Special Issue Article [Queer Frontiers: Imagining new intellectual

queer futures]

Sexualities
2025, Vol. 0(0) 1–16
New directions for asexual © The Author(s) 2025

geographies Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13634607251326375
journals.sagepub.com/home/sex

Joe Jukes 
University of Bristol, UK

Rachel Bayer 
University College Dublin, Ireland

Abstract
Thinking geographically involves empirically contextualizing and critically contesting the
situatedness of relational life. Thinking asexually, meanwhile, means fundamentally
questioning the givenness of social and sexual life and seeking alternative arrangements.
We suggest that these two approaches, taken together, constitute a frontier of queer
knowledge. Pointing in four scholarly directions for ‘asexual geographies,’ we argue that
thinking geography asexually, and asexuality spatially: empirically grounds considerations
of asexual community formations in space; challenges understandings of asexuality by
emphasising non-identitarian asexualities; critiques compulsory sexuality and its spatial
(re)production, and raises negative theories of (a)sexuality to think possibility through
that which has not yet come. This paper invites queer and feminist scholars to pursue
asexual geographies, arguing for a research agenda that attends to the nonsexual in its
multiple spatial forms and operations.

Keywords
Asexuality, compulsory sexuality, geography, nonsexualities, queer

Introduction
Asexual geographies are not yet here. Or, although ‘asexual’ as a concept, identity term,
and community form has burgeoned over the past twenty years, considerations of

Corresponding author:
Joe Jukes, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
Email: [email protected]
2 Sexualities 0(0)

asexuality within and beyond queer studies have typically been dislocated from the spaces
in which asexuality ‘takes place’. Even so, literature on asexuality1 has demonstrated the
limits of sexuality’s capacity to ‘capture’ queerness’ various forms and exhibited the
variousness of queers’ erotic and relational practices in ways that go beyond the sexual
alone (Cerankowski, 2021; Kenney, 2020; Przybyło, 2019). As some of the first ge-
ographers of asexualities, we note that disciplinary approaches from geography can
ground studies on asexual lives by empirically considering the spaces where they occur,
and by contextualizing these occurrences with reference to social, cultural, political,
historical and environmental factors, including the uneven intellectual geography of
asexuality studies itself. To begin such work, we offer four ‘new directions’ for spatial and
asexual thinking, inviting queer studies, feminist theory and geography to orient towards
asexuality. Across these directions, asexual geographies might serve to: empirically
consider asexuality community formations in space; include non-identitarian asexualities;
critique ‘compulsory sexuality’ (Gupta, 2015) and its spatial (re)production across in-
timate to international scales; and theorise asexuality ‘negatively’. These broaden
considerations of asexuality to consider the spaces that compose and come to touch it, as
asexualities are lived out in varied, global and geographic contexts.
Our emphasis on direction ought not to suggest that we know where these inquiries
may lead. Rather, these point the way towards questions that appear, to us, to be fruitful. In
what follows, we work to bridge three ‘frontier’ fields: queer theory, asexuality studies
and queer geographies. Asexual geographies might constitute a bridging between fields
insofar as not only are we ourselves concerned with asexual spaces and spatialities, but so
too might others, in our stead, be able to cross from one area of inquiry to another. Doing
so ought to invite geographers of sexuality, for example, to include asexuality, but also
offer ways that ‘geography’ and ‘sexuality’ might become re-directed through asexu-
alities. Hence, this article serves as an invitation to ourselves and others to think about
what is possible and needed in our current, and shared, predicaments of space, sex and
time.

Reviewing ‘queer’, ‘geographies’ and ‘asexualities’

Queer
The terrain of asexual geographies is textured by feminist and queer studies’ prior in-
terventions. Both the well-established feminist critique of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’
(Rich, 1980) and the normalisation or ‘correctness’ of certain ‘charmed’ sexual practices
(Rubin, 2011) maintain that sex and sexuality are not singular phenomena, but rather
present an array of stratified engagements with social and gendered norms. Emphasizing
the production of heterosexuality as ‘a normative category of sexed, gendered and sexual
identity’ that also produces sexual deviance (Carroll, 2012: 2; Butler, 1990), queer theory
troubles the naturalization of any sexual form, in which sexuality is always a partial,
value-laden matrix of subjectfying power and embodied desire (Foucault, 2020).
Queer theorists have asked how queer communities respond to such ‘deviant’ social
positionings, and, indeed, exceed these, where queerness is not just an embodied or
Jukes and Bayer 3

structuring difference but also gestures toward a host of un/governed spaces through
which gender, sexuality and other differences find expression anew (Berlant and Warner,
1998). In these, feminist and queer studies have found potential in other relational forces,
such as the erotic (Lorde, 1984), which makes queerness possible and political in an
expanded range of sexual, asexual and more-than-sexual arrangements (Cerankowski and
Milks, 2024a; Przybyło, 2019).

