Asexual citizenship makes the case for a negative biological citizenship wherein the community of the asexual orientation forms through the rejection of medicalisation and pathologisation of a lack of sexual attraction.
In an era when nations scrutinise their population levels to ascertain the future demographic age structure and ecological and economic conditions, reproduction tends to be highly controlled. As such, citizenship tends to favour heteronormative coupling. Specifically, sexuality is often identified as a primary site through which citizenship is negotiated.
Sexual citizenship, a concept that emerged in the 1990s, examined how sexuality was a key component that determined who was a ‘proper’ citizen (Richardson 208). Citizenship often held heteronormative, nuclear families as the norm that included a heterosexual coupling, marriage, and compulsory reproduction in the package (Richardson 212). Sexual citizenship, as a result, studied how queerness was denied social legitimacy and rights that proper citizenship usually provided.
However, under the queer category, only lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people were included, leaving out asexuality. Even under the limited extent of citizenship rights accommodated to queer people, those rights were exclusive for consumerist, monogamous, domestic, and family-oriented queer people (Richardson 212). While rights were expanded to include queer people, the characteristics of the citizenship model are built prioritising sexual desire, coupling, and reproduction. Asexuality, as a whole, challenges the traditional notion of the erotic and instead asks why citizenship is constructed around sex and couple-based intimacy.
If citizenship is centered around domestic, monogamous allonormativity, it is fascinating to construct a new citizenship ideal that is centered around asexuality. In theorising the asexual community or citizenship surrounding asexuality, I conceptualise a negative biological citizenship wherein the community of the asexual orientation forms through the rejection of medicalisation and pathologisation of a lack of sexual attraction. Rather than organising around a shared pathology, the asexual citizenship identifies the freedom from an imposed duty of reproduction and instead retains freedom to experience their relationality with their asexuality through any possible means.
Defining Asexuality in Affective and Biopolitical Terms
Asexuality, in most queer digital forums, is often defined in biological terms as the inherent lack of sexual attraction. Describing the relational and continually evolving nature of queer orientations as a “lack” is profoundly reductive. In his essay, “Asexuality and Erotic Biopolitics,” Nathan Snaza reimagines asexuality beyond the biopolitical framing of an absence of sexuality and conceptualises it through the lenses of affect and the erotic.
By ‘erotic’, I implicitly mean Audre Lorde’s feminist notion of creative energy and affect-driven force. Rather than associating ‘erotic’ with the superficially sexual implication, Audre Lorde ties it with the “assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which [women] are now reclaiming in [their] language, [their] history, [their] dancing, [their] loving, [their] work, [their] lives” (Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic” 89). In a broad context, it is described as an internally contented state of being and becoming.
Underpinning this is amatonormativity, the hegemonic assumption that sexual or romantic coupling is universal (Przybylo 5). In struggling to explain these complex definitions to the amatonormative world, forums like the AVEN (Asexual Visibility and Education Network) website adopt a reductive definition:
An asexual person does not experience sexual attraction – they are not drawn to people sexually and do not desire to act upon attraction to others in a sexual way. Unlike celibacy, which is a choice to abstain from sexual activity, asexuality is an intrinsic part of who we are, just like other sexual orientations. (“About AVEN”)
The definition, in consolidating and legitimising the asexual identity, strives to present asexuality as an identity based on a lack of sexual attraction or a non-choice while juxtaposing celibacy as a choice. But most definitions on the AVEN website are biologically bound.
Using biology as a basis for classification often proves to be a slippery slope for pathologising non-heteronormative conditions. Besides, the core tenet of volume 1 of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality addressed how non-heterosexuality was medicalised and surveilled, substantiating how power creates identities and psychiatric diagnosis in an inadequate attempt to understand queerness.
However, this essay does not critique biopolitics as a whole in explaining what the asexual experience entails. Rather, it draws from Snaza and Przybylo’s idea in encouraging a biocultural approach in understanding how sexuality can never be separated from socio-cultural influences as much as biopolitical ones. Coloniality, race, gender, disability, and many such elements play into sexuality more than biological factors. Using the concept of the erotic and affect brings nuance into asexuality.
Asexuality and Biological Citizenship
Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas conceptualise biological citizenship as forms of citizenship in which ideas of political belonging are organised around biological understandings of human life, whether at the level of individuals, families, populations, races, or the human species itself (439). They argue that citizenship projects enable political authorities to establish normative ideals of citizenship by defining the biological characteristics and forms of life that are recognised and valued. Biological citizenship, therefore, emerges when biological identities and distinctions become intertwined with state recognition, national belonging, and the construction of imagined communities.
If citizenship is centered around domestic, monogamous allonormativity, it is fascinating to construct a new citizenship ideal that is centered around asexuality. In theorising the asexual community or citizenship surrounding asexuality, I conceptualise a negative biological citizenship wherein the community of the asexual orientation forms through the rejection of medicalisation and pathologisation of a lack of sexual attraction. Rather than organising around a shared pathology, the asexual citizenship identifies the freedom from an imposed duty of reproduction and instead retains freedom to experience their relationality with their asexuality through any possible means.
