Taking A Look At The Asexual Visibility And Education Network

The Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) defines an asexual person as someone “who does not experience sexual attraction” (The Asexual Visibility and Education Network 2018). We live in a sexual world, which expects everyone to be and enjoy being sexual. Because of this, asexual people often find themselves associated with the misconceived labels “abstinent” or “celibate,” or the malicious label “broken.” Tarot, using visionary fiction, could explore these misunderstandings. The genre visionary fiction questions current situations and examines the possibilities of future social practices. As adrienne maree brown further explains, visionary practices are rooted in connections within communities, not because of shared oppression, but

It represents asexual people, and the LGBTQ community in general, who have not yet “come out of the closet.” Heteronormative culture assumes that everyone is straight until proven queer, which puts pressure on non-straight people to come out, instead of on straight people to stop assuming everyone is straight. For asexual people, so little is known about asexuality that many asexuals hesitate to come out because of feeling too obscure for others to understand. There is a balance between feeling like coming out is too unimportant and wanting others to respect asexuality. People of color, especially women of color, are highly sexualized, and may face other people’s confusion or brutality more extremely than white people because of the hypersexualization of their bodies. Women’s bodies in general are also sexualized, while women are shamed for wanting sex. Therefore, women coming out as asexual face conflicting sentiments that they should not be ace because it hurts their potential partners, and that their asexuality is fake because women should not want sex anyway. Men on the other hand are expected to like sex, especially sex with women, which plays into structures of masculinity. Asexual men in the closet may feel like their masculinity pressures them into sexual acts to prove their “manhood.” The Closeted card relates to asexuals who fear their asexual identity is related to their mental health, and that they will

In the rare cases when asexual characters exist on TV, their asexuality is often seen as a burden or character flaw, and they can be “fixed” by finding a good partner. Healthy, non-sexual relationships are nearly non-existent, leaving asexual people with few role models, and allosexuals (non-asexuals) with warped ideas about what asexuality is. When manhood is partly defined by men’s lust for women, asexual men are seen as rejecting their manhood, or having disorders with their sex drive. Black men are especially stereotyped to be good at sex, which adds pressure to perform sexual acts, and makes it harder for black men to discover they are asexual. Many asexuals do not discover they are ace until they are much older, and instead grow up believing they are broken, because of hormonal imbalances or other diagnosable biological disorders. This has negative impacts on asexual people’s mental health, for making us believe we are flawed, when in reality it is society’s visions of the proper ways to exist in a body that are flawed. The Broken One card resists labels like “broken” or “disordered,” because these labels exist to keep people behaving within heteronormative terms. Asexual people are made “culturally illegitimate and politically invisible” because of these labels, as theorized in the Sick Woman Theory (Hevda 2016). Without political or cultural