Plan for the Week

TO DO THIS WEEK:

• Edit a-spec characters database and graphs - find way to visualise data about orientation and genre more clearly
• Finish reading Ending the Pursuit by Michael Paramo
• Respond to thesis feedback
• Finish writing up thematic analysis points
• Add focus group points to Findings section
• Add summaries of case study shows to TA method section

Reading of the week

Finished reading Ending the Pursuit! Absolutely wonderful book - I'm in awe of what Michael Paramo is doing with it and the scale of their ambition. I almost can't help comparing what I'm doing to their work - it makes everything I'm working on feel so small. Probably good to remember that I'm not like. The editor of an ace/aro/agender literary magazine writing a crowdfunded work of creative non-fiction. I am just one grad student. ALSO AZE JOURNAL OPTION TO GET MY WRITING PUBLISHED HMMMM???

Anyway notes:

• "This is an assumption that non-asexual people can sometimes make: that aces are prudish or are simply choosing to abstain from sexual activity" (p.74) - stereotypes!!!
• "I have encountered many aces who, like B, express their desire to form a relationship yet remain concerned about the viability of fulfilling such a desire. I have encountered just as many aces who are simply uninterested in forming a relationship altogether. This is because aces are a diverse group of people, and their relationship to relationships is not monolithic." - commonly expressed idea in focus groups (p.76)
• "Overall, these discussion threads posted on Usenet in the early 1990s illustrate how asexuality, in its decentralized form, was open to some degree of debate regarding its specific definition. However, although users debated understandings of asexuality, what remained relatively uniform was the association between asexuality and some form of absence, lacking, or estrangement from human emotion or feeling." - useful historical point (p.80)
• "the assumption that asexuality is marked by ‘frigid’ or ‘robotic’ behavior remains pervasive today" (p.80)
• "The perception that asexuality is represented through being devoid of humanity – implied in the association with roboticism – has been deeply reinforced in media representations" (p.81)
• "In a piece for AZE titled ‘Asexual Positivity in a Game About Sexy Demons,’ Alex Henderson discussed how online dating simulator Cute Demon Crashers by Sugarscript opens space for positive asexual representation: Most other fiction seemingly runs on the principle that of course you want to [have or pursue sex] […] If that wanting never appears, the character [in most other fiction] is likely a villainous or humorous husk of a human being, meant to be Othered whether that’s for horror or for laughs – or simply waiting for the right person to thaw their unnatural frigidity" (p.81) - media representations
• "On May 30, 1997, ‘My Life as an Amoeba’ by Zoe O’Reilly was one of the earliest articles on asexuality published on the Web via AZStarNet.com (affiliated with the Arizona Daily Star newspaper). In the article, O’Reilly reclaimed the association between asexuality and the non-human through the figure of the amoeba. Other groups, such as the Haven for the Human Amoeba founded in 2000, would similarly exhibit this embrace" (p.82) - ace history
• "AVEN would go on to become the central online space for aces and play a crucial role in the centralization of asexual identity. Operating via the URL asexuality.org, AVEN established itself as a leading voice on asexual identity, coalesced around a now uniform definition." (p.86) - ace history
• "AVEN would go on to become the central online space for aces and play a crucial role in the centralization of asexual identity. Operating via the URL asexuality.org, AVEN established itself as a leading voice on asexual identity, coalesced around a now uniform definition." (p.87) - zero idea if this is gonna end up being relevant but I think it's an interesting point!
• Discusses pathologisation of lack of interest in sex in the 19th century - "effectively transformed an experience that has presumably always been present in humanity into a new medical classification to be studied as an allegedly unnatural deficiency of the human condition" (p.89)
• " as the narratives of Hammond’s patients will show, those who embodied desirelessness internalized themselves to be broken and sought compliance with Victorian social expectations" :( (p.91)
• "manliness became defined by one’s ability to exhibit restraint and mastery over one’s sexual desires. White men used this definition of manliness to refer to themselves as superior to those “less manly than himself – whether [that be] his wife, his children, his employees, or his racial ‘inferiors.’”" (p.94, citing Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, p.48)
• "While the passionless or ‘asexual Victorian woman’ was upheld as an ideal for middle- to upper-class Euro-immigrant women in the period to maintain social respectability, sexual desire from both men and women was understood to be necessary in marriage" - I love. nuance (p.97)
• "by the turn of the century, an anxiety over the potential effects of desirelessness and other factors on lowering the reproduction rates of Euro-immigrant or white families was surfacing. Concerns emerged that, when “taken to an extreme, asexually-styled sensitivity and restraint could ultimately threaten white elite reproduction rates.” As such, “a new marriage manual market pushed for the cultivation of erotic desire in monogamous, heterosexual marriage” away from Victorian ideals" (p.103, quoting Hawkins Owen)
• "Unhitched from the clutches of sexuality, Allen’s patient exhibited how contentment in one’s desirelessness could challenge the gendered norms and sexual expectations of Victorian America. His case reveals to us that to normalize fulfillment in our desirelessness can inspire the opening of portals to worlds unlike those which existed in an age of sexual desire; where men like Mr. W are no longer expected to be aggressively sexual, where women like Mrs. C can become detached from their submissive role as objects to the sexual advances of men, and where all social expectations tied to sexuality and gender can loosen and unravel, to be rearticulated anew" (p.106)
• WRITING ABOUT AROMANTICISM WE ARE SO BACK "Studies have further attributed disengagement from romantic relationships with a decreased quality of life and an increased susceptibility to physical and mental health issues.3 These assertions contour the lives of aromantic people, demarcating those of us who do not experience romantic attraction to be inherently closer to misery, sickness, and death." (p.107)
• "Aros may internalize these narratives as we are repeatedly cast into the clutches of words like ‘unfeeling,’ ‘robotic,’ ‘emotionless,’ ‘loveless,’ and ‘devoid’ from a young age. From the outside looking in, aros can more easily identify which behaviors and expressions socially denote people as ‘feeling’ and, allegedly, more human than ourselves." (p.107)
• "Aros may come to feel as if their relationships or life will never be as fulfilling, or believe that they are ‘unlovable’ because of how essential romantic love is to the idea of living a healthy life. Since long-term relationships, in or out of marriage, carry the assumption that mutual romantic attraction is essential, aros can feel increasingly isolated when entering adulthood." (p.107)
• "The social role that the novel played continues to be filled today by cinema and television, which perpetuate romantic ideals of what it means to be ‘in love’ among the mass public." - media stuff (p.108)
• "This love hierarchy was thus invested in using romantic love, or a claimed adoration of women by men, as an indicator of Western advancement and white supremacy. Love was therefore used as a colonial instrument to justify the European superiority complex, enshrining narratives of the ‘backward’ primitive dark past and the enlightened romantic white future into the greater social imagination as ‘truth,’ while suffocating the agency of so-called primitive women under a blanket of paternalism and saviorism." - overlap with issues of race and xenophobia (p.116)
• "This notion of who was deemed capable of ‘true love,’ which was equated to romantic love, thus regulated who was considered more worthy of life and who was more ‘justifiably’ subject to genocide, slavery, mass incarceration, and policing. Scholar Paulette Richards described how slaveholders portrayed enslaved Africans as irrational and “incapable of love” and “propagated these myths as a rationalization for the practice of breaking up families on the auction block.” She notes how stereotypes that portrayed Black women as sensual “lascivious jezebels who seduced white men” were conjured to rationalize their sexual abuse" - impact of race (p.117)
• "This colonial narrative of Black men as loveless, or without the capacity to experience ‘true’ or ‘romantic’ love, is exemplified in “the insistent association of Black males with a hypersexuality savagely expressed in sexual violation and exploitation” that reduces Black men “to their sexual organs.”" (p.117, quoting Headley, Philosophy as Excited Delirium, p.35)
• "Failure to pursue and actualize this [a romantic relationship] is construed as a failure on the part of the individual – a reflection of their defective, pitiful, repulsive, or unlovable nature. Under capitalist cisheteropatriarchy, this perception becomes most imposed onto single women." (p.120)
• Thought this was an interesting point in the footnotes about the cultural context behind aromanticism - "The idea that legitimate relationships should be based on anything other than the mutual expression of romantic love is still commonly rejected in the West. Perhaps then it is of no surprise that an identity like aromantic would sprout in the West, as in other contexts the issue of romantic love may not necessarily be viewed as a necessary element in one’s life or relationships to the same extent. Therefore, to develop such a concept as aromanticism, defined as the absence or lack of romantic attraction, may not be as urgent in contexts where romance itself was never understood as essential to life, love, and fulfillment." (p.177)
• On a similar note: "The labels asexual, aromantic, agender, and many others that we may use to label our ‘sexuality,’ ‘romance,’ ‘attraction,’ and ‘gender,’ have been formed through this matrix. They exist in relation to a host of other identity labels and general beliefs about sex, romance, attraction, and gender that are deeply naturalized in Western culture, having become the building blocks many of us depend on to label ourselves and others." (p.143)

