Something I’m really looking forward to is taking place in December. Myself and two other asexuality researchers have organised a panel on asexuality and sexualisation for this international conference on the Sexualisation of Culture in London:
- Ela Przybylo – York University
- CJ DeLuzio Chasin – University of Windsor
- Mark Carrigan – University of Warwick
I haven’t actually written my paper yet, or even really planned it, though I’m fairly clear about what it’s going to involve. Having worked out my notion of the Sexual Assumption in various papers (the all pervasive categorical assumption of the uniformity and universality of sexual attraction) and, through a range of conference presentation, begun to offer a grounding for this account in critical realist social theory (my own spin, based on my PhD research, on the debate between Archer, Elder-Vass and Sayer about the relationship between reflexivity and habitus) I want to use this presentation to try and draw these strands together and finally do what I’ve been aiming for in the last three years: offer an empirically worked out theory of late capitalist sexualization. This is the topic for my long planned short zero book style book and, if I can get funding, my big ugly probably slightly unreadable book about the ‘science of sex and modernity’ so it’s very exciting. This conference panel feels like a crucial hinge between stuff I’ve been doing for the last 3 years and stuff I want to be doing for many years to come.
