Shadow Play:Visualizing Asexuality in New Kari Barclay (bio) Asexuality—the perspective of not experiencing sexual attraction to others—is sometimes called the "invisible orientation" for its lack of representation in popular culture (Decker). Popularized in the early 2000s, the term "asexual" describes a spectrum of non-normative desire and is usually presented as a sexual orientation akin to "heterosexual," "bisexual," or "homosexual." While framed as an essential, minority identity, asexuality can also describe a sensibility akin to queerness. Within the past few years, television series such as BoJack Horseman, Sex Education, Sirens, and Everything's Gonna Be Okay have all spotlighted asexual characters. In theatre, however, asexual representation has remained rare. Being one of a few out asexual playwrights, I have stumbled upon pockets of asexual theatre-makers, often by chance, as colleagues have connected via social media or word of mouth through mutual friends. I have noticed (and been part of) a cohort of artists working to tell stories of asexual experience and shift social understandings of what constitutes "natural" sexuality. Here, I spotlight a sample of plays from this cohort to investigate what asexual aesthetics and representation might lend to theatrical discourse more broadly. In December 2021, I hosted an online gathering of asexual playwrights to build community and assess the state of the field. I was curious to understand not only how artists imagined asexual representation but also how asexuality shaped their artistic work's form. How does one theatricalize what is often viewed as a "failure to perform"? Whereas asexuality is often defined in terms of lack—a lack of attraction, a lack of visibility—what I found instead are works that indulge in fantasy and strategically mix naturalistic and non-naturalistic forms. In this article, I analyze four plays by artists on the asexual spectrum and position them in relation to queerness. These four plays each situate asexual characters alongside lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender characters, using the differences and similarities to make asexuality legible. I describe this dynamic as asexual shadow play, an attempt to make asexuals' lack of sexual desire visible in the shadow of other forms of queer experience. With the concept of shadow play, I push back on the drive for visibility in sectors of the LGBT movement. For some queer subjects, visibility has facilitated concrete gains like marriage equality, employment protections, cultural funding, and resources for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. However, as some queer theorists argue, efforts at visibility also enable surveillance, backlash, and cooptation.1 At first glance, asexual art-making appears to jump on the bandwagon of LGBT visibility, trailing it like the A in the LGBTQIA+ initialism. However, not all formulations of asexuality focus on identification or visibility. Here, I offer a third alternative to invisibility and visibility: shadow play. Theatre that incorporates asexual identity often does so in conversation with other queer identities as a kind of foil or bas-relief to queer visibility politics. My idea of shadow play cites the theatrical device of using puppets held against a light source to project images onto a curtain. Shadow play conceptually challenges the dichotomies between lack and excess, which often dominate discussions of asexuality. A shadow combines lack and excess, absence and presence; it is an absence of light that becomes a visible, living presence by virtue of the light around it. Similarly, asexual visibility in theatre tends to reveal not only asexual experiences but also the sexual cultures surrounding them. [End Page 5] Playing in the Shadows The move to connect asexuality and queerness is not self-evident. The first explicit mention of asexuality I encountered in theatre was in Fun Home. In the musical, a young Alison Bechdel is exploring her sexuality as a first-year at Oberlin College. Talking to her friend Joan after a Gay Student Union meeting, Alison says, "The only thing I really know about myself is that I'm asexual. I'm not attracted to men but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm attracted to women" (Tesori and Kron 35). The next moment, Joan kisses her, and we're swept into the soaring ballad "Changing My Major," in which Alison describes her sexual awakening and overwhelming...
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Nov 1, 2023
Xu Wang + 4
Open Access