“Asexual Healing Is Like the Sun Shining on Your Face in an Open Field”: A Found Poetry Analysis of Asexual People of Color’s Wellness and Dis/Ability

ABSTRACT

Despite growing research about asexuality in the field, there is a lack of asexual-centric health communication research. We leverage a communication lens in examining the lives of asexual-spectrum people of color and their experiences with wellness, dis/ability, and/or neurodivergence. Asexuality’s fraught relationship with dis/ability provides a generative location to interrogate co-constitutive systems of oppression. Thus, this article uses poetic inquiry on 33 in-depth interviews with asexual-spectrum people of color. The poems explore the participants’ emotive and experiential dimensions of their stories at the intersections of racism, ableism, and allonormativity and emphasize asexual people of color’s individual and collective pursuits of wellness and healing. Ultimately and looking forward, we recognize allonormativity as a systemic barrier to health and wellness, and aim to instill a commitment to asexual people of color’s wellness, healing, and hope.

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.