ABSTRACT
“Asexual: someone who does not experience sexual attraction.” This is how the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) defines an asexual person. From this definition, we might extrapolate “asexuality” to be a sexual identity or orientation to which asexual people may lay claim. Before AVEN, which came into existence in 2001, “asexual” was rarely used to describe people who did not experience sexual attraction or who otherwise did not engage in sexual relationships.1 But to start a history of asexuality with the history of AVEN in the twenty-first century would be to overlook the rare and brief moments we do find historical mention of asexuality that closely resembles how we think about it today, and it would also mean glossing over adjacent or analogous iterations of sexual abstention, withdrawal, or resistance that might better help us understand how asexuality came to be what it is today. Without getting too deep into the debate about how to do a history of sexuality and the trouble with exporting contemporary identity concepts into eras in which those categories and languages did not exist, it is important to acknowledge that the problem we bump up against in doing a history of asexuality is that of knowing what exactly we can call “asexual,” especially since the term only came into more prevalent usage within the past couple decades.