Geographies
‘Geography’, we think, offers a means to observe the world taking shape around us. It
prioritizes ‘space’ and ‘place’ as central analytic phenomena, thinking these plurally with
reference to ‘scale’. Geographers therefore question the regimes of power, roles of in-
frastructure and the effects of (material) flows in their research, as these affect the shape of
the spatial world in which we live differentiated lives. Asexual geographies might refer to
the lived realities of people and communities differentiated by (their) asexuality, though
they also denote a particular spatial approach to understanding asexualities as dynam-
ically produced phenomena.
For over four decades, feminist and queer geographers have spatially investigated sex,
sexualities, genders, and social identities. This work has understood space as relational,
dynamic, and fluid (Massey, 2005), in order to explore how spaces, like identities, are
socially constructed and co-produced through our interactions within broader systems of
power (Brown and Browne, 2016; Johnston and Longhurst, 2010). The field of queer
geographies has thus attended to the multiple ways in which sexualities and genders are
co-constructed in and through space/place, as well as how social identities and sexual
lives are experienced spatially. For example, geographic explorations of the ‘(hetero)
sexing’ of space have revealed how everyday spaces are routinely heterosexualized,
reflecting and reproducing heteronormative ideals and power relations (Browne, 2007;
Valentine, 1993). Such inquiries have illustrated how spaces can be ‘made’ in ways that
co-produce normative worldviews, assumptions, and beliefs – processes which often go
unacknowledged because they align with ‘common sense’ understandings of the world
and what is considered ‘normal’ in various spaces (Hubbard, 2008).
In this way, queer/sexualities geographers have argued that where we are actively
impacts the ways in which sexualities and genders are understood and experienced – and
also, how we understand sexualities and genders impacts how spaces themselves are
continuously (re)created through social relations and systems of power (Hubbard, 2018).
Geography is not merely a study of location, but rather of how space affects, mediates and
constrains all aspects of life, including its gendered, sexual and intimate aspects. Queer
geographers have built from foundational feminist interventions to critique the spatial
orders of ‘queer,’ through which what we ‘know’ as sexual or queer is shaped by a
markedly uneven, typically white, cisheteropatriarchal and Anglo-American geography
of knowledge production (Kulpa and Silva, 2016). By highlighting the importance of
space/place, power, and social context in the production of (queer) research and
knowledge, queer geographers have challenged assumptions that underlie, and still
dominate, the field and by extension our subjective and intimate lives.
4 Sexualities 0(0)

This being said, a silence has nonetheless persisted throughout this growing and
diversifying literature. The spatialities of asexuality remains an area almost entirely
unexplored, with considerations of asexual geographies only just beginning to emerge
within the discipline (Bayer, 2024; Jukes, 2024). We seek to challenge this silence and
bridge this gap by bringing queer geographies into conversation with asexuality studies as
we lay out directions for further study.

