User Profile

"I think people go in and out of heterosexuality and homosexuality and queerness in various ways, and why can't that also be true for asexuality?" asks Cerankowski, the gender studies scholar. "There are different circumstances under which people might find themselves identifying with different sexualities, and I do think we have to allow movement and fluidity as we think more complexly about sexual identities."

— Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (Page 109)

Not all aces have been welcoming of people like Cara. Members of the ace community, especially in early years, rejected disabled aces completely, insisting that they would delegitimize asexuality and make it impossible to prove that asexuality is not related to (or caused by) disability and sickness. Even the efforts to add the asexual exception to the DSM ended up being subtly ableist by focusing on how happy aces are. "Rather than challenging stigma against both mental illness and asexuality, it seeks instead to rid asexuality of the stigma of mental illness," writes Wake Forest gender studies scholar Kristina Gupta. "Such normalizing tactics may come at the cost of intersectional analyses and coalitional possibilities."

— Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (Page 105)

The disabled community has spent a long time fighting the idea that disabled people are, or should be, asexual. The ace community has struggled for as long as it has existed to prove that asexuality has nothing to do with disability. A disabled ace woman complicates both these political agendas, and it is perhaps in a situation like this that the question of legitimacy and in-group loyalty are most acute.

— Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (Page 93)

Aces can look like ourselves and be ourselves -- attention-getting and fashionable, nonconformist and awkward and shy, and everything in between. Aces don't need to experience sexual attraction to move through the sexual world on our own terms.

— Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (Page 92)

It's hard if you confirm a stereotype and it's hard if you violate a stereotype and it's hard if you think you're violating the stereotype only because you hate it so much.

— Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (Page 85)

Representation not only reflects, but actually changes reality.

— Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (Page 83)

The details of why some groups find it harder than others to accept asexuality, or be accepted as ace, reveal the outlines of how sex and power and history have combined.

— Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (Page 79)