National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) 2012 Call for Papers about Asexuality

National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)
2012 Call for Papers about Asexuality

November 8-11, 2012, Oakland, CA.

Papers on any topic at the intersection of women’s and gender studies and
asexuality will be considered.

At minimum, your submission should fall under one of the following themes
for NWSA 2012:
*Revolutionary Futures
*Traveling Theory
*Social Networks, Power, and Change
*Decolonizing Knowledge
*Creative Awakenings

For more information on the themes, visit: http://nwsa.org/

While this is an open call, topic suggestions include:
* Asexual Intersections (including with LGBTIQ, Race, Nationality,
Disability, Appearance/Beauty)
* Online Asexual Communities (AVEN, LiveJournal, Tumblr, etc)
* Asexual Activism & Visibility
* Teaching Asexuality Studies
* Asexual Discourses and Theory
* Asexual Research Methods
* Asexual Literature
* Asexual Artists & Artwork

If you are interested in being a part of the 2012 Asexuality Studies panels
at NWSA, please send the following info by February 13, 2012 to Regina M.
Wright: (wrightrm@indiana.edu). Please make sure receipt of your submission
is confirmed.

Your submission should include your:
*Name, Institutional Affiliation, Snail Mail, Email, Phone.
*NWSA Theme your paper fits under (and asexuality studies topic area/s if
yours fits any of the above).
*Title for your talk, a one-page, double-spaced abstract in which you lay
out your topic and its relevance to this session.
*AND a 100 word truncated abstract (NWSA requirement).

Each person will speak for around 15 minutes, and we will leave time for
Q&A. In order to present with your name in the program, you must become a
member of NWSA in addition to registering for the conference.

Survey for asexuals 25 or older

My name's Andrew and I'm writing my doctoral dissertation on asexuality, and for the first part of my research I am wanting to better understand how asexuals understood their asexuality before the rise of online asexual communities. This will help us to better understand the history of asexuality and the conceptual resources people have drawn on for understanding asexuality.

To participate you must
1) presently identify as asexual
2) be 25 years of age or older, and
3) and have lived most of your life since age 12 in English language contexts.

Asexual Identity Online and Before.

I know that there are a lot of you who like taking surveys who may be disappointed about not meeting the eligibility requirements. (Based on the results of the AAW11 census, the eligibility requirements probably exclude about 85% of aces active in online English language communities.) It's not because I don't care about people outside the above demographic, but because of the specific issues I'm wanting to investigate with this particular survey.

Edit: I got the number of responses I was aiming for a much faster than I anticipated. Since I now have 200 responses I have closed the survey. I want to thank everyone who participated.

The presence of absence: Asexuality and the creation of resistance

Hughes, L. (2011). The presence of absence: Asexuality and the creation of resistance, gnovis, 12.

This paper investigates the existence of asexuality or ace identity. The aim of the paper is twofold, to examine the emergence of a seemingly impossible identity and to consider the consequences of an asexual space in a sexual discourse. Since the term ‘asexual’ proves problematic in its dependence on the existence of sexuality, the first half of the paper attempts to renegotiate a definition of asexuality, focusing on the power of the term “ace”. I then explore the work of three exemplary authors, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Lillian Faderman, and Michael Foucault, who prove successful in constructing an alternative discourse to the dominant sexual regime. Using their work, I argue that not only does an asexual space help individuals articulate their existence; it also creates resistance against the dominant power regime. Outside of academia, I argue that technology takes the reins, as the Asexual Visibility and Education Network’s (AVEN) online presence continues to raise awareness and expand the asexual community.

Asexy Pioneer: Asexuality Versus Eroticism in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!

Erro, N. (2011). Asexy pioneer: Asexuality versus eroticism in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature, 1.

No abstract.

Petition about DSM-5

A little over a week ago, the Society For Humanistic Psychology (Division 32 of the American Psychological Association) started a petition regarding DSM-5. It started without any big announcement and has spread largely by word of mouth, email, and a bit of blogging.

Having been put up on October 22, it already has nearly 3000 signatories, mostly mental health professionals. The open letter/petition addresses numerous problems with DSM-5. Some of these are problems that already exist in DSM-IV and are of the "easy to point out, but virtually impossible to fix in our current state of knowledge" variety. Others are particularly bad proposals for DSM-5 which they fear would be worse than the status quo, rather than better. A major part of it concerns turf battles among mental health professionals, and some history is in order here.