Asexualities
The interdisciplinary field of asexuality studies has steadily grown over the last decade
and a half, encompassing empirical research and theoretical scholarship surrounding
asexualities, ace people’s lives and identities, and societal expectations about what
‘normal’ sexuality should be. Queer approaches in asexuality studies have positioned
asexuality ‘in direct dialogue with larger power structures and patterns of injustice’
(Przybyło, 2019: 15), and expanded understandings of asexuality towards ‘queerly
asexual possibilities’ (Przybyło and Cooper, 2014: 300). Asexuality scholars have built
from queer theorizing to develop the concept of compulsory sexuality – a framework that
captures the taken-for-granted assumption that ‘all people are sexual,’ as well as the
‘social norms and practices that both marginalize various forms of non-sexuality… and
compel people to experience themselves as desiring subjects, take up sexual identities,
and engage in sexual activity’ (Gupta, 2015: 132). Work at the intersection of queer and
asexuality studies thus points towards asexuality’s potential for (re)imagining sexuality,
intimacy, kinship, and interpersonal relations (Kenney, 2020; Tessler, 2023).
Scholarship in this area has sought to expand conceptualizations of asexuality beyond
static, binary and/or essentialist understandings of sexual orientation (Chasin, 2024;
Kurowicka, 2023), highlighting instead the heterogeneous and fluid spectrum of plural
asexualities (Cerankowski and Milks, 2024a). Like queer geographers, asexuality
scholars have also centered interlocking power relations, identities, and cultural
variance – illustrating how compulsory sexuality impacts (ace) people’s lives and
identities in uneven ways (Chasin, 2024; Foster et al., 2019; Kim, 2014, 2024). Addi-
tionally, asexuality scholars have placed asexualities in conversation with nonsexualities
to explore resonances and points of connection between them (Przybyło and Gupta,
2020), where ‘nonsexualities’ describe identities, relations and practices that operate apart
from sexual attraction, desire or activity, without taking up the term ‘asexual’ (Jukes,
2024). Thinking queerly about asexuality has meant situating asexuality within, and also
seeking to challenge, broader systems of power and social contexts that shape how
asexualities are understood and experienced, whilst also expanding the frames through
which relationality can be conceptualized and/as queered.
We note that this situating work is potentially geographic work also. Yet despite
resonances with geographic thinking in its growing attention to the global diversity of
asexualities/nonsexualities and the importance of socio-spatial context, asexuality studies
(and indeed, queer/sexuality studies more broadly) still undertheorizes matters of space
and place (Bayer, 2024; Hubbard, 2018; Jukes, 2024). In addition to locating and de-
scribing spatial variance, we argue that there is more to be done at the intersection of
Jukes and Bayer 5

asexuality studies and geography to understand the spatial processes that operate in
particular places, and to expand these inquiries across sites and scales.
Asexuality ‘offers a location, both discursive and material, from which to refresh
‘known’ realities about intimate life’ (Flore, 2014: 30). Where, or what, is asexuality’s
location? What would a spatialized understanding of asexuality bring to this field’s multi-
scalar and multi-sited enquiries? And, what consequence would the assertion of an
asexual geography have on current understandings of the sexualization of space? As we
suggest, asexual geographies bring the analytics of queer, space, and asexuality together
and towards new possibilities for such thought. Yet, asexualities take shape in a variety of
locations, requiring nuanced and grounded spatial consideration. It is these locations we
identify in this article and from which we wish, with others, to proceed towards an asexual
geography.

Thinking spatially about ace lives & communities

If we are to queerly approach asexuality as ‘a product of our cultural here/now’ (Przybyło,
2011: 445), then where and when we are living are central to how we understand
asexuality as a concept/identity and how asexualities are lived and experienced on a daily
basis. As with other sexualities and identities (Brown-Saracino, 2018; Johnston and
Longhurst, 2010), understandings of asexualities and ace identities continue to develop
and change across time and place – constructed and varying in ways specific to geo-
graphic location and socio-historical context. Seeking to add to growing queer/feminist
qualitative research in asexuality studies, we ask: what new insights surrounding ace
identities, relationalities, and experiences might be gained and further developed by
adding a spatial lens to empirical explorations of ace lives?
Geography offers a key means of materially engaging with people’s social worlds and
developing grounded insights into their everyday lives, providing opportunities to extend
empirical engagements with ace people and communities. Research in asexual geog-
raphies might then include explorations of ace people’s experiences in everyday spaces
(such as where we live, work, relax, and socialize), in order to understand how being ace
feels on a personal, intimate, or bodily level in different settings and/or how these spaces
impact ace people’s identities and experiences in different ways. Asexual geographies
also create possibilities for multi-sited and multi-scalar analyses that can expand emerging
work on the diversity of the ace people’s lives and identities globally, by investigating
how they are shaped by their spatio-temporal locations on scales ranging from the intimate
(Przybyło, 2011) to the international (Chen, 2024).
As ace communities grow and develop, empirical geographic research could consider
the formation and use of ace community spaces, both online and ‘in real life.’ This adds to
work that has highlighted the importance of discovering (usually virtual) ace communities
in asexual identity development (Kelleher and Murphy, 2022), by further considering
where these communities are (or are not) located, how this affects who is ‘inside’ and
‘outside’ of the ace community, and how such spaces are made, shared, and circulated by
other ace people. These investigations open pathways for extending understandings of
where ace people feel ‘in place’ or ‘out of place’, and build from work that has
6 Sexualities 0(0)

