Queerly Platonic: Constellating An Asian North American Critique of Compulsory Sexuality

Abstract

This sandwich thesis critically intervenes in asexuality studies by critically examining compulsory sexuality, or the logic, discourse, and practice that centers sex and sexuality as natural and necessary parts of human life. Unfolding across four (published and in-press) chapters, it also offers a queer Asian North American approach to the complexities shared between asexuality and Asian North American lifeways as a means to consider the overlapping contexts of colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism, and transnational capitalism. Through an analysis of select digital visual culture between the years of 2019 and 2024, this thesis traces platonic intimacies across these cultural texts to meditates on how the platonic manifests as a queer practice of relationality. Chapter One, “Thinking Asexually: Sapin-Sapin, Asexual Assemblages, and the Queer Possibilities of Platonic Relationalities,” interrogates white-centric imaginaries in the asexual community by exploring platonic relationalities informed by Pilipinx ways of knowing and an analysis of digital illustrations on Tumblr. Chapter Two, “#PlatonicIntimacy: Asian North American Asexualities and Their Fairytales,” examines the fraught histories of asexuality and racialization, analyzing histories of compulsory sexuality and Asian North American life through an engagement with select photographs of non-binary Asian Canadians. In the second half of the thesis, Chapters Three and Four build upon these foundations by addressing the ongoing impact of compulsory sexuality in crisis times. Chapter Three, “Pandemic Asexuality, or Compulsory Sexuality in Risky Times,” explores how compulsory sexuality operates within crisis contexts, using tweets from 2020 and 2021 to highlight the entanglements shared between conceptions of health, asexuality, and intimacy. Chapter Four, “Ingat Ka Ha?,” presents a multimedia research creation piece that blends collage, poetics, and disability justice theory, offering a reflective meditation on care, relationality, and asexuality within Asian diasporic contexts. This thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship that challenges compulsory sexuality and reimagines asexuality as a mode of theorizing relationality. Centering queer Asian North American perspectives, it envisions future research that continues to interrogate the intersections of asexuality with broader structures of power and offers a vision of social justice rooted in care and community.