Asexuality as Critique: Care, State, and the Limits of Normativity

The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked so that one can fight them.
– Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault debate (1971).

“Imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks 1994:248) takes the condition of loneliness and turns it into a commodity; it tells us we will be made whole through coupling, through consumption, through conformity.

The 21st century is positioned to be the era of queer inclusion globally. Fiercely debated for many years, same-sex marriage has become a legal reality in a rapidly growing number of jurisdictions. First enacted in 2001 in the Netherlands, same-sex marriage is now legally recognised in 38 countries around the world, with over a fourth of these recognitions having happened over the past five years. At the time of writing, queer activists and lawyers in India, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia are attempting to get same-sex marriage legislation passed. But visibility, much like Bentham’s panopticon, can operate as a trap: what was promised as an era of queer recognition has become one of objectification and violence (Small 2018). Global North countries are often hailed by many, within and beyond their borders, as being havens for queer folks, owing to the purported strides that these countries have made in LGBT rights. Yet, research shows that queer people continue to face challenges in accessing comfortable lodgings (Matthews et al. 2018) and healthcare (Casey et al. 2019) in these countries – social developmental provisions that are often framed in rights-based discourses as “universal human rights.” With the fascist far-right on the rise and anti-trans violence at an all-time high, queer access to marriage seems to have done little in the way of alleviating the lives of, say, sick homeless queers starving on the streets, queer-trans folks facing abuse and assault at the hands of law authorities and domestic circles, trans and non-binary kids having to drop out of school because of intense bullying, etc. At such a juncture where queer inclusion into state structures is failing to secure queer futures, I introduce a framework of “political asexuality” to render transparent that the state’s priorities are produced through, and reproduce, particular intimacies.

Asexuality offers a particularly generative framework here because it unsettles the state’s deep investment in sex, coupledom, and reproduction as the organising principles through which social belonging is mediated and rewarded. While queerness has long served to critique heteronormativity, the asexual lens extends this critique by drawing attention to the structural centrality of sexual and romantic intimacy in determining access to legitimacy, care, and economic stability under neoliberalism. Reading through asexuality makes visible how the state’s promises of inclusion are tethered to the valorisation of particular intimate configurations, and how such configurations become instruments through which capitalist and heteronormative hierarchies are naturalised. In developing this political asexual lens, I trace how these hierarchies are sustained through the state’s valorisation of certain relationships and intimacies, and consider what forms of relationality and care are rendered politically illegible in the process.

Queerness as Opportunity

Queering is the act of taking something and looking at it through a lens that makes it strange, or that troubles it in some way (Young 2012). Berlant and Warner (1995), Butler (1999), and other queer theorists have espoused that the boundaries of “queer” are to be left open-ended, and defined only insofar as to identify that to be queer is to be someone who is not a part of the hegemonic norm. On the other hand, Foucault’s theorisation of the socially constructed nature of reality and biopower gave way to a project of decentering the state and attempting to direct studies of government to “cut off the head of the king,” as Foucault put it (1978). Hence, as political theorist Samuel Huneke (2022) has noted, queerness and the state are doubly alienated – not only does queer theory have little interest in the state, it also has no use for it.

To queer, therefore, is to oppose the structures and institutions that reproduce the conditions and concepts of normativity, which is itself a variable that is relative and changing. It is to decentralise whatever becomes central to speak from the margins of a changing set of normativities – who is queer is also subject to change depending on spatio-temporal contexts. As Rao (2020:173) writes, “our very understanding of what queerness is must constantly shift as capitalism and the state apparatus morph to deflect and absorb the antagonisms that they incite.” A wealthy Israeli gay man in the settler colony of Israel is not politically queer, but an economically disadvantaged gay man in the colonised state of Palestine is. In neoliberal Indian society dominated by the caste Hindu Right, an Ambedkarite Dalit queer is queerer than a cis-het middle-class upper-caste gay man.

Yet, queer theory and queer activism have had an agonistic relationship: one is a manifestation of a radical who rejects political compromise, and the other, a pragmatist who begrudgingly embraces it. As an academic discipline, queer studies in the United States was born as a response to Gay and Lesbian studies that sought inclusion into state institutions of marriage and the military. The late 80s/early 90s was a period of political conundrum: on the one hand, imbued with a Foucauldian spirit, queer movements turned away from the political and toward everyday modes of resistance and world-building in social and cultural realms. On the other hand, this was also the time of the AIDS epidemic and much of LGBTQ+ activist struggles at this time were directed at getting the very state that these movements inherently distrusted to recognise and address the fatal health emergency that predominantly affected queer people.

