The Freedom Song of the Jigsaw Girl

The essay that you've been hearing about is now published and available for free online.

What Do You Mean You're Not Interested in Sex?: American Life and Law from an Asexual Perspective by Amanda C. Lee is now fully available in all kinds of formats on Smashwords. Please feel free to share as you like.

Description of the essay: An academic and personal exploration of asexuality and the asexual spectrum, this essay focuses on the complexities of human sexuality and sexual orientation and takes a look at how asexuality fits within the broad spectrum of human experience. An interdisciplinary work, the author weaves the history of the American LGBTQIA community, social science research, legal analysis, and individuals' stories to provide a powerful argument for the importance of visibility and community.

I will be sharing this on some of the asexual forums that I know of, but please feel free to signal boost. Also please let me know if you find any formatting issues, errors, etc.

This past semester I wrote an article on asexuality. It is both an academic research paper and a deeply personal essay. There are not many articles like it available and I think it would be helpful and interesting to others and would like to share it. I've been seriously struggling with the best way to share it though.

It contains enough legal analysis that I could submit it to a law review journal, like Tulane's Law and Sexuality Journal, or another academic journal focusing on similar research topics. Being published by an academic journal shows that the work has achieved some measure of peer review and provides some standing, but it also severely limits the audience. Many journals are only available through libraries, or subscription based archives (e.g. JSTOR, Hein Online).

My other thought is to self-publish and make the article available online in pdf and/or e-book formats. This would make the article available to a wider audience, but might affect the credibility.

I am more than a little nervous about publishing this paper regardless of publication format. I include a lot of personal reflection and history, which, as my professor pointed out, makes the paper more powerful and compelling. It is more than a trifle frightening to put such frank and honest discussion of personal issues out there under my own name, and yet I feel that it should be published under my own name and not a pseudonym. One of the main points of the paper is the importance of visibility, and using a pseudonym to publish the paper takes a bit of power out of that argument. I also have to decide if I want to promote the paper via this blog and other dreamwidth communities like asexuality. I already have an established presence and circle, many of whom have expressed interest in the paper. However, that would very clearly tie my real world identity to my blog. To be honest, the two are not all that disconnected or blurred, but it is a bit scary to give up that last little illusion of anonymity.

The paper was twice reviewed for content, grammar and structure by my professor, and there are a few small edits that I would like to do before publishing. However I would not mind some additional betaing and feedback. You do not need to be familiar with Bluebook citations (standard US legal citation format) as I am less worried about the citation formats than the overall content and spelling/grammar.

If you are interested in providing general feedback (general thoughts on content, flow, etc), editorial feedback (more specific feedback regarding grammar/spelling), or cheerleading purposes (feedback on whether or not it should be published) please PM me with an email address so that I can send you a .pdf of the article (or an alternate format like .doc).

Also please feel free to comment with your thought/suggestions regarding publication options.

I get to write a 20 page paper on asexuality this semester. I'm going to do a broad overview of the topic for the introduction, look at the issues of cultural discrimination and examine how that discrimination might play out in legal settings. I was particularly interested in addressing on of my classmates comments that basically said zie doubted that asexuals face the same sort of legal discrimination that other folks in the queer community do.

We're going to be allowed to use a wide variety of sources including websites and blogs. So if you have materials on this topic that you think might be helpful or interesting please feel free to mention them in the comments. I have some already (like AVEN) but am certainly on the lookout for more. I'd also love to bounce title ideas off folks.