/u/mastelsa on Questions for a book I am writing.

What pitfalls have you seen from poor or misguided representation that I should look out for?

One of the things I'd caution against is treating asexuality the same as just straight-but-uninterested. I think there are fundamental ways that asexuality and/or aromanticism affects someone's interaction with the world.

Coming of age, I didn't have the words or even the mental framework to explain the disconnect I felt from my peers. There was definitely a disconnect there, but I could pretty easily hide it to fit in better. The adults around me chanted things like "late bloomer" and it was terrifying to continue to not "bloom" and not understand why, because there was a framework for "late blooming" but there was no framework for not "blooming." There was a constant sneaking suspicion (which I had to work to avoid confronting) that there was something deeply and fundamentally wrong about me, because literally everyone else gets this.

There's a concept of "queer time" in queer theory that, imo, is one of the strongest arguments that the ace and aro communites are indeed queer and innately belong under the LGBT+ umbrella. The gist of it is that non-heteronormative people don't have the same life milestones laid out in front of us as cis-/straight people do. In fact, for much of history (including history that's in recent memory), many of those life milestones were literally inaccessible to queer people. Western society (and home economics) is very oriented around two-adult nuclear family structures, and someone who doesn't know whether they're ever going to have a relationship that fits into that framework (even if they find they do want one), is fighting an unceasing uphill battle against these social and economic norms. It's a constant low-key battle to maintain perspective and a sense of self-worth in a society that very heavily values a specific type of love over all others, and is very much designed around the assumption that it's something everyone experiences and wants.

Now that we're beginning to see more queer stories told in our media, a lot of those stories have shifted a bit away from "struggle narratives," and begun to indulge queer audiences in fictional worlds where no discrimination exists, which is wonderful--I love me some of that--it's good shit. But I think with asexuality we haven't had enough representation yet to have actually explored the "struggle narrative," and I think it's something we actually need to do a bit more of.

March 18, 2021 at 11:08PM