Books by Ela Przybyło
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
Why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and d... more Why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability
Honing a “cranky” approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstrual positivity rhetoric. Drawing on their own experiences as a toxic shock survivor and a menstrual pain and period dysphoria sufferer, Ela Przybyło questions why, on what terms, and for whom menstruation has been fixed around experiences of pain. Instead, they present a vision for menstrual justice that refuses the womaning of bleeding and the further erasure, dismissal, and denial of menstrual pain as real pain.
If menstruating is framed as somatechnically elective, Przybyło contends, it provides avenues for both celebrating and appreciating cultures of bleeding as well as for remaining critical of the ways in which bleeding has been used as a transphobic and sexist tool to fix gender in place.
Ohio State University Press, 2019
Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality draws on Audre Lorde’s work on erotics... more Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality draws on Audre Lorde’s work on erotics and the burgeoning scholarship in asexuality studies to propose an alternative language for discussing forms of intimacy that are not reducible to sex or sexuality and that challenge compulsory sexuality.
https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214046.html
Palgrave, 2018
Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—i... more Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—it has long functioned as a social category that demarcates access to social, cultural, and political spaces and capital. The editors of and authors in this collection harness intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches in order to examine ugliness as a political category that is deployed to uphold established notions of worth and entitlement. On the Politics of Ugliness identifies and challenges the harmful effects that labels and feelings of ugliness have on individuals and the socio-political order. It explores ugliness in relation to the intersectional processes of racialization, colonization and settler colonialism, gender-making, ableism, heteronormativity, and fatphobia. On the Politics of Ugliness asks that we fight against visual injustice and imagine new ways of seeing.
Edited Special Issues by Ela Przybyło
Feral Feminisms, 2022
Digital painting done for the Carnival of Aces, March 2021. Caption written at the time: "never d... more Digital painting done for the Carnival of Aces, March 2021. Caption written at the time: "never did a painting as a carnival post, but I think I might try to do them more from now on-this one's messy lol, but drawn recalling my feeling being in dreams that seem sexual but not in a really human-bodily way-either I'm a humanoid form surrounded by abstract forms that press in on me, or I myself am an abstract, cloudy being touched by more humanoid figures-no skin on skin contact, just a lot of pressure and thought and emotion, if those sound different enough-here, messy as this kind of is, thinking about lying on my stomach and getting a back massage from whatever forces are moving around in my dream lol." Ulysses Constance Bougie (he/they) is a creative writer, visual artist, and academic bitch with bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the University of Missouri, respectively. He is currently a graduate instructor with focuses in asexual and aromantic studies, composition studies, and multimodal + neuro/queer rhetorics at Illinois State University. They recently published a chapbook of old poems entitled my god(s)(?). Find him on Twitter as @5tephendeadalu5 or via their website, https://cpbwrites.wordpress.com/. Credits Feral Feminisms Issue 10.2. Spring 2022 www.feralfeminisms.com Feral Feminisms is an independent, inter-media, peer-reviewed, and open access online journal committed to equitable knowledge-making and knowledge-sharing. We are part of the Radical Open Access Collective, a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses committed to horizontal alliances and creative experimentation. As a journal ran by volunteer/unpaid editors, we welcome your support through donations, which will go toward maintaining the journal. If you donate, your support will be acknowledged on our website and in our forthcoming issues.
Feminist Formations, 2020
Introduction to special issue on The Erotics of Asexualities and Nonsexualities: Intersectional A... more Introduction to special issue on The Erotics of Asexualities and Nonsexualities: Intersectional Approaches.
English Studies in Canada (ESC), 2014
(Derritt Mason and Ela Przybylo) Recognizing that we cannot wholly pin down a concept that circul... more (Derritt Mason and Ela Przybylo) Recognizing that we cannot wholly pin down a concept that circulates in defiant resistance to definition, this issue understands hysteria as a diagnostic trope assigned to a series of symptoms—performed, manifested, and/or expressed at the level of the body—and functioning in every case as an index of cultural norms that hysteria always exceeds and sometimes resists. Today, hysteria commonly circulates with reference to collective and individual social performances of excessive behaviour, and although it has been by and large disarticulated from gender and medical discourse hysteria remains haunted by its history and etymology.