interrogated ace liminalities in heteronormative society (Vares, 2022), in relation to the

queer community (Mollet and Lackman, 2018), and within the ace community itself
(Foster et al., 2019; Kurowicka, 2023). Such inquiries might also build from emerging
work on ‘asexual citizenship’ to extend these inquiries across (inter)national scales –
placing asexual inclusions/exclusions in dialogue with discussions of rights, recognition,
and liveability (Banerjea and Browne, 2023; Hart-Brinson et al., 2024). In doing so,
geographic explorations provide meaningful opportunities to deepen intersectional an-
alyses of how race, ethnicity, gender, class, caste, ability, religion, and age impact where
and in what spaces ace people feel comfortable, safe, and understood.
In this vein, research in asexual geographies can contribute to nuanced, situated
understandings of the spatial variance of ace people’s lives, and amplify ace experiences
that have gone under- or unrepresented by ‘putting them on the map.’ This speaks to work
that has begun to examine culturally-specific factors such as religion, national identity,
and gender/sexual politics (Kim, 2024; Kurowicka and Przybyło, 2020; Malavika and
Kachap, 2024; Wong and Guo, 2020) to further investigate the interactions of space/place
on ace people’s lives and identities. These geographic inquiries could also extend
emerging explorations of asexualities beyond the the lives and spaces of white, cis,
middle-class, able-bodied, English-speaking people in the Global North, which remain
the disproportionate focus of asexuality research (Przybyło and Gupta, 2020). The
production of knowledge within asexuality studies thus also has a particular geography,
which is important to not only acknowledge, but also challenge, as the field develops.
Challenges such as these provide opportunities to understand normativities within the ace
community and critique normative imaginings of who or what an ace person is ‘supposed’
to be (Cuthbert, 2017). Spatial investigations thus not only respond to calls for more
research exploring asexual cultural diversity across space/place (Cerankowski and Milks,
2024b; Kelleher and Murphy, 2022), but can also extend queer analyses in the field of
asexuality studies and challenge its own normativities.
Asexual geographies point towards multiple avenues to build upon growing qualitative
studies surrounding ace people’s lives by extending investigations of how asexualities are
lived, experienced, and produced in and through space. They could include engaging with
intimate or everyday spaces, such as asexual geographies of the home; examining how ace
communities circulate knowledge, language, and resources across various digital and ‘real
life’ spaces; or situated explorations of asexualities as understood in relation to socio-
spatial contexts and knowledge paradigms beyond the white, English-speaking Global
North. Such spatial approaches also lend themselves to locating nonsexualities and ways
of relating beyond the sexual, to which we now turn.

Locating queer nonsexualities

That asexuality as we know it appears here and now speaks to its becoming relationally.
Thinking with relational geographies positions asexuality as a collection of relations
produced ‘through’ spaces and modes of power, whilst producing relations ‘to’ spaces and
modes of power (Massey, 2005). What if, then, traces and substrates of asexuality could
already be located inside geography’s most popular social relations? ‘Queer’ has become
Jukes and Bayer 7

intellectually attached to minoritarian desires for ulterior spatial or political forms

