Asexuality and the feminist politics of ‘not doing it’
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Abstract
This thesis makes a contribution to the burgeoning study of the sexual identity category and sexual orientation of asexuality by arguing for its political valence and feminist potentiality. Offering a feminist reading of scientific texts on asexuality, and revisiting feminist radical texts from the late sixties and early seventies, I make the claim that asexuality is possible and intelligible only in our very specific Western discursive context, a context saturated with the sexual, coital, and heterosexual imperatives. Assessing that asexuality is both limited and enabled by dominant sexual discourses and that asexuality as a sexual orientation has not been discursively available in the past, this thesis suggests that feminist iterations of asexuality contribute key insights to the gendered politics at work behind ‘not doing it.’