Want to read my article on gender detachment?
Here's a preview
As my regular followers know, I’ve been talking lately about a big finding from my research: gender detachment.
I know many of you have been curious to read the full article where I describe the findings in greater detail. It’s not published yet, but I’ve decided to release a “preprint” (basically, a preview) that is free and accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
But first, some background:
When I began my research, I planned to compare the experiences of asexual men, asexual women, and “beyond the binary” asexuals. I ended up interviewing 77 people under the asexuality umbrella.
But there was a major problem. About a third of the people I interviewed didn’t really fit into any gender category.
These individuals felt that gender presentation and/or identity was unimportant, pointless, and/or oppressive. They didn’t want to be understood through the lens of gender. I ended up coining the term “gender detachment” to describe these feelings (though, as some you helpfully pointed out, there are other terms, like autigender, neutrois, etc. that get at similar ideas).
The response to this finding has been explosive—especially considering that the paper hasn’t even been published! My various tweets about gender detachment have gotten a lot of traction on Twitter, but they’ve also been shared on Tumblr and other parts of the internet. Journalists from various outlets have reached out asking for interviews. The asexuality-centric podcast Sounds Fake But Okay also recently released an entire episode inspired by my tweets about gender detachment. You can listen to it here.
Scholars are also paying attention. I recently learned that a draft of my article on gender detachment won the Sally Hacker Graduate Student Paper Award from the American Sociological Association’s Sex and Gender section. Earlier this year, I won a similar award from Sociologists for Women in Society-South.
This attention has been incredibly gratifying. I hope it helps people in the asexual community feel seen and understood as well. But I know many of you have been eagerly waiting to see the full paper.
Read my article on gender detachment
As a community-engaged scholar, I think it’s vital that my work is accessible both inside and outside of academia. Many, many of you have asked where to find the paper. So I’ve decided to make a preview available here.
To give some context, this paper is still a draft. It’s not published yet. The version that’s available is a “preprint,” meaning it hasn’t gone through peer review.
That said, this means your feedback can help to shape the (eventually) published version of this work. Your thoughts are invaluable to me, so please feel free to comment here or send me an email.
Want to support my research on asexuality? Consider becoming a contributing subscriber by clicking on the button above. You can also subscribe for free or follow me on Twitter @CantonWiner. Regardless of whatever decision you make, I am committed to keeping my work free, without paywalls. Consider your paid membership a token of appreciation, an investment in research on asexuality, and a small but meaningful way to join a community that shares your interests.
Thank you so much for sharing this! A friend of mine showed me your initial tweet, and I pretty much immediately subscribed here in the hopes of exactly this! I would have just kept my musings to myself, but you did ask for commentary, so I hope you really meant that!
I ID as Queer Ace and use she/her pronouns (because they were given to me along with my name, and they do just fine in referring to me), but I’ve pretty much never felt like a “woman” so your coining of “gender detachment” was honestly groundbreaking for me. Very seriously, thank you! I’ve complained to a number of friends that agender and nonbinary are too gendered to feel right, especially since I don’t experience dysphoria OR euphoria—detachment really does sum it up neatly.
As I was reading, I found myself wondering about a couple of things, but especially that gendered experience of gender detachment you mention, and something that came to my mind was the difference in how it feels to be and how one experiences being the “other.” So, in the same way that someone not trans would not generally spend much time lingering on whether or not they feel cis, and someone straight might never interrogate their feelings on sexuality, I wonder if being AMAB might not come with an inherent lack of… curiosity? desire to unpack? their assigned gender (provided they aren’t otherwise trans or genderqueer). Gender studies, after all, comes with it a sense of “about women/feminism,” doesn’t it? So if sexuality implies “non-straight,” and gender identity implies “non-cis,” then gender by itself implies “non-men.”
I also find myself coming back to the Audre Lorde quote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I spent a lot of time in my theory classes (lit major) thinking about this one, because a number of my classmates read it so differently than I did. At a glance, I’ll admit, it can seem defeatist, but I’ve always taken it as something solved over a long, long time. You cannot dismantle the house with its tools, no; working in a system means the system must continue to exist. But over time, you can develop new tools that begin to work outside the system, until the system itself becomes obsolete. In order to abolish gender, of course we must work within the framework that assumes it, but that doesn’t mean that chipping away a little at a time won’t someday allow our descendants to leave the system behind altogether. I think of it as planting seeds that we will never see fully grown. Just because we won’t, doesn’t mean the seeds will never grow, you know? Some of us are already trying to live in a world where gender is irrelevant; I think that’s a huge step toward that supposedly theoretical genderless future.
Thank you again for your work, and for bringing gender detachment into the spotlight! It really does feel wonderful to know that my friend, my fiancée, and I aren’t alone in out ambivalence. It really is comparable only to the moment when I first read “does not experience sexual attraction,” and learned that I wasn’t broken or a super late bloomer. I’m just me, no gender required.
Thank you so much for sharing the preprint of your article and the link to that podcast episode! I've just started reading the preprint and even though this isn't necessarily related to gender, I wanted to share a 'subtype' of asexuality: aegosexuality (https://www.lgbtqia.wiki/wiki/Aegosexual). A friend who identifies as such mentioned it to me a couple of years ago when I wasn't even sure if I was asexual. It was shockingly accurate to my own experiences and since then, I have shared the term with several other people who weren't sure if they were ace—but they had the same reaction as I did when they read that description. I'm sure it's not necessary to include such specific micro-identities in your paper, but I thought you might be interested in that.