ASEXUALITIES | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation
Date and Time
Jul 29, 2024 6:00 pm
Location
450K
450 K St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20001
Jul 29, 2024 6:00 pm
450K
As one of the first book-length collections of critical essays on the topic of asexuality, ASEXUALITIES: FEMINIST AND QUEER PERSPECTIVES became a foundational text in the burgeoning field of asexuality studies. This revised and expanded ten-year anniversary edition both celebrates the book’s impact and features new scholarship at the vanguard of the field.
While this edition includes some of the most-cited original chapters, it also features critical updates as well as new, innovative work by both up-and-coming and established scholars and activists from around the world. It brings in more global perspectives on asexualities, engages intersectionally with international formations of race and racialization, critiques global capital’s effects on identity and kinship, examines how digital worlds shape lived realities, considers posthuman becomings, experiments with the form of the manifesto, and imagines love and relation in ecologies that exceed and even supersede the human.
This cutting-edge, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary book serves as a valuable resource for everyone—from those who are just beginning their critical exploration of asexualities to advanced researchers who seek to deepen their theoretical engagements with the field.
Editors KJ Cerankowski and Megan Milks, and some contributing authors are joining us on the Busboys stage in person and virtually to share more about their research and advancements in the field since the release of the first edition. Copies of the book will be available for purchase before, during, and after the event, and the in person editors and authors will be signing following the program. When you purchase the book online, your total includes shipping anywhere in the United States via USPS.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of ASEXUALITIES will be available for purchase before, during, and after the event. Please note that this event is hybrid and will be livestreamed.
We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books
Editors
KJ Cerankowski is the author of Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming (2021). He is Associate Professor of Comparative American Studies and Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies at Oberlin College.
Megan Milks is the author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body and Slug and Other Stories. With KJ Cerankowski, they co-edited the first Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (2014) as well as the recently released expanded ten-year-anniversary edition.
Contributing Authors
Nathan Bernstein (they/he) is a cofounder of and advocate with The Ace and Aro Advocacy Project, and cowrote Ace and Aro Journeys (2023). They are currently getting a Masters of Education from Widener University's Center for Sexuality Studies, and are specifically interested in studying the way that aromantic and asexual individuals and communities fit into the larger queer populace.
Alyson K. Spurgas is Associate Professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Alyson researches, writes, and teaches about the sociology of trauma, the politics of desire, and technologies of care. They are the author of Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century (2020) and Decolonize Self-Care (2023).
CJ DeLuzio Chasin is the author of “Asexuality and the re/construction of sexual orientation” published in Expanding the Rainbow (2019). They are a PhD candidate in (feminist) applied social psychology at the University of Windsor, with a focus on consent and agreeing to unwanted sex. Meanwhile, they are continuing their ongoing work both in the gender based/domestic violence sector at Ernestine’s shelter and as a local ace & aro community organizer.
Kristina Gupta is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wake Forest University. Her interests are in the areas of contemporary asexual identities and gender, health, and science. Her second book, Ace(ing) Science: Compulsory Sexuality, Asexual Possibilities and the Deconstruction of Sex, is under contract with the University of Washington Press. Her first book, Medical Entanglements: Rethinking Feminist Debates about Healthcare, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2019.
Nicole Seymour works at the intersection of queer theory and environmental studies. Her books include Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and Glitter (Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, 2022). She is currently Professor of English at California State University, Fullerton.
Dr. Justin Smith is an Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies at Randolph-Macon College. His research focuses on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century African American literature, with an emphasis on critical race theory and the Black radical tradition. He has also helped lead in digital crowdsourcing efforts to transcribe African American written records in collaboration with organizations such as the Center for Black Digital Research and the Library of Congress. His work has appeared in The Black Scholar, Feminist Formations, The Modernist Review, Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (rev. and expanded ed.), The Space Between Journal, and Scribes. His current monograph in progress, tentatively titled Racial Stylings: Black Identity from Realist to Modernist African American Literature, demonstrates the dynamic connection between fluid literary styles and shifting conceptions of racial meaning at the turn of the twentieth century.
Joela Jacobs is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research engages with plants, animals, the environment, Jewish identity, science, gender, and sexuality in Germanophone literature and culture since the nineteenth century.