(Muñoz, 1998), and a host of attachments and impossibilizations of desire become
produced in relations to geographical forms, like the nation (Anderson, 2022; Gopinath,
2005). If platonic-yet-close relations, such as friendship, care and kinship, are productive
of intimacies, desires and vulnerabilities (Cronin, 2014), we question what difference the
absence of sex makes to these forms of relation?
Of course, category terms which are circulated in and by our lives, such as ‘asexual’,
are also enacted relationally (Butler, 1990). Understanding sexuality as situated in a
context of diffuse, incorporated power (Foucault, 2020), we seek to bring Przybyło’s
concept of ‘sexusociety’ closer to geographic inquiry, as it describes ‘the diluted om-
nipresence of sexuality in our western contemporary present … it is within us, it is us’
(2011: 446). Perhaps asexuality relationally constitutes an ulterior spatial arrangement of
this ‘sexuality’, in the same sense that ‘metronormativity’ spatializes sexual availability
and accessibility with a bias towards the city (Halbertstam, 2005; Podmore and Bain,
2020). However, what if the frame of reference is shifted such that sex need not ground
spatial and social lives, especially for queer communities?
Such a shift could provincialize the sexual, albeit strategically or momentarily, to
spaces of sexualization and sexual activity. While some will argue that there is no outside
to processes of sexualization, we ask: what if there were? What else happens-with
sexualization that might be obscured by our readiness to see the sexual at play? Looking
beneath or ‘in excess’ of sex (Przybyło, 2019), sexuality’s attendant comedy, tragedy and
politics surface in ways quite distant from the sexual act, yet appearing with it (Berlant and
Edelman, 2013). It is these kinds of emotional geographies (Zebracki, 2017), that exist
alongside sexual ones and are sensed in nonsexual relations, constituting queer-yet-
nonsexual geographies of their own.
Asking what queerness might mean both as asexuality and in nonsexuality, asexual
geographies could destabilize and transform work on geographies of sex/gender that
presumes, or prioritizes, an a priori (allo-)sexualization of all subjects, bodies and spaces.
To spatializations of desire such as metronormativity, asexual geographies illuminate a
milieu of non-normative relations to space and sexuality that resist the primacy of sexual
desire in influencing one’s spatial behaviour. If, as Ghaziani (2019: 7) suggests, ‘spatial
expressions of sexuality are becoming more diverse and plural’, then where in his
‘cultural archipelagos’ might there be space for sexuality to actually recede? We wonder
how a critically capacious embrace of a-/non-sexualities could nuance other queer
spatializations, such as the closet, which produce sexual silences and relational absences
whilst not erasing queer experience (Boussalem, 2021). Might this illuminate queer
nonsexualities worth salvaging?
(Allo)Sexuality does not produce the same spaces wherever it appears, suggesting that
the differentiation of spaces in, say, a queer cultural archipelago is always informed by
more than sex, which is to say, the nonsexual. Why, then, the sexual assumption
(Carrigan, 2012)? As Japonica Brown-Saracino comments, ‘to a remarkable degree,
assessments of what we know about queer settlements reflect our own identity categories
and that of the specific groups we study and the places they make and inhabit. We should
and must study unchartered territory’ (2019: 41). If geographies of sexualities have
8 Sexualities 0(0)

prioritized attending to sexual practices and identities, then is it any wonder we have
inherited a geography that operates by sex’s map?
Thinking more-than-sexually in this way offers an uncharted territory to geographers
and queer scholars. We point to the potential for ‘queer nonsexualities’ to constitute
perhaps another asexual geography that parallels the study of ace lives and communities,
understanding that there is more to a-/sexual life than the identity terms that some take up
and relate with. Asexualities and queer nonsexualities are, of course, produced in multi-
scalar registers, including intimate, interpersonal bonds, relations to place and state, and
global senses of ‘queer’ and their operative norms. Hence, we ask where does sex begin in,
or for, geographical enquiry? What constitutes the limits and specificities of the sexual,
even as it circulates in diffuse ways and is internalized by us? And, is geography willing to
methodologically experiment with a strategic destabilization of its sexual assumption, that
new possibilities for critique might become opened? It is these asexual modes of critique
that we route along next.

