February Carnival of Aces

[cinnamon_possum]

Normativity, Community, and Creating Ourselves

This month's Carnival of Aces is being hosted by Ace Film Reviews, and the theme is Comparing Ace Spaces.

• There are many online platforms that asexuals use to connect.  What are your experiences with AVEN, WordPress, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube, etc.?  What do you think are their relative merits?
• Do you feel more comfortable in some ace spaces than others?  What factors make some spaces feel more welcoming and others more alienating?
• To what extent do different ace spaces have their own culture, language, etc.?  Can we really talk about an asexual community, or are there in fact multiple communities, each with their own subtly different take on aceness?

So I am of the age (read: youngster) that my first foray into the internet coincided with me discovering asexuality and queerness. Over the course of the almost decade since then, I have bobbled through a variety of social media platforms and engaged with their queer, and specifically ace, niches to varying extents. Some experiences have been positive, and some have been outright awful. 

I think it is crucial to talk about multiple ace communities, rather than one. The differences between them are often not subtle. We have places like the AVEN forums where some of their most prominent members are anti-gray and do not support gray-a identities as part of the community. We have spaces such as the AVEN forums, Reddit, and some Discord servers where people mostly ask questions - is this sexual attraction? is there a label for this? is anyone else repulsed by this? etc. There are other spaces, such as Pillowfort, the TAAAP Pride Chats Discord server, and a variety of Wordpress blogs in which deeper, more theoretical conversations are encouraged, and where people ask more abstract questions such as what should ace activists focus on and how ace identity forms differently across intersections. We have spaces like Tumblr where infographics are more widely spread, and spaces like Twitter where long threads of educational topics are more normalized. YouTube has video essays and q&a's. Sites like Waterfall, Mastodon, TikTok, and Facebook have ace communities that I know of but cannot and will not access. I think its unfair to treat all of these spaces like they make up one cohesive ace community. The only consistency is that we are there, and we exist, and we talk to each other. Past that, its hard to make any kind of generalization or find a unifying thread. 

Because of this, I am reluctant to try and treat any space as better than another or as more accurate than another. All of these spaces are responding to different needs and have created different cultures because of that. The aces who primarily interact with other aces via the AVEN forums are not worse off because they discuss different things or hold different values than the ace niches of Tumblr or Mastodon. The ace community is large enough and diverse enough that not everyone is going to agree with each other or even agree on what "asexual" means. This is not a unique feature to the ace community and I think it would be regressive to act like its a bad thing. 

It, unfortunately, means that being ace in one space can be quite liberating and affirming, while being in another can put you on the receiving end of harm and vitriol. There are certain ace spaces that I simply have to avoid for my own mental health, and there were certainly ace spaces that I stumbled into that convinced me that I was not ace. The ability to enter an affinity space and feel connected to the people there can be the making or breaking point for someone claiming ace identity, and what happens when a space breaks them and they do not wish to attempt to find another? 

It is often discussed how certain spaces can be unfulfilling or not useful due to differences in identity - as an example, an alloromantic ace may not get much out of a space filled with romance repulsed aroaces. However, I think we need to look deeper than simply numbers and demographics, and start thinking about ways that asexual spectrum identities are defined, what is considered "possible" for ace identity, and what is deemed "impossible", "contradictory", or "wrong". I think we should focus on moving away from the culture of defining certain experiences and feelings as ace or not, as it may do more justice to look at what ace or questioning people offer as parts of their sexuality and apply an ace lens to it. A bit like giving a text or movie a queer reading, this could help create ways of understanding how asexuality works for different people and how it meshes with their other identities and experiences, rather than applying a checklist to people to determine if they match a given definition of asexuality. Allowing asexuality to be applied to or made use of by people rather than trying to make a person asexual. 

I don't think this will catch on anytime soon. Many people still look for buzzwords that indicate asexuality in people's stories, treating experiences and feelings as rebuttals to or evidence for asexuality, with the final decision left up to the jury and not the defendant. I think this has become entangled with homonormative ideas of sexuality as innate and the "born this way" narrative. And of course, not all ace spaces are like this, but I have noticed that many are, and it is those spaces that tend to drive me away, as I am simply not interested in being put to trial with my orientation at the mercy of a jury of internet usernames. 

