Asexuality and Erotic Biopolitics

This essay argues that conceptualizing asexuality as a queer orientation to sexuality instead of a sexual orientation enables a way of thinking about asexuality as a political swerve away from dominant modes of biopolitics toward an uneven field of affective erotics. The first section turns to Eve Sedgwick's famous reading of Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle" to lay out how compulsory sexuality has dominated queer reading practice and sketch the problems of relationality and kinship that are foreclosed by such readings. The second section takes up the politics of orientation, primarily drawing on Sara Ahmed's work, before generalizing in the fourth section to an account of the biocultural becoming of all creatures. Asexuality, on this reading, comes to be a biocultural phenomenon that emerges from complex relations among a biological entity and a more-than-human milieu. The third section offers a schematic overview of colonial biopolitics as, to use Sylvia Wynter's words, the overrepresentation of the human by Man, which requires persons to have a sexuality. The final section returns to kinship, arguing that asexuality should be constellated with a range of queer and decolonial modes of performing the human that are inseparable from more-than-human erotic relations.