Conceptualizing and critiquing compulsory sexuality in and

through space
By exploring the lived experiences of asexualities/nonsexualities as grounded in space
and place, asexual geographies provide a vantage point from which to extend con-
ceptualizations and critiques of compulsory sexuality – offering possibilities to better
understand how the (sometimes abstractly theorized) structures of compulsory
sexuality are tangibly lived and felt. Not only this, a spatial perspective grants insights
into how these structural norms and practices are manifest and experienced in ways
that can vary based on where we are (Bayer, 2024). Geographic investigations thus
illuminate new directions for queerly examining how compulsory sexuality and its
material impacts on ace (and allosexual) people are shaped and reproduced through
social context and location.
Just as asexualities can be lived and understood differently at different times and
places, so too can the logics and structures of compulsory sexuality vary based on where
they are produced and experienced – although there is still little known about these socio-
spatial contingencies. As Kristina Gupta noted, more research remains needed ‘to explore
whether and how compulsory sexuality operates in non-US and non-Western contexts’
(2015: 132). Yet now a decade later, this remains underexplored. We ask, then, how does
compulsory sexuality function in different parts of the world in ways that are specific to
geographic location and socio-spatial context? Emerging research in asexual geogra-
phies has begun to consider how beliefs surrounding the universality of sexuality can be
shaped by space and place – and how space itself can become ‘allosexualized’ (Bayer,
2024). Continuing to explore how norms function in different locations can extend
conceptualizations of compulsory sexuality and critique these structures in ways that are
grounded in the settings in which they operate (Bayer, 2024; Kurowicka and Przybyło,
2020). These and future insights are not only key to understanding how sexual nor-
mativities are (re)created, but also create meaningful potentials to challenge these norms
and practices as they show up in our everyday lives.
Jukes and Bayer 9

Spatial approaches to compulsory sexuality also put forward opportunities to analyze

how these structures unevenly operate. This builds upon work that has illustrated how
compulsory sexuality intersects with racist, sexist, ableist, and classist ideals, dispro-
portionately harming (ace) people with marginalized social identities and bodies (Brown,
2022; Chasin, 2024; Cuthbert, 2017). As we discussed earlier, investigations of where and
in what spaces ace people feel ‘in place’ open pathways to explore how ace people’s lived
experiences are shaped by intersecting aspects of identity – experiences that vary based on
where they occur. The specific ways that normative racialization and coloniality intersect
with and (re)produce compulsory sexuality in the United States (Owen, 2014), for ex-
ample, may be different in other parts of the world (Chen, 2024; Kim, 2024). Geographic
research is thus key for deepening our understanding of how the structures of compulsory
sexuality operate and are (re)produced in and through space – structures that can impact
ace people, and indeed us all, in asymmetrical ways.
With this in mind, compulsory sexuality is a framework developed by scholars re-
searching and writing in the English-speaking Global North to describe the societal norms
and practices in the United States and other ‘Western’ cultural contexts – a limitation that
was also noted a decade ago (Gupta, 2015). We therefore return to the question of whether
compulsory sexuality is a framework that can or should be applied in all contexts/
places – and add, what new and as of yet-undeveloped concepts might also be needed to
understand asexualities, nonsexualities, and sexual normativities in different locations
and societal contexts? Future and emerging research in asexual geographies is uniquely
positioned to help answer these questions by centering space/place and a plurality of sites/
scales – broadening our conceptualizations of norms related to the assumed universality of
sex and sexual attraction.
Asexual geographies provide multiple critical perspectives from which to extend
critiques of compulsory sexuality, and examine how these norms and structures may (or
may not) operate in different places. This might include building upon investigations of
how compulsory sexuality can be reproduced and wielded by the nation-state (Bayer,
2024; Kurowicka and Przybyło, 2020), to explore how these logics intersect with re-
ligiosity, racial justice & migration, shifting sexual rights landscapes, and reproductive
freedoms in culturally-specific ways. Other work could further consider the situated
spatial processes by which compulsory sexuality can be (co)produced in and through
everyday space, or indeed, develop new frameworks for understanding the socio-spatial
contingencies of (allo)sexual normativities. Research and theorizing centering space/
place thus points towards underexplored frontiers from which to think about the nor-
mative, marginalizing structures of compulsory sexuality and its limits – as well as
opportunities to think towards new concepts that might help us better understand and
reach beyond sexual normativities across the world.

Theorising negativity
In addition to exposing and critiquing compulsory sexuality as it operates across space
and between subjects, asexual commentators have repeatedly refused the terms of conduct
it mandates (Brown, 2022; Owen, 2018). Thought through the lens of feminist refusal, the
10 Sexualities 0(0)

