July 2015 Carnival of Aces Call for Submissions: Asexual History

It’s now July, and that means a new Carnival of Aces! For those of you not familiar with it, the Carnival of Aces is a recurring blogging event where we write and collect blog posts (or tumblr posts, or linkspams, or videos) on a select topic each month. You can view the masterpost of previous topics here. Last month’s topic was “Mental Health”, and you can view the submissions here. Anyone can write a post – to be featured in the carnival, just post a link to your article here in the comments or shoot me an email at sennkestra@gmail.com. No worries if you don’t have a blog – we can host posts for you here.

Submissions are due by August 1, but if you think you might take a little longer you can just shoot me a message to let me know and I can hold a spot for you :)

This month’s topic is “Asexual History”

For all that the asexual community is a young movement compared to communities like the LGBT community, we’ve developed a lot over the last decade and a half–and I’m still amazed that it’s really been that long. To put things in perspective, there are people on AVEN now who weren’t even born yet when the site was first created. But while we talk a lot about our speculation for the future of the community, there’s still very little formal conversation about our past. As such, for this carnival, I want to talk about our history – both how we remember our past and how we record our present for future aces. Some possible ideas for this topic include:

• What events or trends do you see as the major highlights of asexual history?
• What have been some of the highest and lowest points in asexual history, in your view?
• What memories of your personal experiences with “asexual history” (whether it’s five years or five months ago) would you like to share with future aces?
• What should we be doing (if anything) to record our history?
• Why should we as a community care about asexual history? Why should non-asexual people care about asexual history?
• Is it possible to speak of an “asexual history” before the development of self-identified asexual communities? If so, how should we approach that kind of history?
• Is it appropriate to speculate about the a/sexuality of individuals who lived before asexuality and sexual orientations were a well-accepted concept?
• They say that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it – what lessons can we learn from ace communities past that are important for ace communities moving forward?
• How can we prevent the loss of institutional memory as older members move on from our communities to other things?
• How is asexual historiography affected by the fact that ace communities are largely internet based?
• What unanswered questions do you have about asexual history that you would like to see addressed?
• And, of course, anything else not on this list!