The Silent A

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.

Queering Queer Conversations

One of the strengths of autoethnography is the connections that can be made through the telling of story. This article is an compilation of the connections made during presentations at the International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry. Despite age differences, situations, and ways of being in and of the world, there were overlaps in the experiences of the authors. Three individual conference papers are merged to begin a conversation of queering queer narratives through an exploration of embodiment, relationality, and self-presentation without resorting to an established, and perhaps reified, queer iconography. From our queer identities, we offer narratives that are neither settled nor normative from our individual queer standpoints. We write to champion a different view of possibilities for queer non-normativity.