In the early 2010s I contributed to the development of a field called asexuality studies. The identity of ‘asexual’ (not experiencing sexual attraction(fn)) had coalesced through a popular online forum, attracting media interest and social recognition which in turn fed into a growth of self-identification. Increasing awareness that other people shared this experience counteracted a tendency towards self-doubt and stigmatisation by others, making it easier to reach the conclusion that “this is the way I am” rather than assuming this experience was a temporary pathology susceptible to cure. The numerical growth of asexual identification, as well as its inclusion within the extended acronym of LBTQUA, led to further media attention. Digital media was enabling a complex feedback loop, initially through a web forum and then through micro-blogging and other social media platforms, which was rapidly consolidating an identity group who the evidence suggested had previously felt isolated and stigmatised due to a lack of understanding that this was actually a relatively common experience.
I published what was to the best of my knowledge the second sociological paper on asexuality, contributing to a field which had until then been dominated by psychological approaches (Carrigan 2011). At the time of writing this paper has been cited 304 times. Using Google Scholar to trace these citations gives a sense of the interdisciplinary scope of research in the area, cutting across psychology, sociology, cultural studies, feminist theory and queer theory to name just a few disciplines which feature prominently in the results. It is important to stress that not all, or even most, research in the area defines itself as contributing to ‘asexuality studies’ as a distinct field of inquiry. Though the results of searching Google Scholar for the exact phrase show a pattern of growth over time:
2023: 37 results
2022: 29 results
2021: 54 results
2020: 26 results
2019: 15 results
2018: 7 results
2017: 18 results
2016: 8 results
2015: 12 results
2014: 20 results
2013: 12 results
2012: 3 results
2011: 2 results
2010: 1 result
The total of 254 results using the exact phrase give a sense of a small field which has nonetheless grown in an accelerated way, with every year of this decade returning 26 or more results for this search. The fact that I did not use the phrase ‘asexuality studies’ in my initial papers, despite seeing myself as consciously contributing to this field, gives reason to assume there are other authors and publications which saw themselves as contributing to asexuality studies who do not figure in these results. The difficulty in searching for ‘asexuality’ is that it is a term with a much wider set of meanings within academic discourse so it is difficult to be precise about the scope of the inquiry. Searching for ‘asexuality’ in Google Scholar produces 1,620 results with a substantial percentage of them appearing to be investigations of the asexual identity from a range of disciplinary perspectives. This suggests the broader literature on asexuality is significantly larger than the explicit references to ‘asexuality studies’ described above, even if I have not quantified this precisely for purposes of the case study.
My interest in scholarly abundance began with my experience of working within a field that was rapidly growing from a position of non-existence. I ran a web resource (asexualitystudies.org) for a number of years which aimed to facilitate dialogue with members of this small research community and was in regular contact with many people working in the area. I edited a special issue of a journal which was later published as a book which consolidated this network (Carrigan et al 2013). My experience at this time was that being asked to review a journal article often entailed the experience of recognising who the author was with some degree of certainty. It was a friendly small field which felt like an intellectual community, at least to me.
My work on asexuality was a side-project undertaken alongside a part-time PhD. It was never my main focus as much as it was significant to me in a number of ways. There were two factors which led me to eventually stop working in the area after a number of years: (1) the feeling I had answered the initial questions which had motivated me to a degree which satiated my curious (2) my growing difficulty in keeping on top of the literature alongside my other commitments. The pressure involved in keeping up the literature is far from unique to those working within small fields. But what makes the experience unusual is that at this stage of a field’s development it is possible to have a realistic overview of the size of the field as a whole. At the point where I began to plan a research project on the topic it was feasible to read the entire of the social scientific literature on asexuality in a single afternoon. Over the subsequent years I increasingly found myself struggling to keep up with the literature on asexuality, as a result of its objective growth and the challenge involved in balancing sustained familiarity with a topic alongside competing intellectual interests.
The fact this was simply one interest amongst others which motivated my work exists as a biographical fact about my own development but also a systemic fact about the incentives which shape academic careers. In an precarious academy where flexible labor is the norm it is inherently restrictive to confine oneself to a single topic, both in terms of the potential audience whose recognition can be attained through your work but also the expectation of employers about career development. To the extent recruitment is driven by strategic planning to meet external incentives, such as priority areas defined by government funders and supported through the availability of funding, intellectual interests need to be adapted to contextual demands. The greater the degree of policy volatility in this context, such as changing governments and changing national agendas, the more variation there is likely to be between the topics in which research is encouraged and those which fall beneath the radar. Under these circumstances having multiple areas of expertise, including the capacity to rapidly pivot to adjacent areas of expertise which can be plausibility studies as well as to rearticulate one’s expertise to speak to new social concerns, becomes an adaptive strategy which is necessary to survive in a hyper competitive jobs market.
Mark Carrigan 