How Should Researchers Approach Asexuality?

Researchers are increasingly interested in asexuality… but there still aren’t many sociologists studying asexuality.

I recently published an article in Sociology Compass where I review existing interdisciplinary research on asexuality and offer some recommendations for how researchers should define, measure, and approach asexuality. You can read the full article here (or here if it’s paywalled). Many of these recommendations will feel commonsense to asexual people. But I also offer some highlights below:

Defining Asexuality

Defining asexuality is trickier than it sounds. As with all collective identities, its exact definition is the topic of debate and disagreement. In my review of existing research, however, I find that most researchers (and even AVEN, until 2021) define asexuality as “a lack of sexual attraction.” I argue that researchers replace this definition with something more expansive.

I recommend instead defining asexuality as both a spectrum and an umbrella term that generally refers to those who experience low/no sexual attraction. I’m not alone in shifting this direction, which is now common in asexual communities, used by AVEN, and even increasingly used by researchers.

I also discuss asexuality’s relationship with broader LGBTQIA+ communities. I note that although asexuality is one of the ‘A’s in LGBTQIA+ (alongside agender and aromantic), asexuality has a complex and understudied relationship with broader LGBTQIA+ communities. Asexual people report sometimes feeling excluded from queer spaces. And some asexual people (albeit apparently a minority) do not consider asexuality queer at all.

Keeping these complexities in mind, I recommend that researchers treat asexuality as belonging under the broader LGBTQIA + umbrella while also being sensitive to the reality that some asexual individuals will not identify with that umbrella. (I’ll also note that I personally think asexuality holds huge queer potential, as I’ve written about on Substack here and here.)

Measuring Asexuality

Measuring asexuality can also be tricky, since conventional methods of measuring sexuality (particularly those that rely on identity, attraction, and/or behavior) do not always translate well to the study of asexuality. For example, it is a major mistake to use sexual abstinence as a proxy for measuring asexuality (and vice versa).

To address the shortcomings of these conventional methods for the study of asexuality, I argue that scholars should examine how asexual communities themselves measure and study asexuality. I make five main recommendations for how researchers should measure asexuality:

1. Include asexuality as an option if a study asks respondents to select a sexual identity. (Many surveys still don’t include asexuality as an option.)

2. Include an “I use a different term” write-in option when soliciting sexual identity.

3. Allow respondents to select multiple sexual identities.

4. Avoid assuming that asexual people are automatically aromantic

5. Do not use asexuality as a proxy for abstinence or any other sexual behavior.

I’m particularly excited by my third recommendation: allow respondents to select multiple sexual identities. Scholars have been slow to acknowledge that individuals can hold multiple sexual identities. Even though we’ve begun to account for measuring the fluidity of sexual identities, we still must learn to account for the simultaneity of sexual identities.

Asexual Interventions

One of the main recommendations I make in my article is that scholars embrace intersectional approaches to asexuality. Scholars have already explored how asexuality intersects with gender, family, race, disability, medicine, and class, and I give an overview of those discussions. Focusing on these intersections helps us understand asexuality more clearly, but it also deepens our understanding of topics like gender, family, race, disability, medicine, and class. Check out the article to learn more.

I also argue that asexuality poses important interventions in how we study sexuality. For example, asexuality breaks apart attraction, libido, and desire, exposing them as distinct, albeit often related, concepts. This intervention is useful for scholars studying sexuality even outside of asexual contexts, adding to our understanding of how sexuality is constructed. Asexuality studies also pushes scholars to treat not just aromanticism and asexuality as distinct, but also romantic and sexual orientations as potentially distinct.

Asexuality studies has also produced concepts like compulsory sexuality, highlighting that the idea that all humans do and should experience sexual attraction is a ubiquitous—but under-acknowledged—building block of sexual normativity and sexual regulation. Moreover, given that compulsory sexuality can marginalize asexual individuals both in heteronormative and queer spaces, asexuality studies also can help scholars examine how sexual normativity and regulation can operate in queer spaces as well as heteronormative ones.

Final Thoughts

All too often, asexuality remains absent both in sociological research and teaching. It is time for sociologists to undo that absence. Asexuality is a part of human diversity, and sociologists must be part of the knowledge we build around that diversity. Moreover, the study of asexuality draws our attention to important—but often unacknowledged—social forces like compulsory sexuality that affect everyone in our social world. Although the assumption and enforcement of sexual attraction might be more visible when we focus on asexuality, the pressures of compulsory sexuality certainly cannot be limited solely to asexual people. Undoubtedly, asexuality presents opportunities to unveil other social forces and to deepen our understanding of social forces we already study.

Asexuality's marginality is, in some sense, a strength. Asexuality guides us to “destabilize what we take for granted as normal.” By breaking with the assumption that everyone does and should experience sexual attraction, asexuality exists at the margins not only of the heteronormative world but also of the queer world. A large body of literature, notably from Black feminist studies, has demonstrated the analytic power of centering the margins in scholarly inquiry. Rather than dismissing—and reproducing—asexuality's marginality, researchers should embrace the unique opportunities and insights that marginality produces.

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