Overview

Advancing asexuality studies in new, queer directions-beyond identity and beyond the human We've all seen the page that states ""this page intentionally left blank"" or heard an authority figure declare ""nothing to see here, folks,"" and yet the so-called blank page has writing on it, and folks definitely have something to see. From the entry point of these and other paradoxical declarations of absence, KJ Cerankowski applies the aesthetics of asexuality to theorize silences, nothings, and emptiness. In the process, he explores new ways of making meaning out of the supposedly meaningless. Throughout this investigation into absences, Cerankowski moves intuitively and idiosyncratically, taking readers along a series of waypoints that include Border, the acclaimed horror film about a customs officer who can smell fear; Jenny Hval's discomfiting novel Paradise Rot; and disabled artist Finnegan Shannon's iconic benches. Experimental in form as well as content, Nothing Wanting offers an innovative and mischievous reading experience that plays with structural elements like redaction, erasure, supertext, and repetition. With a deeply anticapitalist, anticolonial motivating ideology, it pushes to the limits of language, subverting commonplace notions of books, knowledge, and what it is to be human. Moving beyond identity and representation, Nothing Wanting is playful, fascinating, and provocative as it conceives asexuality as additive and expansive rather than lacking. As it reveals the vibrant lifeworlds that hum in silences and thrum in stillnesses, Nothing Wanting pivots from the imposition of wanting nothing to the craving of nothing wanting: satisfied, yet always yearning for more worlds of thriving-for everything and everyone.

Full Product Details

9781517916435

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Beautifully written, politically imaginative, and intellectually nuanced, Nothing Wanting uncovers an entirely new horizon for asexual scholarship and trans studies. KJ Cerankowski remixes the groundwork for asexuality studies, unfolding worlds we might not notice because they’re quiet, barely perceptible, transitory, rotting into other forms.""-Nathan Snaza, author of Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man  

""Beautifully written, politically imaginative, and intellectually nuanced, Nothing Wanting uncovers an entirely new horizon for asexual scholarship and trans studies. KJ Cerankowski remixes the groundwork for asexuality studies, unfolding worlds we might not notice because they're quiet, barely perceptible, transitory, rotting into other forms."" - Nathan Snaza, author of Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man ""How do we come to know substance, but without binary certainty, and love even better what is found? Limning the rich, still barely specified horizons between sex, asexuality, transgender, consumption, and relation, this book charts - after mycelium, with less direction than purpose - a space between the everything and the nothing, which is so much more, as KJ Cerankowski shows, than in between."" - Mel Y. Chen, author of Animacies and Intoxicated

Author Information

KJ Cerankowski is author of Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming and coeditor of two editions of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives. He is associate professor of comparative American studies and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Oberlin College.

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