relating practices and politics of asexual communities might offer scholars some theo-
retical tools by which to theorize lack and negativity as productive spatialities in their own
right.
Refusal recurs in asexuality studies as an imaginative practice: Breanne Fahs locates an
anarchist asexuality in the relating practices of women who root their politics in ‘refusing
sex entirely’ (2010: 450); whilst Sherronda J. Brown describes asexuality ‘as a refusal of
compulsory sexuality’ (2022: n.p.). Refusal produces asexuality in/as ambiguity, where
one’s queerness resists description or categorisation in terms of the sexual. Instead,
asexuality is permitted ‘to exist in illegibility, to be unknown’ (Brown, 2022: n.p.),
paralleling Michael Paramo’s (2024) call to ‘end the pursuit’ of asexual legibility and
normalcy. Brown and Paramo link their turns away from compulsory sexuality, conceived
as asexual activism, to wider critiques of white supremacy, heteronormativity and
neoliberalism, situating ‘asexual’ in a broader coalition of refusal.
Such interventions offer up coalitional and intersectional geographies of refusal - not
simply a dis-located political act enacted by individuals, but a shared, marginal practice of
contestation that is intellectually generative (hooks, 1989). We wonder what an incor-
poration of existing geographical projects of refusal would lend to understandings of ‘ace’
spaces - whether they erupt into the world like Gavin Brown’s description of autonomous
queer cultural spaces (2007, 2011), or are structured and textured by infrastructures of
queer and trans care (Spade, 2020)? Further, can asexuality refract the queerness of these
spaces such that more than sex and sexuality might be seen to inform shared under-
standings of queer politics? In thinking of queer and trans space-making as practices of
refusal, we identify the rehearsal of some alternative: geographies that anticipate or test
new ways of relating. Hence, we follow asexuality studies scholars in asking: what can
intimacy mean in a-sexual contexts when compulsory sexuality is refused? To begin to
answer, we suggest that spaces of asexual refusal are not one-time events but impro-
visations in the negative.
Marked by a lack of (experience of) sexual attraction, asexuality’s lack-based ontology
could challenge sexual positivism and the all-encompassing assertion – especially within
geography – of space’s sexualization. If there is supposedly no space ‘outside’ of allo/
sexualisation, then one direction for asexual geographies follows contemporary cultural
geographers to theorize (sexual) negativity, productively theorizing spaces that are not
endowed with ‘actuality’ or fullness, and in so doing critiquing the production of space as
such (see Chandler and Pugh, 2024). If all space is (allo)sexualized, then asexual ge-
ographies must refuse such a premise. Negative spaces, as geographers David Bissell,
Mitch Rose and Paul Harrison describe them, surface at the limits of what is known or
done, gesturing towards that which is ‘beyond all sense’ (2021: 17). Meanwhile asex-
uality, discursively rooted in lack, acquires a ‘crisis ontology’ that absolutely undermines
the stability of ‘sexusociety’ (Przybyło, 2011). A-sexual, as in void of the sexual, we offer
asexuality as a tool for exposing the limits of spatial theorizations of sexual life that
assume that sex is pre-given.
Speaking alongside the well-rehearsed assurances that ‘asexual’, among other
LGBTQ + identity terms, is ‘valid’, this direction for asexual geography stays with the
predicament of asexuality itself being constructed as ‘void’ or constituting invalidity. This
Jukes and Bayer 11

void-ing is seen in apathetic or violent responses to claims to asexual viability, the

perception that ‘mainstream’ queer spaces do not cater to ace people, and the prevalence
of narratives of ‘brokenness’ that attend asexual identification and collapse asexuality and
disability in problematic ways (Kim, 2024; Kurowicka, 2023).
Yet, as Paul Kingsbury and Anna Secor (2021) note, the void offers a place from which
to think even as it exists in negativity. For them, that which has not materialized remains
presently possible in the void. It is anticipatory. If we understand asexuality itself as a
‘place more void’, we see in its improvisations of negativity rehearsals of different
intimate arrangements: queer-platonic relationships (QPR) and ‘squishes’ (platonic ro-
mance) (Vares, 2019); kink practices that are not predicated on sexual attraction (Jolene
Sloan, 2015), and refusals of sexual or romantic monogamy (Klesse et al., 2022; Scherrer,
2010). These various refusals of compulsory sexuality constitute queer nonsexualities,
which are practised by many more than just asexually-identified subjects. Asexual ge-
ographies afford theorizations of asexual negativity that are not defeated by ‘lack’. We
suggest that thinking negativity as a spacetime - a duration (Cerankowski, 2021), a
nagging space of ongoing lack and of not-quite-ness - directs attention to the ways that ace
people continue to relate in a world that demands ‘more’ of them (more intensity, more
spectacle, more emission; Przybyło, 2019). The void, then, offers a spatial framework for
the as yet unexplored or the still to come, a place for those improvisations of the negative
that ace people rehearse, and into which refusing desires are projected.

