable? Have you got any interesting stories from when people got each other wrong because they made assumptions?

Carving out a space for myself

This post is for the February Carnival of Aces.

About a year ago, I wrote a post on Tumblr called Caught Between Worlds about feeling caught between asexual and Muslim communities. I reflected that I felt I couldn’t really talk about Islam or being Muslim with aces, while I couldn’t talk about being asexual with Muslims.

Since I wrote that post, I got over my hesitation about talking about Islam in asexual spaces – I’ve written 15 posts on asexuality and Islam on Tumblr (seven of which have been published here on The Asexual Agenda)!

I’ve come across a few more asexual Muslims in that time, some of whom (particularly elainexe) have also written on their experiences with asexuality and Islam.

Welcome to our new contributors

Dear readers, we’ve completed our search for new contributors.  Join us in welcoming them.  Profiles below.

Linkspam: February 20th, 2015

Every Friday, we will share links to news, blogs, and anything else we find interesting.  We can’t catch everything, so you are invited to self-promote in the comments!

Everyday Feminism posted an article on demisexuality.

Coyote wrote more about grey areas, and pondered what it means to know that no is an option.

Cinderace wrote about sex-aversion and purity culture.

AVENes, the Spanish AVEN community, launched a newsletter called AVENIDA (also see mobile version).

Coyote collects some advice on how to deal with sexual activity and sex aversion in ace 101.

Wired ran an article on the asexual spectrum.