2024 Asexuality Research Recap

2024 was a pretty big year for me.

In the fall, I started my second year as an Assistant Professor at Northern Illinois University. I feel like I’ve truly found my footing. My students are amazing, and I also love that I get to live in Chicago. Landing a job in academia is tough, but I feel very fortunate about where I landed.

It’s also been a remarkably productive year for my research on asexuality. I try to share my research updates here on Substack and on my Bluesky and Twitter accounts, but I wanted to offer a recap here—both to remind myself of what I’ve been up to the past 12 months but also to share it with you.

Publications on Asexuality

I published a lot of research this year. Here are some highlights:

1. Asexuality is a nascent but rapidly growing field. There are only a handful of tenure-track sociologists in the U.S. who are studying asexuality. As the field grows, I want to offer scholars a guide about how to engage with asexuality. My article “Understanding Asexuality: A Sociological Review,” published this year in Sociology Compass, gives an overlook of existing research on asexuality and points toward new directions for future scholarship.

2. The idea that romantic and sexual orientations can be distinct from one another is pretty widespread in asexual communities. Yet, there is (to my knowledge) no research that focuses explicitly on the split attraction model. That changed this year, when I published “Splitting Attraction: Differentiating Romantic and Sexual Orientations Among Asexual Individuals” in the Social Currents.

3. Why are men so vastly outnumbered by women and nonbinary people in identifying as asexual and/or aromantic? I examined this question in another Sociology Compass article with Hannah Tessler (an amazing scholar who recently received her PhD from Yale University and is quickly becoming a leading scholar of aromanticism). You can read the full article, “Sexuality, romantic orientation, and masculinity: Men as underrepresented in asexual and aromantic communities,” at this link or you can read a shorter summary here.

4. The heavily gendered skew of who identifies as asexual suggests that asexuality is a gendered identity. Thinking about this has made me—and many of you—curious about the relationship between masculinity and asexuality. This year, KJ Cerankowski and Megan Milks released a 10th year anniversary edition of their landmark book Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives. I am thrilled that my research on the intersection of asexuality and masculinity is a chapter in that book, which you can read here.

5. A while ago, Emily Fox (a doctoral student at UC Santa Barbara) and I wrote a short piece arguing that asexual and aromantic people offer an invaluable window into deepening our understanding of friendship. That piece, “What Is Friendship? Learning from Asexual and Aromantic Perspectives,” was reprinted this year as a chapter in Families As They Really Are. You can read the piece here.

I also had two additional research articles and two book chapters accepted for publication this year. They should all be published in 2025, so stay tuned for more updates.

Conference Presentations

In addition to those publications, I also presented my research around the world this year.

1. In May, I presented my research on split attraction at a conference at Tampere University in Finland.

2. In August, I organized the first-ever panel to focus on asexuality research at the American Sociological Association conference in Montreal, Canada. I also presented my work on the intersection of masculinity and asexuality/aromanticism with Hannah Tessler.

3. And just yesterday, I joined scholars Megan Carroll and Hannah Tessler in a discussion of social science asexuality research at AVEN’s mini conference (you can watch a recording here).

I’m also excited that my work on asexuality has been grabbing the attention of other academics. This year, I was invited to give guest lectures at Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, and UC Irvine’s School of Medicine.

In the Media

My research on asexuality also caught the attention of various writers. I was particularly excited to have a conversation with YouTuber Rowan Ellis (whose videos get hundreds of thousands of views) about why I think asexuality belongs under the queer umbrella.

Here’s a quick list of some places where people have been discussing my work outside of academia:

• "Thoughts on Counterintuitive Words." 2024. Medium.

• "The Story We Tell of Asexuality: 'Safe, Legal and Rare'?" 2024. Medium.

• "Reframing Sexual Expectations." 2024. Sexvangelicals.

• "The Chronically Online State of Asexual Discourse." 2024. Rowan Ellis (YouTube).

• "Celebrating International Asexuality Day: There is Power in Knowing and Accepting Who You Are." 2024. SAGE Advocacy & Services for LGBTQ+ Elders.

• "Asexual Representation: Florence from On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan." 2024. Medium.

• "Murray Scholar Delivers Second Talk About Borderlands of Sexuality." 2024. James Madison College News (Michigan State University).

• "Seeing Sex Via Asexual Lens." 2024. Northern Star.

• "Why I Love Love But Not Valentine’s Day." 2024. OMG Chronicles/Medium.

All in all, this was a really productive year for me—and one filled with the joys of building community and a new life in Chicago (a long move from California, where I did my PhD). I’m looking forward to a new year full of more asexuality research!

Canton Winer is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northern Illinois University. His research focuses on the relationships between gender and sexuality, with specific focus on the experiences and perspectives of people on the asexuality spectrum. You can keep up with his research on Bluesky.

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