Articles and Chapters by Ela Przybyło
IMAGINATIONS: JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES, 2026
In this piece I draw on my experiences as a neuroqueer editor of the peer-reviewed, intersectiona... more In this piece I draw on my experiences as a neuroqueer editor of the peer-reviewed, intersectional, and intermedia independent journal Feral Feminisms and on disability justice to hone a short manifestx on crip publishing. While peer-reviewed journals often demand free, invisible, and feminized labor along with high-speed efficiency, I imagine crip approaches to publishing as necessitating such principles as slowness, anti-fascism, recognition, care, failure, multiple mediums for knowledge-making, and community building. The piece begins with a reflection from the “Bed Sorbonne” or academic’s bed office, and moves into a consideration of how thinking sustainable publishing with lichen can enliven our publishing praxes. Finally, I outline the nine part manifestx as a starting point for imagining crip informed publication models. The hybrid and art-based piece engages with the theme of sustainable publishing by thinking about how to make publishing sustainable—as in doable, feasible, possible, limitless— both for crip authors/creators and crip journal editors.
https://imaginationsjournal.ca/index.php/imaginations/en/article/view/29734
Transnational Feminist Pedagogies: Meanings, Methods, and Experiences, 2026
In Transnational Feminist Pedagogies: Meanings, Methods, and Experiences, edited by Debjani Chakr... more In Transnational Feminist Pedagogies: Meanings, Methods, and Experiences, edited by Debjani Chakravarty, Samantha L. Vandermeade, and Suchismita Banerjee
University of Toronto Press, 2026
Chapter in Queer Print Cultures: Resistance, Subversion, and Community, edited by VANCE BYRD and ... more Chapter in Queer Print Cultures: Resistance, Subversion, and Community, edited by VANCE BYRD and JAVIER SAMPER VENDRELL
Elgar Encyclopedia of Queer Studies, 2025
From Elgar Encyclopedia of Queer Studies, Edited by Rob Cover and Christy Newman
In her popula... more From Elgar Encyclopedia of Queer Studies, Edited by Rob Cover and Christy Newman
In her popular non-fiction book, ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, Angela Chen (2020) imagines what it would be like to create asexual representations for asexual (ace) people. Chen’s book is, in many ways, an effort to educate allosexual (or non-asexual) people on asexuality. Yet Chen also dreams of a day when that will no longer be needed, when aces “will move closer to not feeling that any explanation is necessary” and “when aces reject the gaze that evaluates our identities so narrowly” (p. 84). Like members of many sexual minorities, asexuals routinely face damaging and undermining narratives, such as that their orientation is not “real” or that it is a phase. Yet, unlike most sexual minorities, aces are also met with undermining narratives from within the queer community such as through suggestions that asexuality is a form of repression. This entry aims to challenge these harmful narratives through asserting that asexuality is inherently queer, discussing some of the many contributions asexuality has already made to queer cultures, knowledges and theories.
Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, 2024
This chapter explores asexual erotics in relation to eco-sexualities, Indigenous eco-erotics, and... more This chapter explores asexual erotics in relation to eco-sexualities, Indigenous eco-erotics, and queer ecologies. It begins by establishing a dialogue between Melissa K. Nelson and Kim TallBear with asexuality studies, looking at how their work opens up onto erotic formulations of kinship between humans and the more-than-human world. Next, the chapter considers ace-ecologies through a series of propositions that challenge compulsory sexuality, amatonormativity, and settler colonial rubrics of relating. In the final section, the chapter explores eco and body performance artist, Teresa Murak, for how her work builds kinship and erotics with watercress. Energized by the work of ace studies, this chapter develops the framework of asexual erotics to explore some of the vital ways that asexual theories can help hone an asexual approach to ecologies, or an ecological approach to asexualities—an ace-ecologies.
