We’ve 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—and ultimately explores new ways of making meaning out of the supposedly meaningless. Here, Cerankowski is joined in conversation with Hil Malatino and Ianna Hawkins Owen.

KJ Cerankowski is associate professor of comparative American studies and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Oberlin College. Cerankowski is author of Nothing Wanting: Asexuality and the Matter of Absence and Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming and coeditor of two editions of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives.

Hil Malatino is associate professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State and a senior research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute. Malatino is author of Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad and Trans Care.

Ianna Hawkins Owen is an advanced assistant professor in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Ross Gay

Intimacies / Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips

Depression: A Public Feeling / Ann Cvetkovich

Entangled Life / Merlin Sheldrake

“Public Universal Friend,” hosts Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei, Throughline podcast

Reed Erickson

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” (book chapter, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction)

Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes and In the Wake

Renée Green

Paradise Rot / Jenny Hval

Lauren Berlant

Agnes Martin

Yayoi Kusama

“Agnes Martin’s Homework” / The Brooklyn Rail

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
"Beautifully written, politically imaginative, and intellectually nuanced, Nothing Wanting uncovers an entirely new horizon for asexual scholarship and trans studies." —Nathan Snaza

"Limning the rich, still barely specified horizons between sex, asexuality, transgender, consumption, and relation, this book charts a space between the everything and the nothing, which is so much more, as KJ Cerankowski shows, than in between." —Mel Y. Chen

Nothing Wanting: Asexuality and the Matter of Absence by KJ Cerankowski is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.