Naked indifferences: the ethics of (a)sexual representation

Where does the nude as a cyber-body-in-representation situate itself within the contemporary sexual oversaturation alongside the crisis of unfeeling and anxiety surrounding obscenity? Through an auto-theoretical approach, this article examines the circulation of my queer body as it negotiates with its ‘asexual resonances’. I locate my sexuality by looking at adolescence, with attention to the heteropatriarchal Indian discourse and the digital proliferation of pornography and sex as central to the establishment of ‘positive’ identity. I read this private visual modality alongside Shannon Bell’s conception of ‘pornosophy’, a concept that in my analysis allows for the reinstating of a critical distance between sexual representation and sexual acts. How does an alternate (a)sexual image expand this ethical distance and its relation to explicitness and obscurity? How do asexual aesthetics and sexual unfeeling recalibrate the sensational/unsensational dichotomy? I analyse this asexual impasse beyond the economy of sexual optimism and the historically negative construction of sexual coldness within the simultaneous emergence of sexology and popular pornography.