Conclusion: Paths forward for asexual geographies

We have outlined some antecedents for a field of asexual geography and reflected on new
directions that such a field could orient itself along. Although little work has explicitly
considered the spaces of ace lives and nonsexual relations, considerations that bring
spatiality and asexuality together have the potential to enrich queer, feminist, and
geographical studies. We have attempted to begin such bridging work and outlined four
conceptual ‘new directions’ for asexual geographies. Empirically, we have noted the
potential of geographic approaches for locating, documenting, and contextualizing
asexual lives in different parts of the world, understanding these as locally-specific and
globally (inter)related. Relationally, we have suggested that ‘asexualities’ incorporate an
array of nonsexual spaces and relations that challenge geographers and sexuality scholars
to think more-than-sexually. Critically, asexual geographies expose and resist ‘com-
pulsory sexuality’, crucially attending to spatially-specific processes of allosexualization
in everyday lives and politics. Theoretically, we locate ‘the negative’ as a potentially
expansive asexual geography, that would not recuperate asexuality’s lack-based ontology
but rather place it as an improvisation in the negative. We reiterate the openness of this
project, recognizing that more paths than just these might be pursued by other scholars,
artists and activists, though these remain to be seen.
In calling for(th) asexual geographies, we have attempted to think about ‘ace space’
whilst also creating further spaces for ace thought. Thinking spatially requires attending to
the multi-scalar, material and immaterial, grounded and abstract aspects of the world’s
complexity, in which we find ourselves and out of which the question of what can be done
12 Sexualities 0(0)

arises. We understand asexual geographies as challenging the (lack of) space given to
asexuality in our scholastic fields, which joins with the challenges of other queer and
asexual commentators (Winer, 2023; Przybyło and Gupta, 2020; also Rosenberg, 2023;
Kinkaid, 2024). We speak as and to geographers, though expressly call across disciplines,
inviting collaboration in order to: attend empirically to the lived, spatial realities of
asexual lives and relations, and adjudicate the possibilities these present for transforming
current understandings of sex, sexuality and (a/)sexualization.
So while we chart new directions between fields and towards asexual geographies, our
task is also to connect struggles for sustainable ontologies and social viability that are
shared by and beyond ace individuals and their communities. We ask what marginal
tactics, social positions and intersectional approaches can - or should - asexual ge-
ographies account for, foster and enact? Asexual geographies promise to both respond to
the identitarian richness of ace, and other, lives, as well as attend to the space around,
ground below, and possibilities beyond identity alone. Join us.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs
Joe Jukes  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6125-320X
Rachel Bayer  https://orcid.org/0009-0008-5054-650X

Note
1. Contemporary definitions of asexuality have taken shape alongside the development of language/
terminology created by asexual people themselves, primarily in online communities (Teut, 2019).
Today, the identity label asexual (or ace) is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to people
whose experiences fall on a spectrum of little to no sexual attraction (Brown, 2022). Allosexuality
can be understood in contrast to asexuality, referring to normative experiences of sexual attraction
that are commonly held to be universal and/or ‘natural’ (Brown, 2022). In addition to ‘asexual,’ the
ace spectrum includes other identities such as demisexual and graysexual - referring to people who
seldom experience sexual attraction, or those who only do so in specific circumstances (Copulsky
and Hammack, 2023). The asexual umbrella can therefore be viewed as encompassing a dynamic
multiplicity of asexualities (Przybyło, 2016), and we use the terms ‘asexuality’ and ‘asexual’ with
the understanding that they represent this heterogeneity.

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Joe Jukes is a Graduate Teacher in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University
of Bristol, Research Fellow in Sexualities at Leeds Beckett University and holds a PhD in
Humanities (Geography and Sexuality) from the University of Brighton.
Rachel Bayer is a PhD Researcher and Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholar in the
School of Geography at University College Dublin, where her doctoral research focuses
on the spatialities of asexuality and compulsory sexuality in Ireland.