Although many contemporary (neoliberal) states have become unable to “redistribute wealth, care for citizens, address climate change or forge genuine social equality” (Huneke 2022), the massive, though flawed, attempts by governing states to contain the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate the need for powerful states capable of dictating public health measures and convincing citizens to behave in responsible ways. Just two years ago, when I started writing this piece, I would have suggested that we ought to recognise that it is not possible to be separatists under capitalism while also fixing existing problems that plague various marginalised groups. However, in the context of Trumpism, genocidal/settler states violences, and economic crises in many Global South states, I believe that it is no longer a productive point of inquiry to ask if queerness and the state are compatible; we must instead sharpen our critiques of it combined with the direct action and community building bequeathed to us by queer theories.

Sexual Politics and Docile Respectability

The lens of “sexual politics” has been useful to blur the flawed binary of public/private, revealing how states have historically regulated relationships to align with their values. Feminist IR scholars, building on gender and sociological theory, have long shown how democracies operate as male hegemonies (Enloe 2014; Alexander 1994; Weber 2016). The sexual political lens exposes how the international political system silences or sidelines women and other marginalised groups by relegating their concerns to the realm of human interest rather than politics (Enloe 2014). Initially associated solely with the politics of gender, the term has since been expanded in light of understanding gender as a social performance, and poststructuralist critiques of the conceptions of sex as immutably presocial (Butler 1999; 2004). Hence, I use sexual/gender politics interchangeably to mark this expanded field of inquiry that examines how power structures sex, gender, and sexuality across social movements, cultural politics, and state institutions.

States have played a defining role in institutionalising sexual politics. After World War II, many neoliberal capitalist nations rebuilt their economies by investing in the family as a disciplinary unit guaranteeing reproductive futurity and a steady supply of able-bodied workers. Marriage became a conduit for social and economic privilege, with governments incentivising couples through healthcare, housing, and tax benefits, linking romantic legitimacy to state recognition (Rasmussen 2021). Through this model the state sought to both stabilise labour markets and regulate sexual morality, disciplining citizens through the ideal of the law-abiding, reproductive family (Connell 1990), and cementing its authority through both economic control and the production of intimacy itself.

As global inequality deepened under capitalism, this model of privileging married, heterosexual couples came under scrutiny. Campaigns for human rights reframed housing, healthcare, and worker benefits as basic, non-negotiable, and universal. Yet, mainstream gay and lesbian politics pursued inclusion into institutions of the neoliberal state, such as marriage and the military. Such movements marked a departure from more radical, abolitionist strands of queer politics that had envisioned liberation from state control altogether (Conrad 2014). Respectability, in this context, functioned as both aspiration and constraint: it granted recognition to those queers who could approximate heteronormative ideals while obscuring the racial, classed, and gendered hierarchies within queer life itself.

According to Rasmussen, “The fight for equal marriage left many behind because it didn’t also demand healthcare, gender recognition and support for impoverished [queers], and it wasn’t cognisant of the [full] effects of [queer] exclusion” (2021:44). Those queers occupying higher levels of economic strata were/are the ones that advocate/are advocating for the politics of respectability, “orient[ing] themselves as subjects through their dissociation or disidentification from others disenfranchised in similar ways in favour of consolidation with axes of privilege” (Puar 2007:28). Economically productive, “respectable” queers thus reproduce state power by helping to maintain the very systems that marginalise others. In doing so, they render unproductive queers – disabled, unemployed, racialised, or poor – as expendable (Rao 2020). Respectability, then, becomes a tool of stratification rather than liberation.

Respectability obscures how sexuality intersects with race, caste, class, and gender in shaping access to life-sustaining resources. Its emphasis on assimilation allows the state to ignore demands it deems too radical – like universal healthcare, housing justice, or economic redistribution. Through queer complicit participation in the hegemonic institution of marriage, assimilated queers become, as Spade notes (2013:84), “a ‘deserving’ category of gay and lesbian people who meet straight society’s norms ([of] wealth, monogamy, domesticity, consumption and patriotic complacency).” In reality, these allowances serve only those with property, immigration status, and employment-based health benefits to share – those already secured by privilege. If respectability politics marks the limit of queer inclusion, then political asexuality begins where that inclusion fails: in the lives and intimacies the state refuses to see.

