The Asexual Fetish

How the Media Fetishizes Asexuality

I've recently done several media interviews on asexuality, and while two of them were rather tactful and informative, I left one one of them feeling sick to my stomach. Not only did I feel like I never got to actually speak on the points I think are important about asexuality (like defining it, identity, sexual orientation, negotiating relationships, queer politics, pathologization, which I will definitely be talking about in later posts!), I also felt probed beyond reason. (Whenever probing is reasonable that is). I am a very open person, and I think there is value in the personal narrative. We talk about our own lives to help us understand the world. I was completely willing and open to talk about my own personal experience as long as I had the opportunity to extend that outward, to reiterate that everyone's experience is different, and to explain some of the general ideas the asexual community has agreed upon in the literature and on the web.

However, during the interview, the point I was trying to make was constantly interrupted for the sake of a sexy joke, which I understood due to the "fun" nature of the show, but it got a little out of hand. Not to mention, sometimes these jokes were also turned back onto questions about my personal sexual development, like masturbation and arousal. And let's not even get into the role editing plays in this process too. The deal is, I never got to really get my point across, and I was so frequently dismantled, that I started to feel disembodied. When this happens to me, in that moment, I sometimes have a tendency to just want to get it over with. In this instance, I catered to the tone of the performance, but I found my personal defense mechanism kicking in. I found myself embellishing personal details as I grew more distant from the body that was being probed in that interview. An example is saying that I was a "cool kid" in high school, when actually I was a "cool kid" in middle school, but I transferred to a large high school in a new state and I definitely faded into the background there. I bring this up because in these situations, there are ways in which our pasts become embellished, or even become blanket statements that cannot possibly bare nor reveal the whole truth. How can we garner knowledge from such cursory statements?

With all these questions in mind, I produced a piece of performance called "The Asexual Fetish." This performance is not an attack on my interviewer. It is a mode for me to deal with the questions I had around my own experience of this interview. It is to call into question the truths of experience, the crossing of the line into voyeurism and surveillance, and ultimately to open a new dialogue around the politics of asexual visibility and education. Sorry, "The Asexual Fetish" is temporarily unavailable for viewing.