Unwilling Consumers: A Historical Materialist Conception of Compulsory Sexuality

Abstract

This paper seeks to expand the work of Marxist-feminist scholars Rosemary Hennessy and Nancy Fraser by placing it into conversation with the emerging work of scholars of asexuality and asexual identity. In resisting the tendency to reify the identity category of “asexual” as a newly emerging and dialogically structured identity which stands in opposition to the “allosexual,” this paper will rather attempt to determine its nature as a historically structured and contingent emergence of a particular moment in neoliberal capitalism. From this, it will argue that there need not be a tension between the notions of “compulsory sexuality” and “sexusociety” developed by scholars such as Elizabeth Emens and Ela Przybylo. It will be demonstrated that asexuality can be used as a positional tool in order to illuminate the totality of sexuality as a reified and commodified entity under late capitalism, one which is useful for understanding and resisting the capitalist historical (re)organization of human potentials for sensation and affect.

Keywords

• sexuality
• gender
• asexuality
• political economy
• social reproduction