Reviews with content warning for Colonisation - Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture

Thanks to North Atlantic Books for the free advance copy of this book.

- REFUSING COMPULSORY SEXUALITY not only digs deeper into how asexuality is viewed and why it is often rejected by allosexual people, it also shows clearly how acephobia is closely intertwined with many other social constructs, from racism to capitalism.
- This book is quite academic and took me awhile to get through, but it's more than worth it to devote a chunk of time to it. Brown has written a seminal work here, and I think scholars, educators, and thinkers will be referring to it for a long time to come.

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informative reflective slow-paced

3.75

Sherronda J Brown explores the oppression of asexuals through the eyes of a black cis female. She describes in depth the history of injustice asexuals have faced, while coinciding the fetishization and hypersexualization of black bodies since colonial times. Black female identifying ACEs as they often call themselves are faced with living in a heteropatriarchial society and are victim to both misogyny and misogynoir. America has historically simultaneously pleasured and profited from the sexualization of black bodies. This book gives examples from the plantation era Jezebel to modern trends on Pornhub. Black women have been demonized and seen as promiscuous to protect the real sexual predators, men.
Being asexual and black is not considered normative or natural. ACE women face being infantilized and dehumanized by acephobics who are not actually afraid, just disgusted by things not seen as normal to them. Research has gone into the psychological issues of not desiring sex until recently and have gone as far as individuals deciding corrective r*** was a solution. SA whether coerced or forced is common in ACE women to remedy their “problem”. Many ACEs even have sex to maintain relationships although it is not pleasurable to them. ACEs are neither fully accepted by the straight or LGBTQ communities which are both largely based on sexuality, although some ACEs identify as queer.
As a cis hetero black woman I found this work fascinating. I was intrigued to explore an internalized biases and ignorances I had about asexuality. I felt while the ideas aren’t revolutionary, they were ideas I had never considered before. In an oversexed society a woman’s worth can be based on her sexual desirability. I can’t imagine trying to navigate the world with my sexuality being constantly infantilized and dehumanized. I have a new found respect for the perils of living authentically asexual in a heteropatriarchial society.
At times this book could be wordy or drag but it it easily consumable. I would not recommend this work to anyone sensitive to SA, r*** culture or racism. This book gives fair trigger warnings but if you are sensitive to those subjects this book was not written for you.

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