What Might Be: The Possibilities in Identifying With Asexuality

• In Event: Frontiers in the Sociology of Sexualities

Abstract

Answering the call for more sociological research on asexuality (Carroll 2024; Winer 2024), this paper explores what the “outer limits” (Rubin 1984) of asexuality might mean for young racialized, queer, and non-binary people imagining a future in a world in which the normative and mononormative prove increasingly at odds with their interests. Through an analysis of longitudinal in-depth qualitative interviews in 2022 and 2025 with young people whose transitions from adolescence into young adulthood played out in tandem with political upheaval and rising social stress, we ask: What does it mean to identify with asexuality, as opposed to identifying as asexual? Tracing their changing self-descriptions, we illustrate how they alternately played with, grabbed at, and pushed away asexuality as an intrinsic identity. Drawing on the work of Cati Connell (2024), whose application of the concept potentiality to core lesbian texts asks “what could have been?” (402) we suggest that the potential young people found in aligning with asexuality allowed them to imagine what might be. The narratives of our participants suggest that asexuality’s potential was not in its form as an identity, but in its critique of compulsory sexuality and the normative relations and paths it prescribes.

Authors

• Ash Catonio, University of Toronto

• Jessica Fields, University of Toronto