Asexuality Studies Lecture: Dr. Kimberly Kotel
The Asexuality Studies Lecture was established in the spring of 2022, to coincide with the Glitterary Festival, a queer literary conference. We subsequently moved this lecture to the fall, to coincide with asexuality week at the end of October. This year’s Asexuality Studies Lecture will be delivered by Dr. Kimberly Kotel.
Kimberly (Kim) Kotel (she/her) is a visiting lecturer in American Studies for the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. She has a Ph.D. in English with a Graduate Minor in Gender Studies from the University of Mississippi, an M.A. in English and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Chapman University, and a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. Her dissertation research explored asexual impulses in early 20th century French, American, and English literature during heightened periods of pronatalism. She teaches a graduate class in advanced academic writing and undergraduate classes in American literature and U.S. history and culture.
Can you tell us about your current position?
Serving as a visiting lecturer for The Obama Institute has been an incredible experience. I’ve had the opportunity to design and teach graduate and undergraduate courses for students from around the world. This year, our advanced academic writing course is focused on food studies, and so many incredible research papers have developed from it, ranging from analyses of survival video games to examining the evolving relationship between grocery stores, food-brand marketing, and the consumer in early twentieth century America. The literature seminar I’m teaching this semester focuses on short story speculative fiction as social critique, and the class has traced a few recurring themes across nearly all of the short stories we’ve read– two of the themes being “environmental unease” and “entrapment”, which has brought to light an overarching ecocritical perspective that I hadn’t expected to be there. As part of the lecturing team, I’ve also had the chance to act as first and second examiner for Bachelor’s and Master's theses, respectively, which has been a treat to be a part of.
What is your current research?
Right now I’m following a few different threads– two are ace-related. One of them picks up where my dissertation ends and considers how factors such as trauma or aging can chronically alter a person’s sexual desire and/or attraction and usher them into a limited asexual modality or an evolution into an accepted, even welcomed, asexual orientation. The second caught my attention after reading Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” with my class– I’m curious to learn more about the interplay between science fiction and asexualities. The third has to do with James Baldwin, Jean Genet, and Fresnes Prison, located just outside of Paris, where both writers were incarcerated (Genet in 1942 and Baldwin in 1949); what is the relationship between this space and these writers? How does identity (shared and divergent aspects of it) mediate their perspectives of their time there?
How has your minor in gender studies informed both your academic work and your teaching?
Gender and sexuality sit squarely in the middle of both of those endeavors for me. There isn’t– and hasn’t been– a research focus for me that excluded gender and sexuality, nor has a class gone by where we haven’t considered the implications of either, whether we’re discussing a historical event, something as seemingly straight-forward as paper organization, or a short story about killer trees.