This month\u2019s Carnival of Aros has the theme \u201cBeing aromantic in an allonormative world,\u201d which got me thinking about some facts I discovered about aromantic representation compared to asexual representation when I was doing my honors thesis as a combined aro\/ace project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hang around the community, and sooner or later you\u2019ll notice people talk about how aromanticism is even further behind in awareness\/acceptance than asexuality, even within the ace community sometimes. Of course I believed it, but as someone who\u2019s both aro and ace and has tended to see my ace identity as more meaningful because I have stronger feelings about sex than romance, and discovered I was ace first of the two, I can\u2019t say I noticed it much in my own life. But then I needed secondary sources for my thesis, and\u2026wow, there is a clear gap in how much attention has been paid to each of them, that I hadn’t noticed before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(To avoid confusion, I\u2019m not arguing that asexuality has “too much” focus, so don’t take this to mean we should stop talking and writing about it as much – it needs more attention too. What I’m trying to highlight is how aromanticism needs even more<\/em> attention.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s out there for asexuality:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n When I searched my library\u2019s article databases for stuff on asexuality, it wasn\u2019t hard to find stuff. Certainly not the numbers that other subjects would have turned up, but enough resources to find what I wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s quite recent that we have many nonfiction books on asexuality, but that\u2019s changing since 2020. Here\u2019s a list of every one I\u2019m aware of, with publication dates:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now let\u2019s look at aro resources:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Finding articles was\u2026a challenge. Just searching \u201caromanticism\u201d without even specifying anything more specific turned up less than a page of results, and those that were relevant generally had aromanticism alongside asexuality – never as the primary focus on its own, like asexuality often was. Always the sidekick, never a turn to be the hero despite deserving equal attention, so to speak. It just didn\u2019t look like people were researching aromanticism unless it was relevant to asexual people\u2019s experiences, and even that wasn\u2019t very often. (With the obvious disclaimer that this was just MY university\u2019s library, and would not catch literally every article out there or be an exact match for what other people might find at their libraries.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n And for books, ace books generally seem to mention aromanticism (I have not read them all, but I would be quite surprised by an ace book that completely failed to discuss the romantic counterpart that so often overlaps), but they\u2019re not books primarily about<\/em> aromanticism; they\u2019re books about asexuality that also have some info on aromanticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Elizabeth Brake\u2019s Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law (Studies in Feminist Philosophy)<\/em> in 2012 should be mentioned, as it\u2019s the origin of the word \u201camatonormativity\u201d to my understanding, but I don\u2019t know how much aromanticism specifically is a major topic in a way comparable to the other books here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which leaves this list of books that would readily be thought of as relevant if you were asked for books about being aromantic:<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, 5 books compared to 15, of which 2 aren\u2019t even released yet and 2 more of the remaining 3 were just published this year<\/em>. If this is similar to the ace list, hopefully this is a sign we\u2019ll see a few more popping up in the next few years?<\/p>\n\n\n\n And a little tangent on fiction while I\u2019m here\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d also like to see more stories without romance, including ace stories. I don\u2019t have as firm numbers because there\u2019s a lot more aspec fiction than nonfiction out there, but it seems to me like even a lot of ace stories are like \u201cace character trying to navigate romance while being ace,\u201d and those are good stories to write and I\u2019m glad people are, but personally, my aromantic self has zero interest in romance and doesn\u2019t read a lot of the aspec rep that\u2019s already there (despite sort of needing to because I\u2019m also writing aspec stories and should be aware of what\u2019s been done) because of that. Can we also get more stories for my type of aro, pretty please?<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Nice infodump. What am I supposed to do with this knowledge?<\/strong>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n So overall, a tangible look at what people mean they say aromanticism is still left out compared to asexuality. We still need more awareness, acceptance, and literature about both, but we especially<\/em> need it for aromanticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And also now you have a reading list if you were looking for non fic books about either topic :).<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you know of any books that I\u2019m missing here, feel free to let me know and I\u2019ll add them to my list! I try to catch everything but obviously I can\u2019t be in every corner of the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n P.S. Another example my queerplatonic partner pointed out when he reviewed this:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s also the fact that when we went to pride last weekend, there were actually about as many ace flags as other non-rainbow ones (since the rainbow is obviously the go-to, so not a good baseline for comparison on its own), but in 7 hours at the parade and following festival at which there were apparently 175,000+ attendees over the day, besides my own I only saw ONE aro flag plus a demiaro flag. (And yes, other-aro-flag-person and I went \u201coh my god, I love your flag\u201d and pointed at each other like the Spiderman meme.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This month\u2019s Carnival of Aros has the theme \u201cBeing aromantic in an allonormative world,\u201d which got me thinking about some facts I discovered about aromantic representation compared to asexual representation when I was doing my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":284,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aromanticism","category-asexuality"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":372,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions\/372"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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