Tag Archives: asexuality

Recommended Reading for November 16, 2010

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Peggy Orenstein for the New York Times Magazine: The code-words of breast cancer awareness

Fast-forward to today, when, especially during October, everything from toilet paper to buckets of fried chicken to the chin straps of N.F.L. players look as if they have been steeped in Pepto. If the goal was “awareness,” that has surely been met — largely, you could argue, because corporations recognized that with virtually no effort (and often minimal monetary contribution), going pink made them a lot of green.

But a funny thing happened on the way to destigmatization. The experience of actual women with cancer, women like Rollin, Black, Ford and Rockefeller — women like me — got lost. Rather than truly breaking silences, acceptable narratives of coping emerged, each tied up with a pretty pink bow.

Ally at Every Crooked Step Forward: Where I Write About (Not) Coming Out

I could have lied. But I couldn’t lie. I didn’t know asexual was anything, then, so I just said no, and then was forced to sit through all the speculation. They didn’t know, and I didn’t know enough to argue with them. People assumed I was undesirable, because of the CP, and I didn’t argue with them, though I wanted to because the assumption hurt, but the hurt was hard to explain, under the circumstances. People assumed I was too brain damaged to understand sex, and I couldn’t explain otherwise, because simply having no desire was enough to tell sexuals I didn’t understand.

Lisa at Sociological Images: Illustrating a “Normal” Life Course

By organizing birth control needs according to age, the slide show teaches viewers a socially-approved timeline for our sexual, marital, and reproductive lives.   Teen sex is invisible, having children in your 30s is ideal, and the end of a relationship is an option but, as Corina points out, not having children is not.

Wheelchair Dancer at cripwheels: Broken

Regardless of the state of Tommy’s mind and body, it is we who are broken.  It is we who drink in glorifications of war and heroism in the movies and kill the political systemic message of such poetry by treating it as individual expression.  It is we who refuse to provide support and systems of support to help our veterans; it is we who shame and silence them into a stiff upper lip.  We are the ones who both stare and look away.  Homelessness doesn’t respond to swelling music and huge parades.  PTSD isn’t best treated by ignoring it.

Crazy Mermaid at Bipolar: Crazy Mermaid’s Blog: NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness)

Unlike Breast Cancer with their irascible pink color, and Heart Disease with their “wearing red” campaign, Mental Illness doesn’t have the awareness in the public eye that those campaigns and others such as Multiple Sclerosis or other equivalent organizations.  Why is that?

David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine: Homeopathy for fibromyalgia: The Huffington Post bombs again

As you might be able to guess, because fibromyalgia is a syndrome of unclear etiology with a wide variety of physical complaints, widely varying severity, and a clinical course that waxes and wanes, it is a woo magnet. Indeed, many conditions that scientists do not yet understand well and/or for which we do not yet have particularly good treatments are woo magnets.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading at disabledfeminists dot com. Please note if you would like to be credited, and under what name/site.

Recommended Reading for September 21, 2010

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Natasha Tracy at Breaking Bipolar: Stop Minimizing Mental Illness: Worst Things To Say

I feel, sometimes, that I am at war with the mentally-well world. This isn’t to say that many of them aren’t lovely or that I have a desire to harm anyone, but I do feel embroiled. And it’s mostly because the well population just doesn’t understand what it is to be unwell. They demonstrate this heartily by repeatedly saying the worst things possible to a person with a mental illness.

The Guardian: Letters: Living on benefits is in no way ‘a lifestyle choice’

It is quite possible for a person from a very rich and privileged background to genuinely care about the plight of the poor, and to do something constructive to improve it (Osborne to cut £4bn more from benefits, 10 September). It is much harder for such a person to have any real comprehension of what it feels like to live in poverty, with little or no prospect of escape, no matter how hard they work.

Michael J. Berens at the Seattle Times: Hundreds of adult homes conceal abuse, neglect [strong trigger warning for content related to abuse]

In fact, a Seattle Times investigation has found, such cover-ups by adult family homes are not unusual. The Times found that over the past five years, at least 357 of the adult family homes in this state have concealed cases of abuse or neglect of their residents. Many of those cases involved serious injury or death. In dozens of these cases, untrained or unlicensed caregivers mishandled residents’ medications, sometimes giving them fatal overdoses. In other cases, residents became ill after being denied basic care and hygiene.

Ally at Every Crooked Step Forward: Courage…And Other Things I Don’t Have

That I am a person with a disability who identifies as asexual is not a forgone conclusion. That I belong to both groups is incidental, and that both groups have been mistakenly thought, by people who are not part of that group, to denote a lack of maturation or inability to understand one’s social or physical development, does not mean I am, in fact, immature, or that I do not know my own body. The fact that I am asexual is not proof about the presence, or lack of a sexual desire in a person with a disability, or zir understanding of zir sexuality, or zir ability to express that desire, if indeed it does exist. The fact that I have a disability is, similarly, not proof that all, or even most, people who identify as asexual suffer from some kind of physical, mental, or chemical deficiency.