If we consider this behavior to be homornormativity, then we can look at the greater picture of how homonormativity is an issue and why it will not be a simple thing to dig out. Mainstream LGBTQ+ activism is extremely homonormative, where the people who get the most spotlight as deserving of the rights of the privileged class are those who already possess many privileges (white, able bodied, affluent, etc) and who do not challenge societal structures such as capitalism, neoliberalism, amatonormativity, and white supremacy. Those who are considered "bad queers", make the community "look bad", etc, are those who embody a queerness that cannot be assimilated into the capitalist and white nuclear family. Queerness is boiled down to a few specific factors, generally same sex attraction, so everything else can be "just like you!" Queerness that refuses to be more than a few checked boxes, refuses to desire and grovel for the privileges of the oppressor class, and dares to leave the bedroom is considered deviancy that has nothing to do with sexuality. Activism stagnates, as we cannot convince people with power to give rights to those of us they deem undesirable, while those same people are more than happy to give rights to the queers that seem acceptable to them and then claim that as a sign of their progressiveness and goodness. 

Trying to dumb asexuality down into a few specific traits that one either does or does not have, and also understanding allosexuality as an opposite category with its own opposite traits and experiences, is stripping it of the many nuances and much of the meaning it can have for people in an attempt to make it resemble normative sexuality. This leaves behind those that are asexual in unpalatable or unrecognizable ways, and strips the community of the ability to understand and make a home in all that asexuality can be. 

I don't necessarily want to write off entire spaces and niches of ace community for engaging in these processes, though I am worried by the trend of so many spaces being filled with "I do x. Is x ace?" as if that framing could ever capture what asexuality is or could be. I also know that this framing is useful for those who desire group identity or who wish to lessen their anxiety, and as these are not feelings that I deal with, I do not want to speak as to what such people may need. Yet I do want to recognize these practices as pertaining to identity essentialism, homonormativity, and gatekeeping, and those are all things that I wish we could remove from the community. And I want people to actually feel free, or like they're coming home, when they identify as ace, rather than feeling the need to make themselves into an ace person and police themselves into ensuring that they meet the criteria of asexuality. 

So I would ask people that exist in or are willing to spend time in certain spaces if they would be willing to encourage non-normative and non-essentialist frameworks. What obstacles might be in the way for them? I figure the risk of ostracization, especially when we have a semi-limited amount of online community, is a major obstacle into encouraging people to shift their stance on asexual identity. Yet is the obstacle of having such a restrictive and definitive framework pervading our community spaces a bigger obstacle to the overall goal of loving our ace selves and helping other people love their ace selves? I would argue yes.

P.S. Happy Pokémon Day!!!

 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Allowing asexuality to be applied to or made use of by people rather than trying to make a person asexual. [...] I don't think this will catch on anytime soon.

This has been a prevailing cultural norm in the past, and it could be again. Certainly there are certain ace spaces that do still retain this norm, usually pretty vehemently. So I'm not sure the pessimism is warranted.

So I would ask people that exist in or are willing to spend time in certain spaces if they would be willing to encourage non-normative and non-essentialist frameworks. What obstacles might be in the way for them? I figure the risk of ostracization, especially when we have a semi-limited amount of online community, is a major obstacle into encouraging people to shift their stance on asexual identity.

I am very sure that I have a different outlook on this than you do, but I don't analyze the problem this way. I think the major obstacle to improving the robustness of thought in this area is that most people interact with the ace community casually (and there's nothing wrong with that), and the platforms where that casual interaction happen do not expose them to these sorts of ideas. It's not even that they're not slogan-ize-able (e.g. "Asexuality is a tool" or "Orientation isn't destiny") but that but that if you're only in the community very shallowly, it is hard to actually learn what slogans like that mean and they might become increasingly hollow. So, encouraging people to speak up about these ideas is on the right track, I think, but I think we also have to encourage people to engage with things more deeply than infographics and positivity posts by making sure they know further depth exists.

[cinnamon_possum]

"This has been a prevailing cultural norm in the past, and it could be again. Certainly there are certain ace spaces that do still retain this norm, usually pretty vehemently. So I'm not sure the pessimism is warranted."

Oh I believe that! I simply don't see it as something widespread or normalized in the community, and many of the first spaces I encountered were very much not like this (and I think I had a fairly normal welcome into the ace community, not a bizarre one).

And yeah, I agree that a lot of people are "casual" participants who aren't getting as neck-deep as others.

Thanks for reading~