Asexual Political Potential

As noted earlier, the rubric of sexual politics challenged traditional conceptions of the scope of politics as a discipline, “pushing its research beyond the institutions of government and the public sphere to interrogate power-structured relationships in ‘private’ life” (Waites 2007:4253). Nowhere is this more prevalent than in instances of the state and the market privileging certain legally legitimised sexual/romantic formations. Contemporary sexualities are structured by global capitalist markets; in a sense, there is not much that is new about this – sex work, bride dowry, and family inheritance are examples of long-term historical institutions that have regulated sex through economic mechanisms. The inverse of this equation – of how citizenship, belonging, and economic mores are oriented towards and reified by the lived realities of those that the state favours – is what queer approaches to politics give attention to. The arrival of asexual studies as a subset of queer studies in the mid-2010s expanded on the horizons of queer theory’s deconstructionist outlook on state politics, and the rubric of asexual queer identity was used to problematize and call to move beyond the centrality of sex in society, as well as in feminist and queer political imaginations (Przybylo and Cooper 2014).

Asexual theorists like Gupta (2015) point out a cultural preoccupation with sexualisation that she describes as a system of “compulsory sexuality” – drawing on Adrienne Rich’s term “compulsory heterosexuality” (1980) – that privileges sexuality, marginalises non-sexuality, and operates as a form of social regulation. Or, as Przybylo (2019:1) puts it, the framework of compulsory sexuality “speaks to how sexuality is presumed to be natural and normal to the detriment of various forms of asexual and nonsexual lives, relationships, and identities.” Elizabeth Brake further expands on the notion of compulsory sexuality with her theory of “amatonormativity,” which she defines as “the assumption that a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal for humans, in that it is a universally shared goal, and that such a relationship is normative, in that it should be aimed at in preference to other relationship types” (2012:89). Constant socio-cultural reinforcement of this theory and state lubrication in support of the same has created a reality where amatonormative practices have been normalised and long left unquestioned. To address this knowledge gap, this article stands by Gupta’s (2015) suggestion that we must respond to compulsory sexuality, not by seeking desexualisation, but by challenging the unearned privileges that accrue to sexual people and sexual relationships, and by eliminating discrimination against non-sexual people and nonsexual relationships. I am, however, not entirely convinced if the way to effect change is to alter the institution of marriage so that nonsexual intimate relationships can receive legal recognition. There are two reasons for this. One, inclusion is a regulatory tool. Historically, whenever states have accepted certain populations to be worthy of privilege, it has been at the expense of other marginalised groups. Trans and queer of colour critiques of gay marriage are a pertinent example of this. Moreover, once certain normative-adjacent elements of marginalised groups have been included into the fabric of the state, the identity of these populations are rendered immutable and the assimilated subjectivities are then held up to be the gold standard of how to be good and productive citizens (drawing from the Agamben concept of “good life”). This standard is then expected of the other members of the marginalised groups, who become marked for a slow death (Berlant 2007) when they fail. Two, suggesting that non-sexual intimate relationships receive legal recognition collapses asexual political potential – notions of queering as a praxis for life (Bryson and de Castell 1993) come to mind – and fails to acknowledge the insidious way in which states heavily rely on the construction of exclusivity and inclusion to bestow rights.

I wish to draw attention to the neologism of “political asexuality.” It was first coined by Ela Przybylo in her book Asexual Erotics, where she writes:

If the routine disbelief and disqualification of asexuality as a legitimate sexual identification spurs from the belief that sex and sexual desire are central organizing forces for all modern subjects, then the concomitant absenting of “political feminist celibacy/asexuality” as well as its framing as a threat to contemporary sex-positive feminism stems from a feminist conviction or feeling that sex and sexual desire are central to all feminist subjects. (2019:38)

Przybylo’s comparison of celibacy to asexuality received a lot of pushback from asexual activists who likened it to the harm that a similar construction of “political lesbianism” had caused. They argued that by insinuating that people chose to be asexual as a sort of anti-cultural trend to toxic heterosexuality culture, the construction threatened to undo years of activist work that has tried to get society to recognise asexuality as a valid sexual orientation (sexuality not being a choice), independent from celibacy (celibacy being abstinence by choice).

Different from Przybylo’s contested usage of “political asexuality,” I wish to undertake the project of imbuing the neologism with radical potential and resignify it as a lens or a theoretical framework to critically analyse and study how non-asexual relationships – particularly monogamous romantic dyads – are disproportionately privileged by the neoliberal state and the market. In acknowledging that compulsory sexuality affects “asexually abundant lives” (Przybylo 2019), my proposed lens of political asexuality centres asexual relationships. Herein I wish to clarify that the term asexual used in the contexts of “asexual relationships” and “political asexuality” in this article does not refer to the asexual spectrum of sexual orientation categories. Instead, I use asexual relationships to refer to all non-normative close relationships that may/may not be sexual – such as platonic/non-romantic long-term cohabitations, and non-traditional families. That is to say, whether the nature of these relationships is sexual or romantic is of secondary consideration; my primary preoccupation/objective is to investigate into the political neglect of those relationships and care communities that capitalist/neoliberal states do not ordain to be legitimate social unions “worthy” of compensations and benefits. Asexuality is used in this manner not to take away from or interject into the other more widely utilised framing of asexuality, but rather in the spirit of queer utopian world-building by recognising that “asexual” holds queer multiplicities and that various usages of it are possible.