Studies in Social Justice, 2024
In this co-authored reflection by seven graduate students and one instructor, we revisit the “Apo... more In this co-authored reflection by seven graduate students and one instructor, we revisit the “Apocalyptic Feminisms” graduate class taught in Fall 2020, at the height of the pandemic, in which students were asked to engage with interdisciplinary writing on the Anthropocene and to hone their own feminist praxes through going on and documenting their walks. We reflect on the “Walk and Movement Reading Instagram Engagements” assignment, exploring what walking can offer to deepen theoretical, methodological, and praxis-based approaches to environmental and place-based learning. We do this by writing from a cascading voice approach, where each reflection stands on its own and together builds into a whole greater than its parts. Following on an introduction to the course and assignment, we begin with a conceptual outlining of the meanings of place, decolonization, and academic community. Next, each of the graduate student collaborators responds to the following prompt, “How did the walking project on IG [Instagram] influence how you thought about questions of place, decolonization, and classroom community during a pandemic?” Each co-author develops a robust engagement with this question drawing on their own pandemic Fall 2020 semester, their photographs from the course, and the insights and practices they developed in conversation with each other throughout the span of the semester. Together, this reflection offers thoughts on the feminist and place-based utilities of walking pedagogy as well as, through collaboration, challenges the very way in which academic scholarship is done at the site of the late capitalist academy and its topos of success, competition, and meritocracy.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2025
This piece draws on femme studies to explore queer relationalities with rivers in the context of ... more This piece draws on femme studies to explore queer relationalities with rivers in the context of Central and Eastern Europe. It begins by analyzing ableist, fatphobic, sexist, and Eastern-suspicious environmentalist depictions of pollution in waterways, looking at the Baltic Sea docu-series. Next, the article looks to the Polish art troupe, Sister Rivers, which builds “femmeships” between rivers and human kin while developing an aesthetics of excess (Schwartz 2023). I argue that Sister Rivers exemplifies a femme mode of relationality with the more-than-human world that helps to navigate water grief, or the confrontation with the loss of waterways and their biodiversity.
Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies (Routledge), 2024
In this chapter, I provide a genealogy of asexuality for Women's and Gender Studies (WGS). Focusi... more In this chapter, I provide a genealogy of asexuality for Women's and Gender Studies (WGS). Focusing on political asexuality of the sixties and seventies, or an articulation of asexuality connected to the critique of the institutions of heterosexuality, romantic love, and the role of sex, I wish to disprove two common ideas that have implicitly surfaced within WGS: that political asexuality was of relevance only to white feminist politics, and that it was not only unqueer but actually at odds with queer politics. Drawing on antiracist formulations of political asexuality, I hold that political asexuality is a conceptual tool of feminist change-making and worldmaking. By thinking about political asexuality on expanded terms, I suggest that WGS might effectively develop a critical approach to compulsory sexuality through examining the importance of another antiracist feminist concept--that of erotics--as a distinctly feminist paradigm for rethinking intimacies.
Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, 2024
This article develops "menstrual methodologies" for ungendering menstruation and attending to the... more This article develops "menstrual methodologies" for ungendering menstruation and attending to the chronic pain and dysphoria present in menstrual embodiment. Specifically, it unfolds from the experiences of a nonbinary person with undiagnosed endometriosis through developing a series of menstrual methodologies, including ungendering menstruation; thinking with pain through crip time, crankiness, and autoethnography; and a justice-based approach to menstruation; followed by an application of these methodologies to a recent case study. Following on an autobiographical prelude, I begin with an introduction to menstrual methodologies and next outline each one. Menstrual methodologies, I argue, provide a toolkit not only for those who study menstruation and menstruators but for researchers across disciplines who are interested in questions of gender, embodiment, pain, medical science, justice, and disability.
Polish Literature as World Literature, Bloomsbury’s “Literatures as World Literature” series, 2022
This chapter argues for the importance of rethinking both world literature and Polish literature ... more This chapter argues for the importance of rethinking both world literature and Polish literature from the perspective of queer Polish literature. Focusing on Tomasz Jedrowski’s novel, Swimming in the Dark (2020), the chapter considers the use of water in the novel with an attention to how it plays on the themes of border imperialism, sexuality and national identity, and transnational circulation of queer texts. Jedrowski’s novel, set in state socialist Poland of the seventies and eighties, is a queer love story that mounts a challenge to the heterosexualization of Polish literature, and—being written in English from the diasporic standpoint of Jedrowski who was born in Germany to Polish parents but who continues to be invested in Polish culture and identity—it demands a rethinking of what can count as Polish literature. The chapter argues that by reading against the tide and being attentive to queer movements in writing through an analytics of water, Polish and world literatures can continue to be reimagined and reinvigorated.
For edited collection, Polish Literature as World Literature, edited by Piotr Florczyk and K. A. Wisniewski. London: Bloomsbury for Bloomsbury’s “Literatures as World Literature” series. 161 – 176.
