thingsthatmakeyouacey:

Here’s the thing: perhaps be glad you don’t understand how “asexuality” as a concept has been a part of white supremacy. To a lot of us, it’s not just some abstract concept. It’s a brutal reality.

In my family history, for example, marriage was a form of survival and sex was an act of violence. British colonialism in the Caribbean ensured that female indentured servants – and before them, slaves – were useless property:

labelled as “the harlots of empire” by the british, this is an epithet that came to haunt their existence throughout indenture & long after to the extent that in the west indies, amongst indians, the word randi/रण्डी became a commonly used synonym in bhojpuri for ‘woman.’ there is a hell of a lot to say about what kind of jobs women were expected to perform and the specific dangers that came with them…

indentured labourers were housed throughout the indenture period in the same shacks that black slaves had had to live in, not long before these being long sheds made of corrugated metal, partitioned into small cubicles, in which a person or family was expected to live. when the sun shone on them, you can imagine how gruellingly hot they would’ve become, and most importantly for women, the partitions between the cubicles did not reach the roof. it was possible to stand on a stool etc. and look over the top of the partition at your neighbours. this was deadly for women, particularly single women, whose only option was to marry themselves at the earliest opportunity in order to protect themselves from harassment and r*pe. this was the theory, at least, and the one indian women were coerced into following.

in practice, with the partitions not meeting the ceiling, once a woman’s husband had gone to work, she was left to defend herself to the point where it was difficult to bathe or change clothes or any action without being watched by a stranger whose intentions were clear. what it meant for indian women was that marriage didn’t offer the security it was supposed to provide, and many women were forced to take up multiple partners just to protect themselves from harassment and threats, leading to generalised accusations of infidelity and sex work which turned out to be deadly. so many women were murdered by their boyfriends/husbands that it has its own name, “coolie wife murders”…

…a woman who fled to the colonial authorities was unflinchingly dragged back to her partner, with the implicit knowledge she would be killed. a woman who begged for help from one of her partners against the other could just as easily be murdered by him tomorrow. “i kill my wife, why not? i kill no other man’s wife” being said by a young indian man, and have seen quotes by white visitors to the colony who, on the subject of the murders said “we can hardly help admiring this trait in his character.”

“such murders occurred at a rate ninety times greater in Guiana than in India in the previous decade [this report from 1871]…"In the heartland district where most migrants were from, the picture was even darker: Indian men killed their romantic partners at a rate 142 times greater in Guiana than in India’s Northwestern Provinces and Oudh.”

laws over time became more and more lenient towards wife murdering. where initially it was met with the death penalty, the plantocracy & indian men appealed to the judiciary, in light of the expenses paid to bring them to the caribbean & the value of their labour to remit the sentences given, to the point where murdering a woman eventually, at best, caused you to be relocated to another plantation as sufficient punishment. and it is worth noting also that the numbers of women recorded dead reflect only those cases where prosecution was successfully brought against a man. undoubtedly there were many murders where there was no prosecution. the rate was higher than recorded.

marriage was not a safe-haven for women either. the scanty rights protecting women were swept away once she got married. becoming her husband’s property, she had no right to leave him, and if he died before her and they had children, unless she could find another husband quickly, she was liable to be sent back to india as a nuisance an her children taken from her and put into orphanages where they were [forcibly] converted to christianity & put into work houses until they were ready to be married. 

(source)

So how does this reflect personally? In the generations since “liberation” from the system of indenture servitude, marriage still has the connotation of survival, or at least has for my parents’ generation. It is a mode of protection from government, poverty, and colonialism, turned into a mark of piety and respect for the family.

This is a coerced and compulsory sexuality, and one sourced from white supremacy. The social status of indentured servants and furthermore indentured women allowed for the Empire to denigrate our people to animals, where rape was seen as deserved (a pattern we see in the US with how the justice system deems Black women as deserving of sexual assault or else unfeeling). South Asian women were useless in labor and thus had to deserve murder and sexual crimes.

Sexual abuse is extremely pervasive in my and other family narratives and often silenced because of the nature of marriage as a form of survival. Later colonization – the political strife in the 50s-70s with the institution of multiple tyrants by the British and Americans – just exacerbated this system.

What’s this have to do with asexuality, then? Sexuality is a way to colonize a people. It is a way to divide the people you are enslaving (say, by gender) and thus weaken them (via justification of murder). And these traumas persist in cultures.

When I say it’s difficult for me to say I’m asexual, I really do mean, it is viscerally horrible to consider myself asexual. It is violent. It makes me think of my mother and all the women in my family put into arranged marriages and the regret the men face as they emplace their daughters in these marriages purely out of fear for them. It makes me think of the conviction my grandfather has when he tells us young girls that we need to be financially independent and educate ourselves, because we finally can be safe outside of marriage. It makes me think of the stories of soldiers roaming neighborhoods and grabbing women from inside their homes.

Asexuality is what they want. It is what the soldiers, and the masters, and the foreign governments want. They want us to lack something they deem human so they don’t have to empathize. They want us to not desire because it gives them sick satisfaction. They want us not to feel because then they can justify crimes against us in our own courts. How could it not pain me to call myself asexual?

I literally feel all of this weight every time I have to confront my sexuality, when I have to confront my family and my family history, which I’m trying to uncover because the British literally wiped our records. 

So maybe be glad that you cannot personalize the ways in which white supremacy operates via sexuality. But don’t think it’s some theoretical abstraction that has no place in discussions of asexuality.