Once political asexuality is understood as a lens for examining the privileging of certain relational formations, its radical potential begins to unfold. This is not just about noticing what is absent or marginalized; it is about imagining what might exist if the state, the market, and society stopped treating sexual and romantic intimacy as the ultimate benchmarks of legitimacy, care, and value.

Political asexuality invites us to linger in the spaces normative frameworks erase: the long-term cohabitations of friends, the quiet care networks that resist the rubric of a traditional family, the small practices of support that operate off the books. Think of neighbours coordinating childcare cooperatively, chosen families sustaining queer, disabled, or elderly people when institutions fail, or informal networks sharing resources across households. These arrangements create life, sustenance, and social belonging – yet they rarely register in policy, law, or economic planning. Political asexuality allows us to read these networks not as exceptions or compensatory measures, but as living demonstrations of alternative social logics that push back against both compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity. It is in the refusal to collapse difference into normative frameworks, in the refusal to render a life legible only by its proximity to sexualised or romanticised ideals, that we glimpse the possibility of care, belonging, and solidarity untethered from the state’s traditional markers of value.

Politics of Life, Death, and Asexuality

The privileging of monogamous, dyadic romantic and sexual relationships occurs at the expense of non-normative care communities and networks such as non-romantic families, non-monogamous relationships and other forms of romantic/platonic non-sexual intimate relationships (Scherrer 2010; Chavez et al. 2015). Indeed, biologically distantly related family members, polygamous partners, long-term cohabitating friends and other “families of choice” (Weston 1991) cannot avail the same benefits that marriage law, or a couple in civil partnership, can, in areas such as taxation, inheritance, and immigration. In offering legal and social benefits only to the romantically attached, neoliberal society socially codes the mere presence of romantic feeling to be deserving of elevated care and special protections, even though friendship, and other forms of care, can include more love, more freely given. Chen, in her book Ace (2020), writes of legal troubles that non-sexual long-term care partnerships run into since particular rights are inextricably linked to the realm of the legally-recognised romantic. One particularly poignant example of what happens when romance is required for rights occurred in 2012, when the Canadian government deported seventy-three-year-old Nancy Inferrera, an American woman, who had lived with her eighty-three-year-old friend Mildred Sanford. The two had moved to Nova Scotia several years earlier and pooled their money to buy a $14,000 mobile home to take care of one another, with Nancy particularly supporting Mildred through dementia. Their relationship fulfilled the primary functions of marriage: mutual long-term caretaking and companionship (Brake 2015). Yet, a couple in an abusive marriage would have received more protection from deportation than Nancy and Mildred did (though, seven years later, Nancy did finally gain permanent Canadian residency).

Scholars such as Baggini (2018) argue for extending civil partnership rights to close friends or siblings, while political theorists like Metz (2010) advocate recognition of “intimate care-giving unions” irrespective of sexual or romantic status. While these proposals aim to socially and legally legitimize non-normative care relationships, legal codification may not dismantle the broader socio-political structures that devalue non-romantic relationality.

In the cultural realm, neoliberalism has been able to deploy its philosophies and market rationalities on self-regulating subjects that the system subjugates. Governmentality theorises states to be able to govern populations through mentalities, rationalities and technologies of control. It posits that power lies in social control that is administered from the “outside,” through disciplinary institutions such as schools, colleges, and the state, and it is manifested through knowledge and discourse produced by self-regulated/correcting members of the society. These dominating apparatuses are at the focal point of “discourses, institutions, spatial forms, regulatory frames, legal and administrative practices, as well as modes of conduct, affect, and desire” (Posocco 2014:73). Social control is internalised so thoroughly that it is rendered invisible, and technologies of self-regulation compel individuals to “renovate themselves, their bodies, minds, and lifestyles, to attain a state-approved version of happiness through processes of responsibilisation and normalisation” (Long 2018:79). In this way, bodies become sites for constant self-correction (by regulation and modification) – a form of biopower that enforces normative ideals, rendering the subject “docile” (Foucault 1980). Yet, the mechanics of this form of slow violence inflicted by the state on marginalised people cannot be understood completely through a biopolitical lens alone.