Blackamazon at Having Read the Fine Print…….: We’re supposed to be impressed

However

I get less and less likely to feel solidarity with it when THAT phenomena where in your experimentation , goals for what inclusion looks like , and execution are serious matters and the stuff you got it from , the places it came from aren’t even notable .

As well as EVEN less likely to believe it’s just experimentation or poking and prodding when certain aspects of those personae like your race,class, sexuality are seemingly

a) ignored

or

b) only poked in ways that continually exhibit you as a edgy for a member of privileged class or consistent appropriator or chosen vessel.

It’s not my job to tell you haw to do it but if you wish to explore why is THAT section so often missed .

Guest Post: Disability and Asexuality

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Kaz is a German woman in her twenties, currently doing a maths PhD in the UK. She is on the autistic spectrum, stutters, and has been dealing with clinical depression on and off since her teens; she considers all of these disabilities. She is also aromantic-tending-towards-homoromantic asexual and identifies as queer. She blogged as Zailyn at WP for a while, but can now be found at either Dreamwidth or Livejournal, where she writes about fandom, disability, feminism, asexuality, and sometimes even maths.

Kaz’s note: First of all, this is not a 101-level post on either the asexuality or the disability side of things. However, I’m aware that asexuality isn’t really an issue that is on most people’s radars, so to anyone who doesn’t know much about it I suggest you check out AVEN in general and the Wiki in particular before reading or whenever you run into something that doesn’t seem clear.

Mod Note: Kaz & I talked and I’ve put in some links to terms as they come up.

A list. The header reads: What is your Sexual Orientation? Typed underneath with check boxes is Heterosexual, Homosexual, Bisexual. Written in, with a hand-drawn check box, is other. The check box is filled in next to other

Talking about the intersection of asexuality and disability is pretty difficult, because “asexuality” gets another meaning in disability rights discourse: it’s used to refer to the various stereotypes about disabled people’s sexualities. People do often seem to realise that this is problematic when it’s pointed out to them. However, what not so many people realise off the bat is that it goes beyond just “problematic”.

The stereotypes in question actually consist of a wide variety of things tossed together, some of which are in line with asexuality but many of which seem to have little to do with asexuality or in fact to be entirely opposed to it (I am interested to see how the stereotype of the disabled woman not saying no because she feels lucky anyone wants her is supposed to relate to asexuality, for instance). What they have in common, however, seems to be: denying disabled people their sexual agency and the right to make decisions or have knowledge about their own bodies and sexualities. The stereotypes about disabled people’s sexualities seem quite in line with the common tendency to consider us childlike, helpless and needing to be protected for our own good.

Asexual adults? Are not children. Nor do we (or, at least, should we) lack agency. In fact, the very existence of the asexual movement shows that we are in opposition to a lot of these ideas! We’re organising, we’re campaigning, we’re demanding that our sexual identity should be recognised and considered valid; disabled people are stereotyped to not have a sexual identity at all. (There is a distinction between the lack of a sexual orientation and a sexual orientation incorporating lack of sexual attraction that most people miss, but that is crucially important in this context.) Taking all the stereotypes disabled people get hit with regarding sex and sexuality and claiming that they all boil down to making them like asexual people? Like me? Is something I actually find really offensive.

An example: the desexualisation of disabled people often gets used to justify giving them less extensive sex ed or no sex ed at all compared to abled people. However, saying this is because they’re stereotyped as asexual entirely misses the fact that – asexual people need sex ed too! At the moment, it’s true that a lot of us will probably need it less than most sexual people, but it is still necessary as a large portion of asexuals do end up having sex at some point in their lives. Also, if mainstream comprehensive sex ed ever gets away from the “put the condom on the banana” “tab A slot B” style of sex education and starts talking about things like sexual orientation, explicit consent, how to figure out whether sex is the right decision for you at a certain time, etc. – I’d argue that we need this kind of sex ed more than many sexual people, as being a sexual minority tends to lead to more confusion and needing to figure things out. (There’s a traumatic experience I could have happily avoided if sex ed ran more in this direction.)

Also, using the name of my sexuality for these stereotypes obscures the fact that actually, they have negative effects for me, too. For instance, there is an astounding amount of ableism in the arguments people use to try and invalidate asexuality, ranging from “you should get your hormones checked!” over “that’s a disability, not a sexual orientation” to “you’re just all autistic!” You can imagine how the last one feels to me as an asexual autistic person! Worse, parts of the asexual movement buy into this and will talk about how they’re not autistic, their sexuality is valid – unlike mine, apparently?

…hey, I recognise this argument! But wait a minute, we can’t very well call it stereotyping disabled people as asexual if it’s being used to invalidate the sexualities of asexual people.
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