<Book Review> ACE: an asexual narrative challenging dominant ideologies through nuanced intersectional approaches

Angela Chen’s “Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex” delves into the complexities of asexuality, challenging prevailing societal norms around desire and identity. Through a blend of reporting, cultural criticism, and memoir, Chen explores how asexuality intersects with various aspects of identity, prompting a reevaluation of traditional identity politics. This article is a further discussion on the identity politics invoked by the early ACE movement mentioned in the book, rethinking knowledge, identity, and subjectivity paradigms underlying the movement and applying post-structuralism framework in examining the problem.

The second part- Variation on a Theme- of the ACE book talks about how identities intersect together, especially when “other” identities intersect with ACE identity, and how ACE people coming from different contexts encounter the problem of coming out as Ace: Chapter4 talks about how gender intersects with Ace, Chapter5 talks about how race intersects with Ace, and Chapter6 talks about how disability (mental and physical) intersects with Ace. The topic of intersectionality is incorporated in these chapters, aiming to dissect the unexamined ground of claiming one identity as a fixed truth regime, in which the dominant hegemony is reified with the systemic oppressions still lingering on this very ground.

Generally, being white, middle-class, and privileged receiver is more likely to have the agency (or systemic privilege and advantages) to reclaim their ace identity without much being interfered, not like those influenced by racialized sexual minorities, people with disability, and women who are subjected to the notion of “sex-positive feminism”. The paradigm in reclaiming one identity is a proverbial process called identity politics, which is criticized by the post-structuralist conception of knowledge, reality, subjectivity, and identity to the structuralism’s ideal of relational but universal, fixed, and essentialized conceptions explaining how underlying structure influences human behaviors.

One thing emphasized by structuralism is language as the linguistic structure that shapes our conception of the constructed reality. That is, partially explained through linguistic turn, language/word is not a secondary label to pre-existing ideas and meanings; instead, language is fundamental in establishing meaning through relational comparison, also called binary opposition. This theoretical framework seemingly “explains” the phenomenon of the dominant versus marginalized paradigm. To illustrate, to establish one’s legitimacy, we tend not to establish the way we are legitimate, avoiding talking about the origin of it; instead, we tend to notice the difference between “us” and “them”, strategically turning the differences into “otherness”. The strategic process shows the illusion of stability of meaning, which is explained through Machel Foucault’s idea of Power and Knowledge: the knowledge we know is a biased version of it, exemplifying the ideology of most powerful people, since discourse is constantly censored (who can say, what can be said). From there, we establish the subjectivity and the sense of identity by ideology instead of something genuinely from the centering body of ourselves. This deconstructive idea of learned subjectivity and knowledge is helpful in questioning the double standard in explaining the legitimacy of dominant identity and marginalized identity.

Legitimacy of dominant identity is made to be a myth, and from the very start, we unconsciously absorb them, becoming the only way in which we can reason. Unlike the dominant identity (eg. Man, heterosexuality…), minority identities are constantly subjected to the consciousness of the dominant gaze, the expectations. Enfeeble in challenging the discourse, minority identity tends to assimilate into the dominant structure, reifying their ideology. This sounds contradicting, but Chen really gives a clear revelation of how minority identity could again marginalize the oppressed sub-groups of people (the lack of consideration of intersectionality in identity politics). To gain dominant acceptance/recognition and to fight against their false account, weirdly, is an act of externalizing the internal sense of recognition, and thus an act of assimilation. Learning the variations of bodies is not a neutral process; instead, it is examined through the gaze of dominant ideology and reflected through discourse. ACE, reflected by Angela Chen, was previously denoted for people who are having (1) Psychological problems (2) Racial paradigm (inferiority in relation to whiteness), and (3) physical disability. Confronting (1) Sexism (2) Racism, and (3) Ableism, what minorities could do is to negate the meaning pre-described through our linguistic system or just discourse (discursive determination). Thus, we observed the pattern that, to establish the legitimacy of asexuality, what we are doing is to form a “Gold-star” ideal. This is interesting that, to establish our legitimate existence, the only way is to exclude any possible attributes that might negatively impact the process of reasoning. One sentence comes to my mind when thinking about this: to make our behavior/choice/inclination reasonable, we are only allowed to reason it from the reasons given by the existing discourse (the slur version and reclaim from there). This might seem promising for some, the white privilege, to use such a way to reclaim themselves, but only themselves. Why it is not legitimate for a disabled woman having inclination for asexuality despite the reason for her disability, and why does it seem feeble for an Asian woman to claim her an asexual despite the conscious stereotype of a submissive, not-wanting sex sexual object under racialized sexual stereotype? From there, we see that multiple layers, often amplifying each other, provide a harder context for people to claim their agency as an intersectional person, to be somewhere in-between. That is to say, by establishing the legitimacy of minority groups through the fixed, universal lens, we are constantly prioritizing some and simultaneously marginalizing the otherness.

Chen, and other poststructuralist thinkers, provide an alternative paradigm in which people could better understand themselves under specific identities. That is embracing the uncategorical “otherness” and cherishing the multiplicity and particularity, avoiding the process of centering (or anti-representationalism: avoiding the construction of superiority and inferiority): thinking the meanings we’ve learned as contingent and relational instead of universal (the establishment of truth regime).