Necropolitics (Mbembe 2003) expands this frame, examining how states manage death and social expendability. Populations denied autonomy or sovereignty over their bodies – whether through neglect, economic precarity, or erasure – occupy “death worlds” in which life is permitted only under strict normative conditions. In our racialised heteropatriarchal political economies, queers who experience multiple intersections of Other-ness are necropolitical (living dead) subjects. Necronationalism, in particular, examines how the erasure of “bad” queer citizen-worker bodies creates ideological and physical space for “good” citizens to thrive. Homeless queer populations, disproportionately affected by abuse and systemic neglect, live at this intersection: they are rendered socially and politically disposable.

Yet, the state’s neglect of marginalized, non-normative populations is not simply a matter of frugality or resource scarcity. States often allocate vast sums toward military expansion, policing, and surveillance infrastructures, while providing only minimal funding for social support systems that could materially sustain populations deemed “unproductive” or “illegitimate.” From this perspective, necropolitics is less a byproduct of economic constraint than an ideologically driven distribution of life and death: resources are directed toward the reproduction of normative social hierarchies, and withheld from those whose existence challenges state-sanctioned conceptions of productivity, relationality, and care. Political asexual subjects, whose intimate networks and non-romantic care structures fall outside these sanctioned forms, reveal this allocation logic in stark terms: their precarity is not inevitable but chosen. Actionable policy change does not get enforced because, after all, the monstrification and neglect of these “bad” queers is to the benefit of the hegemonic institutions that the state derives productivity and value from. Mainstream LGBT disinterest in this kind of queer suffering – i.e. debilitating living conditions of “economically unproductive” queers – can be read as an example of necronationalism. The lack of action in addressing queer and politically asexual issues like economic precarity, homelessness, and accessible healthcare, ominously reflects the state’s concern for the livability and killability of its disadvantaged non-normative populations.

Political asexuality offers a lens for understanding how such necropolitical logics operate beyond the overtly sexual or romantic sphere. Just as the state allocates life and death along lines of productivity, desirability, and conformity, it similarly erases and marginalises relational forms that do not map onto normative sexual or romantic schemas. Non-romantic cohabitations, care networks of friends, chosen families, and other asexual or non-normative intimate communities often fall outside the purview of legal recognition, social support, and economic protection – rendering them politically precarious and socially invisible. In this sense, the political asexual is also a necropolitical subject: their relational lives are deemed less “legitimate,” less valuable, and therefore more exposed to the slow violences of neglect, poverty, and social invisibility.

By centering asexual and non-normative networks, we can see how survival, care, and belonging unfold independently of the frameworks that define “productive” or “legitimate” life in neoliberal states. Where necronationalism tracks who is allowed to live, flourish, or be recognized, political asexuality traces the relational worlds that exist despite state erasure – the quiet infrastructures of support, mutual aid, and non-romantic intimacy that resist codification and normative valuation. In this intersection, political asexuality can be read as a praxis for life-making in the interstices of necropolitical regimes: it names and protects forms of relationality the state seeks to render invisible, while also imagining the possibilities of care, solidarity, and flourishing, untethered from the constraints of sexuality, romance and institutional legitimacy.

Asexual Legacies

The urgency of political asexual theorising becomes clear in the contexts explored here: while the lens of sexual politics illuminates how neoliberal and capitalist states discipline and regulate relationships according to heteronormative and nuclear family ideals, political asexuality shifts the focus to those whom the state marginalizes or erases. By revealing how the centrality of sex underpins state-sanctioned relationship configurations, political asexuality exposes the denial of essential conditions for existence – conditions often framed as “basic human rights” – to non-normative bodies. These denials frequently occur even when they contradict the state’s own interests, highlighting the fragility and arbitrariness of a socially constructed reality that is at best partial, exclusionary, and incapable of holistic, inclusive development.

By centering visibility and space-making without dismantling embedded hierarchies of gender, class, caste, or racial privilege, inclusionary queer politics risks reducing queer advocacy to a representational or elite concern. In doing so, it neglects access to basic services and infrastructures that directly shape survival, particularly for queer populations rendered precarious by the intersections of systemic oppression. Political asexuality, in contrast, demands a more radical praxis, calling for critical engagement with institutions, norms, and policies that masquerade as inclusive while remaining complicit in hierarchies of power. To queer must therefore be to asexually queer – to challenge the primacy of sex, romantic intimacy, and state-sanctioned relational hierarchies, and to affirm life, care, and relational abundance in ways that extend beyond the logic of normative recognition.