Asexual Assemblages, Part 3: Diagnoses of Exclusion
A concluding reflection on aceflux identity, cultural constraints, and the limitations of orientation labels in queer discourse
This is the third entry in a three-part essay series. The other parts may be accessed here:
Introduction
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
—Wittgenstein
I came to understand myself as aceflux avant la lettre, much more through its implicit, inchoate expression in media like Lost in Translation than through the linguistic and cultural structures of queer identity labels.
There were several reasons for this. Perhaps the most obvious is that the term I currently use to describe my sexuality, “aceflux”, did not exist when I was acquiring sexual awareness in the 1990s and 2000s. Like many terms associated with marginal groups, it is not obvious when or where the term originated. Wiktionary cites The ABC’s of LGBT+, published 2016, for its definition of the label; however, its presence in this publication implies an earlier attestation.
Unfortunately, the date of first attestation is difficult to establish due to the unique circumstance that most historical discussion about acespec sexuality took place on forums such as those hosted by Asexual Visibility and Educational Network (AVEN). Users on forums like these can create signatures and bios that appear with their posts; when users update this information, the updated content retroactively appears with their old posts. When search engines like Google index forum posts, they index the updated signature and bio information. Thus, for example, if a user updated their bio with the label “aceflux” in 2018, it may appear next to a post they made in 2008, and would appear in Google search results restricted to the year 2008.
Beyond the existence of labels, another factor in my lack of self-understanding is that I did not identify as queer through my teens or twenties, and so was not involved with communities where I may have become aware of the label “asexual”. Even if I had, it would not have been long before I learned that asexuality as a category was, and remains, doubly marginal; despite increased prominence in the last 20 years, asexuality is still significantly less-discussed than most other queer identities as of 2024.
There is also an element of self-exclusion. I have tended to exclude myself from queer culture because participation seems to requires a level of openness with and investment in one’s own sexual identity that I find alienating. I believe I am not alone in this sense, which is evident everywhere and immediately, beginning with the LGBTQIA+ acronym itself:
“LG”, in first place, designates an affirmative, specific preference for a sex object with a particular, binary gender expression; these labels are associated with the oldest, most established, valorized portion of the community.
“BTQI”, in second place, are grouped as identities which contest the unitary identification of gender, either in oneself or in one’s sex object preference. People taking on these identities in the community are contrasted with “LG” in popular discourse as entryist, marginal, medicalized.
“A”, in last place, shares the doubly-othered quality of “BTQI” and its position also emphasizes that, ultimately, one does not have the option to refuse to enter into the matrix of sexual and gender identification. To decline to do so is to be assigned “A”, a generic diagnosis of exclusion which is indeed not even specific, and may mean any of “asexual”, “agender”, or “aromantic”. The use of the word “diagnosis” is deliberate, here; even among many queer people acespec is perceived less as an identity but more as a hangup or a diseased dysfunctional medical or mental health state.
The assemblage of queer culture is characterized by an abstract machine that affords first-class status to subjects who enthusiastically participate in acts of gendering and sexual activity, while those who fail to do so are relegated to a subordinate position.
It is striking how closely this arrangement mirrors the violent imperatives of the hegemonic culture out of which it emerges. Namely, cishet culture affords maximum privilege to cisgendered, allosexual, heterosexual people, and violently suppresses subjects expressing difference along these axes, violence which is justified by pervasive readings of queerness as fundamentally other, medically pathological, and a sign of moral and social decline.
Queer culture has responded by deploying a set of ideals and imperatives that are superficially at odds with cishet culture, namely toward sexual openness, permissivity, and interest, as well as a toxically-positive response to approved expressions of sexual and gender diversity that foreclose the complexity, ambivalence, and nuance of identity acquisition and development.
This cultural orientation causes significant issues for people on the ace spectra, as well as others. For instance, survivors of trauma, especially sexual trauma, may find frank depictions and discussions of sexuality uncomfortable or even triggering, and in turn be deemed prudish or hung-up. The same applies to individuals who come from cultures where sexuality is a relatively more private matter, those at the periphery of the urban, privileged, sexually “liberated” West whose theorization of queerness is the queer community default.
In short, avowal of one’s gender and gendered sex object preference remains a shared, fundamental conditioning relation for the assemblages of both cishet and queer identity. It is significant enough to the project queer self- and community-theorization that the refusal to avow such a preference constitutes a threatening line of flight that is banished via marginalization and questioning, as in cishet culture.
Perhaps, then, I related to Lost in Translation as a younger person because, on some level, I recognized that Bob and Charlotte were beset by this pair of equally-inhospitable cultures. On one hand, the violent commandments of cishet culture have yielded cold, joyless marriage commitments for both protagonists, and regularly thrusts them into sexual situations with which they are uncomfortable. On the other, queer culture is not open to people like Bob and Charlotte because that culture is hypersexualized, too, and also lacks space (and therefore labels) for individuals whose expressions of intimacy are sometimes, or never, sexual.
Closing Remarks
I opened this essay with a discussion of bindweed’s project to “build a politics” of ace and aro “identity”. At the end of another of their articles[1], they exhort us to:
… free ourselves from the constraints of thinking in terms of sexual orientation, not by obliterating the concept and associated labels, but by putting them in the toolbox where they belong and searching for all the other tools we’ve let lie rusty and forgotten or never touched at all.
I agree. Without abandoning the notion of orientation we must think past the labels we currently possess, which have come to function as assemblages that restrict and recuperate lines of flight and the formation of new identity. These labels foreclose the formation of new sites of revolution and resistance, not to mention of intimacy, interdependence, and love.
This foreclosure and risk of capture are of special concern to all queer (sexual, gender, relational) orientations; among these the hazard of capture (and/or erasure) is especially keen for labels that incorporate ideas of lack or absence such as “asexuality”. The word itself acquires meaning only by its (normatively deficient, lacking) relation to “hegemonic cisheteronormative sexuality”. In a certain way, displacement to the label of “ace” is harmful because it occludes, but does not reshape, this definitive underlying relation.
Instead, we must interrogate ways of assembling so-called “ace” identity in ways that avoid merely recapitulation of or recuperation into the apparatus of capture represented by “normative sexuality”. To return to Nail’s elaboration of Deleuze and Guattari’s claim in A Thousand Plateaus that, for the nomad,
[Every] point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is in the intermezzo. Even the elements of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is forever mobilizing them.
Viewed through the critical lens of assemblage theory, Lost in Translation tells us that the forms and arrangements we find for ourselves, and join into with others, are always provisional. They are trajectories that will reach, and immediately alight from, a place we can’t know in a future we can’t predict. I agree with bindweed here—orientation labels ought not to be “obliterated”.
However, the proliferation of labels alone is not sufficient to produce liberation, and could even attenuate connection and worsen atomization if the labels are deployed as unchanging, essential identity markers. Instead, we must first acknowledge that labels are abstract machines that always-already restrict our ability to express the ways in which we connect, even as they provide sets of conditioning relations which can usefully direct lines of flight toward the strategically essentialist alliances that are necessary to create truly dynamic, inclusive, and liberatory communities.
[1] bindweed, “How ‘Sexual Orientation’, as a Concept, Harms Us,” Substack newsletter, Some Sort of Radical Asexual (blog), September 20, 2023,
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