CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Kasikci, Hilal |
|---|---|
| Title | Frigid transgressions: Unveiling the queer potentialities of asexuality |
| Summary | This thesis scrutinizes the possibility of asexuality to emerge as a novel locus in queer epistemologies and becomings, as well as a locus of rupture in the system of compulsory sexuality that is embedded in capitalist circuits. In order to construe both the material and cultural mechanisms underlying the process of construction of sexual imperative that has rendered asexuality unintelligible and unthinkable, and in an attempt to unearth the transgressive potentialities asexuality carries, I situate my research into the uneasy intersection between Marxian critique and feminist/queer theories. I begin with providing an account of the relationship between capitalism and sexuality to unveil the materialist facet governing the constitution of the regime of sexual normativity. The contemporary mode of production, in my conceptualization, governs the performative process of sexual subjectivation through which sexuality has been normalized and rendered compulsory. Asexuality, therefore, emerged both as a product of and a challenge to the normative sexual discourses embedded in capitalism. In this vein, I then proceed to discuss the deconstructive potentialities residing in asexuality, suggesting that asexuality could be read as a queer locus of disidentification with the dominant interpellations of pervasive discourses of sexual normativity, on the way to achieve delinking of sexuality from subjectivity. Problematizing the existing esentialist conceptualizations of asexuality as an identitiy category based on lack of sexuality, I offer new readings of asexuality as a disidentificatory locus, framing it as a non-identiterian and non-belonging site that exists solely in and through its potentiality beyond the paradigm of liberal-humanist discourses. The disidentificatory potential that asexuality carries could be realized in its promise to be a rallying ground for achieving new non-monogamous configurations of intimate affinities and non-institutionalized ways of being together that challenge the normative regime of sexuality that privilege monogamous intimacies and (hetero)sexual relationalities. In this vein, I contend that by being excluded from ontology, asexuality has emerged as a site not fully saturated by (hetero)normative formulations of intimacy and affinity. Hence, I maintain that it is this exclusion that contradictorily paved the path for deconstructive possibility of asexuality to resignify intimacy and desire, which have been monopolized by sexual vocabulary. In this picture, asexuality could lead to rethinking sexual normativity and destabilizing the centrality of sexuality in discourses. This project of queering of asexuality, as a consequence, aims to expand and destabilize the current meanings and conceptualizations of queer that have so far been focused on non-normative sexualities and sexuality in general. Finally, asexuality as a queer locus, embodies a potential to achieve a relaxation of the (sexual) norm and expansion of the matrix of intelligibility regarding (a)sexual performances and subjectivities. |
| Supervisor | Yoon, Hyaesin Irene |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/kasikci_hilal.pdf |
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