Compulsory Sexuality

Or Does Everyone Have a Sexuality?

“I don’t have a sexuality.”

That’s a response I received several years ago when I was collecting interview data for my dissertation on asexuality. I asked everyone I interviewed to describe their sexuality and what sexual identities they use.

Honestly, I wasn’t prepared for a respondent to tell me that she simply felt that she didn’t “have” a sexuality.

It’s a response that’s been rattling around in my head for years. And it’s an inspiration for the discussion I had with my students last week in the Asexuality and Aromanticism Studies course I’m leading this semester. Specifically, we talked about a core concept in asexuality studies: compulsory sexuality. (We also read Kristina Gupta’s excellent article on the concept.)

We’re seven weeks into the course, so the idea of compulsory sexuality isn’t new to my students. We’ve talked extensively about how our society is steeped in the assumption that everyone does—and should—experience sexual attraction, an assumption often labeled as “compulsory sexuality.”

But last week I encouraged my students to consider other conceptualizations of what exactly compulsory sexuality is.

Specifically, I encouraged them to consider that we can think of compulsory sexuality in two broad ways: 1) as referring to the assumption that everyone does/should experience sexual attraction and 2) as pointing toward the sociocultural imperative to understand ourselves through the lens of sexuality in the first place.

Those definitions aren’t mutually exclusive, but they are meaningfully different.

The first helps us challenge the idea that sexual attraction is a universal element of humanity. The second helps us think more deeply about sexuality as a social construct.

The Social Construction of Sexuality

In queer-friendly corners of academia, it’s pretty widely accepted that sexuality is a social construct. This doesn’t mean that sexuality isn’t “real.” What it means is that sexuality only becomes real through human agreement and interaction rather than existing as a “natural” fact.

But I’d argue that most of us—academics included—don’t think deeply enough about what it means for sexuality to be “socially constructed.”

Often, seeing sexuality as a social construct becomes limited to acknowledging that the various sexual identities available to us (gay, straight, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, etc.) are socially constructed.

Those labels are absolutely socially constructed. But that analysis doesn’t go deep enough. It’s not just that the identities we use to label our sexuality are socially constructed; the very idea that everyone has a sexuality (and that this sexuality is core to the self) is also socially constructed.

This is where the second definition of compulsory sexuality (as identifying the sociocultural imperative to understand ourselves through the lens of sexuality) comes into play. That definition of compulsory sexuality goes beyond legitimating asexuality and instead troubles the idea that everyone “has” a sexuality.

This is a challenging idea.

After all, we live in a social world in which even people who don’t experience sexual attraction are still expected to understand themselves through the lens of sexuality (thereby giving rise to asexual identities). So it’s hard to wrap our heads around the idea that the concept of sexuality is a cultural artifact.

Connections to Gender Detachment

By this point, those of you following my research may be reminded of the concept of “gender detachment.” Gender detachment is a term I coined to refer to feelings that gender is irrelevant or unimportant at a personal level, that gender does not feel like a core element of one’s self.

Yet, we live in a social world that assumes everyone has a gender. Indeed, it’s arguably one of the few things that those on the political left and political right agree on: everyone has a gender. The source of disagreement is over whether the available gender options are determined from birth and limited only to the man/woman binary.

I think we can interpret compulsory sexuality as pointing toward a similar dynamic, but toward sexuality rather than gender.

Through that lens—in which compulsory sexuality is understood as the sociocultural imperative to understand and label the self through the concept of sexuality—we might understand asexuality as actually emerging from compulsory sexuality.

Put differently, living under the assumption that everyone has a sexuality, even people who do not experience sex/sexual attraction as important to themselves face compulsory pressures to identify themselves as sexual. Asexual identities can be understood as a response to that pressure.

A counterfactual might be helpful here. Let’s pretend we lived in a social world in which sexuality wasn’t assumed to be a core element of the self, in which people certainly still have (and desire) what we call sex, but in which those activities and desires simply don’t carry much cultural weight and aren’t socially important. Would asexual identities (or other sexual identities, for that matter) emerge in that context?

I want to be very clear: I don’t see this as an argument that asexuality isn’t real. Asexuality is as real (or not) as any other sexual identity. Like all of them—and like the very idea of sexuality—it is socially constructed. But remember: that doesn’t mean asexuality (or any other sexuality) is fake. It means that it emerges through culture rather than being a natural fact that exists outside of human interaction.

Is Asexuality a Sexuality? Or a Resistance to Compulsory Sexualization?

I think that these considerations raise some deep—and potentially uncomfortable—questions about asexuality. For example, we might ask: is asexuality a sexual identity? Or does asexuality represent an effort to break from the sociocultural imperative to understand ourselves through the lens of sexuality?

I think asexuality is—or can be—both.

Ultimately, both definitions of compulsory sexuality (and both understandings of asexuality) strike me as valid and useful. And as an asexuality scholar, I think we need to engage with both sets of understanding as we continue to build our knowledge of asexuality.

This is Part 6 of a multipart series, where we follow along each week with the Asexuality and Aromanticism Studies course I’m teaching this semester (one of the first times such a course has been offered anywhere). You can find the first post in that series here.

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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