In 1977 (in preparation for DSM-III, published in 1980), there was a presentation by Robert Spitzer and Jean Endicott on defining "mental disorder" that defined "medical disorder" and claimed that "mental disorder" was a subset of that. Over the past several decades there had been a number of attacks on psychiatry (collectively these are often called anti-psychiatry) which argued that psychiatry is not a legitimate branch of medicine and that the concept of "mental disorder" is a metaphor at best and an outright lie at worst. Spitzer and Entidott's proposed definition was intended to challenge anti-psychiatric critiques, but it created quite a reaction among psychologists who feared that the American Psychiatric Association was doing turf-warfare, trying to get a bigger slice of the mental-health-funding pie. As a result, the "subset of medical disorders" language was not included in DSM-III and Spitzer had to write an editorial for the APA Monitor to alleviate the fears of concerned psychologists, insisting that the goal was not at all to devalue the work of psychologists or for psychiatrists to try to assert dominance in the mental health field.

Thirty years later, the DSM-5 people are doing a number of things which are setting off similar fears. Yet the fact is that physicians make up a small portion of the mental health professionals who use the DSM. Fears of turf wars remain, and one gets the suspicion that the DSM-5 folk aren't really all that sensitive to the political/guild concerns of those other guilds that use their book.

Interested readers, especially those who are mental health professionals or in related fields, are encouraged to go read the petition and sign it if you agree with it.

Spitzer, R. L. (1981, October). Nonmedical myths and the DSM-III. APA Monitor, pp. 3, 33.

Spitzer, R. L., & Endicott, J. (1978). Medical and mental disorder: Proposed definition and criteria. In R. L. Spitzer & D. F. Klein (Eds.), Critical issues in psychiatric diagnosis (pp. 15-39). New York, NY: Raven Press.

History of asexuality group

I've recently created a google group for people interested in the history of asexuality. In my own view, the history of asexuality can usefully be divided into three categories. First, the history of asexual communities as "asexuality" is (generally) understood since the establishment of asexual communities in the past decade or so. Second, is cultural history involved leading up to the creation of such communities. Third, there are historical and cross-cultural categorizations similar to asexuality.

While I'm not limiting this group to any one of these, I expect the focus to largely be on the first of these (and a little bit of the second, especially in the years prior to the formation of [online] asexual communities). I've met a number of people participating in asexual communities who've been doing some important work in piecing together bits of the history--generally this has been for blog posts, the AVENwiki, or issues pertaining to the history of AVEN that are relevant to questions about how the site is run. The main purpose of the group is for people who spend time digging into the history, reading through old threads, websites stored in the Wayback Machine, and other sources for piecing together bits of the history.

If anyone wants to join, please email me and let me know so I can add you.

Asexual scripts: A grounded theory inquiry into the intrapsychic scripts asexuals use to negotiate romantic relationships

Haefner, C. (2011). Asexual scripts: A grounded theory inquiry into the intrapsychic scripts asexuals use to negotiate romantic relationships>Asexual scripts: A grounded theory inquiry into the intrapsychic scripts asexuals use to negotiate romantic relationships. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto, California.

Abstract: This grounded theory inquiry sought to generate a mid-range theory proposing how asexuals negotiate romantic relationships. Two online surveys were posted on the Asexuality and Visibility Education Network (AVEN) website. Sixty-four participants completed either 1 or both of the surveys for a total of 74 responses. As demonstrated through thick description culled from the data, an important feature of negotiating romantic relationships for the participants in this study was a process called naming. There were 3 areas of naming found in the datAa: Naming the Norm, Naming Asexuality in Relationship, and Naming Asexuality for Self. Though the areas of naming identified in this study represent the internalized meaning of being asexual in a sexualized society, the areas of naming also correspond to the 3 categories of scripting identified by Simon and Gagnon and explained in sexual script theory (SST). The areas of naming suggest that the heteronormative paradigm, with its prescriptive model of what a romantic relationship is and how individuals should engage in romantic relationships, affects asexuals at many levels including experiencing themselves as different from the norm, engaging in or choosing not to engage in romantic relationships, and perceiving themselves as asexual beings.

The author identifies as asexual, and as far as I know, this is the first doctoral dissertation on asexuality. Expect it to be the first of many, as I am aware of several asexuals pursuing doctoral level degrees who are planning on doing their dissertations on asexuality.

Edit: I realized that I had forgotten to include a link, so I have now added one.