About a week ago, I was in my women’s and gender studies course and the professor was telling us how she and her daughter, who is around 9, were discussing the birds and the bees, and how the daughter, after having learned all about sexual actions, intercourse, foreplay, etc. asked the basic question of why someone would want to engage in sexual activity at all. This got me thinking about how even on a basic teaching level, we accept sexual drive and sexual attraction as an innate part of ourselves. This type of thinking obviously excludes the asexual and aromantic individuals on the QUILTBAG spectrum, and once again reinforces our invisibility in even within and amongst our own “community.”
So, I emailed this professor, pointing out more explicitly her daughter’s point that how we teach our children is contingent on our assumption that a sexual attraction is a part of us. And she emailed back, thanking me for my candid points, and then the next day in class she handed out a revised syllabus with several articles discussing asexuality in academia!
This was shocking in the best way, not only because she had found this material so quickly, but also that she revised the remainder of the class schedule for the semester in part thanks to this. And y’know, she could’ve just said “thank you,” considered putting this stuff in for next year’s class and have it be done then. But she didn’t. She took action now, something that I was quite humbled by and glad of because it showed how students’ own initiative can have tremendous power. Obviously, I’m coming at this from a privileged position -- my university is small and so can afford a drastic change like this, because the classes are well-knit and community is strong -- and that especially made me appreciate the drive that the professor displayed.
The article that she included comes from the "Sexualities" journal. It’s called “Coming to an Asexual Identity: Negotiating Identity, Negotiating Desire” by Kristen Scherrer, and this was some of the first material in academia that I had formally come across dealing with asexuality as an identity all on its own. You may read the article for yourself if you like -- there’s some fascinating stuff in there about breaking down binaries, re-thinking identity, understanding sexuality as an interplay of differences, and so forth -- but even on a broader level, this cemented for me my identity among the queer spectrum, this validated it, and what’s more, my professor’s actions validated it. Asexual people, and other people whose identities are often rendered invisible by the broader queer spectrum, we exist. And we’re valid.
I think it’s important that other professors follow this example, to recognize, especially in our current rapid-fire climate of information, that discussions are shifting, and so too might your students’ conversations be shifting alongside them. I think we live in a world now where easiness shouldn’t be what we’re striving for in terms of identity. Complexity and derivation yield a greater emphasis on individuality and personality, the ability to find who you are and what you are and have language for that beyond “not straight” or “aberration.” Certainly taken to its extreme there exists a reductive essentialist value (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it). But strategizing how to deploy such values is, I think, a boon. And, more importantly, to have a language that centers us as valid and as important is empowering and awesome, and to see that manifest itself in the classroom after a simple email exchange, to see that a person listened and took action, that's a huge boost in confidence for me and for the community in general. It's just nice to see that people listen and that language exists for different people.
