The Silent A

Abstract

This critical autoethnography explores experiences as an asexual cismale and the inherent tensions and struggles experienced in the dialectic between societal expectations of sexual desire as a man and the lack of sex drive characteristic of an asexual orientation. It explores the exclusion asexuals experience, as they occupy a third space between straightness and queerness, leaving them nowhere in either the gender or sexuality roles spectrums to truly call home. As asexuals exist in a space not often considered by heterosexual and queer individuals and asexual men exist between the tension of sexual expectation and orientation, music is utilized as a means of common language. This essay offers this connection through a series of autoethnographic glimpses, each set to a different song or lyric, as a soundtrack to give voice to the silenced experiences of asexuals.