Queering Sharing in the Marketized University, 2023
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Sexuality Education, 2022
In her groundbreaking and educational popular nonfiction book ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About ... more In her groundbreaking and educational popular nonfiction book ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, Angela Chen (2020) reflects on the importance of creating asexual representations and stories for asexual (ace) people by ace people. While on the one hand, she acknowledges the importance of educating allosexual (or non-asexual) people on asexuality, on the other, she anticipates the day when that will no longer be necessary, and when as aces “we will move closer to not feeling that any explanation is necessary” and “when aces reject the gaze that evaluates our identities so narrowly” (p. 84). The goal of this piece is to help bridge the gap between those two positions by moving closer toward that “feeling” of not needing “any explanation” for asexuality that Chen refers to. First, I examine in this entry definitions central to the lexicology of ace identities, paying particular attention to both ace and aromantic (aro) identities as well as to the significance of rethinking attraction. Next, I explore who asexuals are, drawing on prevalence rates and community composition. Finally, I explore the significance of compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity as conceptual frameworks. Knowledge of asexuality and aromanticism as well as compulsory sexuality, amatonormativity, and the dynamic possibilities of attraction are vital to sexuality education, which often neglects to include ace and aro related content both in schol- arship and pedagogical practice.
Introducing the New Sexuality Studies (Fourth Edition), 2022
QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking , 2021
In this article, we explore and discuss the role that zines play in asexual and aromantic communi... more In this article, we explore and discuss the role that zines play in asexual and aromantic community and worldmaking. Drawing on intersectional feminist zine studies and asexuality studies, we consider how zines, and in particular Taking the Cake, Brown and Gray, and An Aromantic Manifesto, have provided an important Do-It-Yourself (DIY) platform for asexual (ace) and aromantic (aro) people to navigate their identities, challenge compulsory sexuality, and reimagine ace and aro worlds. Adopting the framework of Lordean erotics, we focus in our analysis on how ace and aro zinesters navigate questions of queerness, gender, ability, race, and racism. We enter the little backroom in the stationary store where rows of zines are kept in place with twine. It's a queer little space but we might not find asexuality or aromanticism here, just as we didn't find it in the gay bookstore. Instead, we bring the a-zines with us-everywhere we go-in case the place needs them, in case someone needs them, in case someone doubting their own existence needs a voice to tell them that asexual and aromantic people do exist.
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Books by Ela Przybyło
Honing a “cranky” approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstrual positivity rhetoric. Drawing on their own experiences as a toxic shock survivor and a menstrual pain and period dysphoria sufferer, Ela Przybyło questions why, on what terms, and for whom menstruation has been fixed around experiences of pain. Instead, they present a vision for menstrual justice that refuses the womaning of bleeding and the further erasure, dismissal, and denial of menstrual pain as real pain.
If menstruating is framed as somatechnically elective, Przybyło contends, it provides avenues for both celebrating and appreciating cultures of bleeding as well as for remaining critical of the ways in which bleeding has been used as a transphobic and sexist tool to fix gender in place.
https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214046.html
Edited Special Issues by Ela Przybyło
Articles and Chapters by Ela Przybyło
https://imaginationsjournal.ca/index.php/imaginations/en/article/view/29734
In her popular non-fiction book, ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, Angela Chen (2020) imagines what it would be like to create asexual representations for asexual (ace) people. Chen’s book is, in many ways, an effort to educate allosexual (or non-asexual) people on asexuality. Yet Chen also dreams of a day when that will no longer be needed, when aces “will move closer to not feeling that any explanation is necessary” and “when aces reject the gaze that evaluates our identities so narrowly” (p. 84). Like members of many sexual minorities, asexuals routinely face damaging and undermining narratives, such as that their orientation is not “real” or that it is a phase. Yet, unlike most sexual minorities, aces are also met with undermining narratives from within the queer community such as through suggestions that asexuality is a form of repression. This entry aims to challenge these harmful narratives through asserting that asexuality is inherently queer, discussing some of the many contributions asexuality has already made to queer cultures, knowledges and theories.
For edited collection, Polish Literature as World Literature, edited by Piotr Florczyk and K. A. Wisniewski. London: Bloomsbury for Bloomsbury’s “Literatures as World Literature” series. 161 – 176.