A review by rachelnevada
Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality, by Ela Przybylo
Like many others reviewing this text, I come to Asexual Erotics not as an academic but as a layperson interested in queerness and sexuality. In fact I ordered the book because I found the excerpt in Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex to be fascinating and I was looking for more of that. (In retrospect, because the bulk of that particular excerpt is from Cameron Awkward-Rich's “A Prude’s Manifesto” I probably would have been better off reading one of his poetry collections instead or just really reveling in the YouTube video of him reading it over and over again).
Asexual Erotics is a slim (but theoretically dense) volume of queer theory that attempts to 1) “explore erotic represenations of asexuality” (typically in art, literature, and film) and to 2) “use asexual perspectives to further examine sexuality” especially compulsory sexuality and desexualization. Much of the introduction is spent laying necessary theoretical groundwork for these two goals.
Asexual Erotics is a slim (but theoretically dense) volume of queer theory that attempts to 1) “explore erotic represenations of asexuality” (typically in art, literature, and film) and to 2) “use asexual perspectives to further examine sexuality” especially compulsory sexuality and desexualization. Much of the introduction is spent laying necessary theoretical groundwork for these two goals.