A review by seeceeread
Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture by Sherronda J. Brown

Oppressive ideas are never singular. They are always informed by other interlocking notions of power.

Black people are doubly closed out of asexuality, both because it is an aggressively gendered experience (and the gender binary struggles with Blackness) and because ace intimacies conflict with widely held assumptions of Black hypersexuality. Yet Brown is real, as are the people they cite in a quick closing chapter, "Black Asexual Insights." The book aims to explain the many ways Blackness is treated as a foil in the human story, as well as to read asexuality into spaces where it has been erased. 

In on-screen villains, historical statutes, and the DSM-IV, Brown finds asexuality has long been (and still is) synonymous with devilish and deviant, cruel and cold, sophomoric and naive. White supremacy, patriarchy, and cisheteronormativity obscure, distort and demonize aces. However, we may find ace traces if we allow ourselves to accept that some of our icons – notably, Langston Hughes and Octavia Butler – were honest about pursuing career over relationship, and turning on audiences for their art, instead of lovers. Brown's methods reminisce of Heyam's in BEFORE WE WERE TRANS; they’re not interested in posthumously assigning labels so much as documenting contextualized transgressions, themselves queer invitations.

Brown picks up after Chen's ACE, briefly discussing the spectrum and its entry points to delve into cultural (mis)interpretations of asexuality. Each chapter reads as its own essay, but the crescendo makes this more than a collection of standalone thoughts. More than once, I craved simpler sentences that could better allow the author's bold thinking to shine, though they also deliver several times. I'm curious about writers in conversation with Brown's work, those who might invite me to further simmer.