Also realised I quite desperately need to look at some more sources on teen shows as a genre. Will probably be going back to the BU library later this week for another look at Teen TV, but today looked at The Television Genre Book edited by Glen Creeber.

• From the section on The Teen Series by Rachel Moseley: "Teenageness is a significant 'in-between' period, and teen drama deals with the stuff of adolescent anxiety: friendship, love, sex and impending adulthood" (p.54)
• "Many of these shows deal with questions of difference, otherness, increased power and the impact of these on personal and community relationships: a significant number of them draw on other cult television forms, using supernatural power as a motif through which to explore these concerns. Many shows give the sense that to be a teenager is to be not quite human" (p.54)

From the Introduction to Teen TV, by Glyn Davis and Kay Dickinson:

• "Recurrent topics of discussion - even within the most fantastical of shows - are sex and sexuality, drug and alcohol use, family tensions and negotiating one's place among one's peers, all issues encountered by the average teenager" (p.3)

Possible further reading:

• Alex Henderson, ‘Asexual Positivity in a Game About Sexy Demons,’ AZE, last modified July 2018, https://azejournal.com/article/2018/6/29/asexual-positivity-in-a-game-about-sexy-demons
• Ela Przybylo and Danielle Cooper, ‘Asexual Resonances,’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 3 (2014): 298–299, doi:10.1215/10642684-2422683
• UnYoung, ‘Care, Uncoupled,’ AZE, last modified May 3, 2021, https://azejournal.com/article/2021/4/24/care-uncoupled

Thesis updates

Thesis progress is going alright! Thematic analysis points are all written up in at least a first draft form, I've written up summaries of all my TA case studies to hopefully make everything a bit clearer, and I've started adding in the points from the focus groups.

Still to do is finishing adding in focus group points and then going back and responding to the remaining comments I got from Emma on my draft, which should be do-able! Let's just not think about the fact that I also have a presentation to make for the week after next...

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