As a scholar with ties in both humanities and medicine, I'm always interested when those realms intersect. Medical understanding of sexuality has been heavily influenced by social science and humanities research, and now a new frontier in sexuality studies, asexuality, is being pioneered at Stanford.
Karli Cerankowski, PhD, who graduated from Stanford's Program in Modern Thought and Literature last year and is a lecturer in Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric, is working on broadening our perception of healthy sexuality by including lower levels of sexual or romantic desire. Her work, recently spotlighted by Stanford News, traces people who might now identify as asexual through historical and pop cultural works, analyzing how they and society have interacted. She's quoted in the Stanford News piece as saying that "society has normalized certain levels of sexual desire while pathologizing others. In a sense, it's the social model that's broken, not asexuals."
Asexuality is a very new field of study, which exists under the wide umbrella of sexuality and gender studies. Cerankowski and her co-editor, Megan Milks, recently published the second book ever to be written on the topic. Thinking about the ways people experience their sexuality, desire, and gender informs how science and medicine understand optimal human health. Although sex and sexuality occupy a prominent place in our culture's understanding of bodies, they are not prominent for every individual.
Cerankowski, again quoted in Stanford News, says:
If we recognize the diversity of human sexuality, then we can understand that there are some people who just don't experience sexual attraction or have a lower sex drive or have less sex, and that doesn't mean there is something wrong with them... We sort of prioritize sexual pleasure and sexual fulfillment in our lives, but we can think about the other ways that people experience intense pleasure, like when listening to music.
Pleasure and desire are important aspects of being human, but they don't have to be tied to sex, or even to romance. On the wide spectrum of asexuality, there is room for those who engage neither in sex nor romance, as well as those who enjoy a romantic partnership and may engage in sex for reasons other than personal desire. This spectrum intersects with other aspects of sexuality that have also, though activism, become recognized as spectrums: sexual orientation, sexual identification, and gender identification.
Previously: Med students want more sexual health training, Changing the prevailing attitude about AIDS, gender and reproductive health in southern Africa and Living with disorders of sex development
Photo by trollhare
