Buon lunedì, prodi seguaci!🖤💜

Ieri è iniziata l’Ace Week, il che significa che questa settimana ci darò dentro con i libri che parlano di asessualitĂ  e che hanno personaggi appartenenti allo spettro asessuale (e ne vedrete anche oltre questa settimana, perchĂ© ne sto leggendo ancora due proprio in questo momento). Inoltre, oggi cade anche l’Intersex Awareness Day, quindi non dimenticate di informarvi al riguardo!💛💜

Per quanto riguarda la citazione di oggi, viene da uno dei libri sull’asessualitĂ  che sto leggendo: Asexual Erotics di Ela Przybylo.

Writing against what she calls the “superficial erotic” – or what we might also think of as the codification of intimacy through the regime of sexuality – Lorde opens up space for a deep intimacy that is not reliant only on sex and sexuality for meaning but that finds satisfation in a myriad of other activities and relationships to the self and to others. Like with Freud, the erotic is an inner resource of power that fuels action and intimacy in the world. In distinction to Freud, however, Lorde’s erotic is not a sexually motivated energy, instinct, or drive, making conceptual space for asexuality in a way that “sexually” does not. If anything, it is the reverse: The erotic fuels sexual desire rather than sexual desire being at the base of the erotic. Sublimation, in this sense, drawing on a Lordean framework, is not the sublimation of sexual desire or a sexual drive into other life pursuits, but rather involves the transference of the erotic into various activities, sex icluded. This traformative understanding of the erotic, rather than sexual desire, as at the base of all creativity, marks Lorde’s work as an intervention in Freudian-based understandings of the flow of desire and the well from which they spur.

Challenging what she sees as an obsession with sex and sexuality, Ela Przybylo examines the silence around asexuality in queer, feminist, and lesbian thinking—turning to Audre Lorde’s work on erotics to propose instead an approach she calls asexual erotics, an alternative language for discussing forms of intimacy that are not reducible to sex and sexuality. Beginning with the late 1960s as a time when compulsory sexuality intensified and became increasingly tied to feminist, lesbian, and queer notions of empowerment, politics, and subjectivity, Przybylo looks to feminist political celibacy/asexuality, lesbian bed death, the asexual queer child, and the aging spinster as four figures that are asexually resonant and which benefit from an asexual reading—that is, from being read in an asexually affirming rather than asexually skeptical manner.
Through a wide-ranging analysis of pivotal queer, feminist, and anti-racist movements; television and film; art and photography; and fiction, nonfiction, and theoretical texts, each chapter explores asexual erotics and demonstrates how asexuality has been vital to the formulation of intimate ways of knowing and being. Asexual Erotics assembles a compendium of asexual possibilities that speaks against the centralization of sex and sexuality, asking that we consider the ways in which compulsory sexuality is detrimental not only to asexual and nonsexual people but to all.