Moreover, two important forms of bio-citizenship are ‘informational bio-citizenship’ and ‘rights bio-citizenship’, wherein individuals become informed about their medical conditions while advocating for improved access to healthcare services, raising public awareness, and engaging in related forms of activism (Rose and Novas 442). Advances in digital connectivity have enabled these bio-social movements to evolve into digital bio-citizenship, in which networks of citizenship are sustained through mailing lists, websites, and social media platforms.
Digital bio-citizenship enables individuals to access biomedical information, improve their health literacy, share personal experiences of medical conditions, and learn from the experiences of others (Rose and Novas 442). As a result, these digital spaces serve as valuable platforms for building communities and forming support networks. The AVEN website, through its forum where participants discuss their unique and queer experiences with asexuality, solidifies the negative citizenship.
The AVEN Website as an Imagined Community and Citizenship
Founded in 2001 with the goal of fostering a global community of asexual people and creating a forum for discussion, the AVEN website has served as a welcoming home for many asexual individuals, including myself. The website features an FAQ section divided into subsections addressing questions about relationships, romantic orientations, and general attitudes towards sex. A glossary of terms explains the different identities within the asexual spectrum, while a dedicated questioning forum provides a space for people exploring whether they may be asexual. The AVEN community also organises workshops, meet-ups, and media engagements, all of which are announced on the website.
Moreover, surveys and research studies are regularly conducted, and researchers interested in studying asexuality or the asexual community can collaborate with or recruit participants through AVEN. Most importantly, however, the discussion forum enables asexual people from across the globe to interact with one another while adhering to the community guidelines. One of the significant roles of biological citizenship, according to Rose and Novas, is the propagation of awareness, campaigning for treatment and broadening scientific knowledge on biological conditions (442).
Similar to how Benedict Anderson conceptualises the nation as an “imagined political community,” AVEN can be understood as an imagined community that fosters a sense of communion among asexual people even though most members will never know or meet one another (6). Philosopher Byung-Chul Han posits that communities as such are strengthened through rituals and, in turn, rituals necessitate symbols that act as a medium of recognition and communication (6). The asexual flag is a primary symbol that characterises the asexual community (through the purple in the flag) and asexuality (signified through the colour black).
The dialogue fostered through the forums and FAQs constitutes a ritual that encourages self-discovery and cultivates a sense of belonging. In particular, the discovery narratives through which new members introduce themselves and are welcomed into the community give rise to a ritual of recognition. In doing so, the asexual community continually expands its vocabulary to accommodate and articulate lived experiences through affective and relational modes rather than purely biological language.
Resonance with each other in the community brings accord, for it includes the echo of the other within the self (Han 11). Beyond its informational functions, the forum enables dialogue that brings participants closer to the erotic through community and connection, as members acknowledge the shared, ordinary, and often overlooked experiences of asexual people. Asexual citizenship, contrary to sexual citizenship, need not base itself on sexuality and willingness to reproduce but on modes of relationality that differ for each asexual person.
Conclusion and Critique
Despite the superficial definition of asexuality that the AVEN website states to globally communicate the concept of asexuality to allosexuals and asexuals alike, the website serves as a platform for asexual citizenship. By contrast, Han argues that digital communication channels are rife with echo chambers that are disembodied forms of communication. “A ritual community is a communal body, and there is a bodily dimension inherent to community,” according to Han (11). However, the AVEN website, seeing as how it majorly functions digitally, would seem to reduce the affective and erotic relationality that a collective promises. He also speculates how collective affect is reduced to a collective outpouring of emotions in the digital sphere, stripping the interaction of resonance.
However, the AVEN is not exclusively digital. Through the organisation of workshops and meet-ups, AVEN strives to bring bodily embodiment to the equation of ritual community. Moreover, the digital platform still performs a severing of pathologisation of the asexual identity and a strong refusal of amatonormative citizenship. As a whole, the question would boil down to prioritising bodily embodiment of community or global access to the community if AVEN were to resolve Han’s critique. Yet this binary itself may be a false one, given that AVEN’s digital infrastructure enables embodied assembly, functioning less as a replacement for ritual community than as its connective tissue.
Image Credit: James Steakley / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
References
“About AVEN.” The Asexual Visibility and Education Network, 2001, http://www.asexuality.org/?q=about.html. Accessed 9 July 2026.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2006.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. 1990.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Polity, 2020.
Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of the Erotic.” Sister Outsider, Berkeley, United States of America, The Crossing Press, 1984, pp. 87–91.
Przybylo, Elzbieta. Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality. Abnormalities: Queer/Gender/Em, 2019.
Richardson, Diane. “Rethinking Sexual Citizenship.” Sociology, vol. 51, no. 2, Nov. 2015, pp. 208–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038515609024.
Rose, Nikolas, and Carlos Novas. “Biological Citizenship.” Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, 2007, pp. 439–63. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470696569.ch23.
Snaza, Nathan. “Asexuality and Erotic Biopolitics.” The Erotics of Asexualities and Nonsexualities, vol. 32, no. 3, 2020, pp. 121–44. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27182035?seq=12.
