Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Gender and Sexuality
“Your Brain Isn’T All Backwards”: Asexual Young Women’S Narratives Of Sexual Healthism, Anna Sheppard, Emily S. Mann, Carla A. Pfeffer
“Your Brain Isn’T All Backwards”: Asexual Young Women’S Narratives Of Sexual Healthism, Anna Sheppard, Emily S. Mann, Carla A. Pfeffer
The Qualitative Report
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 …