“Your Brain Isn’t All Backwards”: Asexual Young Women’s Narratives of Sexual Healthism

Abstract

Scholarship on asexuality is a growing but underexplored area in the social sciences. In the U.S., asexual people (i.e., individuals who do not experience sexual attraction) navigate a society in which being a sexual person is regarded as a normal and even compulsory aspect of human health and subjectivity. Utilizing an asexual subsample from a broader study of queer young women, this article integrates Foucault’s theorizing around sexuality and repression with scholarship on healthism to examine how discourses of sexual healthism operate among asexual young women in the U.S. South. We argue that in rejecting theories of sexual repression and compulsory “healthy” sexuality, asexual young women both confirm and resist the moral authority and power of religious and health discourses to affirm their identities and find language and communities to make their experiences more intelligible to themselves and others. Our analysis advances emerging scholarship on sexual healthism and its discursive and material effects on marginalized groups.