Tag: asexuality

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No Platonic Explanation

It’s Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week and it’s also LGBTQ+ History Month in the UK, which seemed like a good time to talk about a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: the peculiar tension of caring about queer history as an aroace trans person whose experiences of queerness don’t primarily revolve about romantic relationships. This is a complicated, nuanced topic about which I’m still constantly refining my thoughts and feelings; it’s something I have both personal and academic investment in, and that means I spend a lot of time thinking about it, but also that I regularly backtrack, rework, and elaborate on my opinions.

It’s also something I’ve found myself talking about in more informal contexts online, as well as passively hovering on the edge of wider conversations that are happening. To reflect this more informal context alongside my probably pretentious semi-academic prose, this post will be punctuated by Tumblr posts that I’ve seen recently that have spoken to me, shaped my ideas in some way, or just made me laugh. In general, though, I want to make it clear that this post represents a snapshot of an ongoing process of thought and grappling with methodology and intentions. All of this, too, goes beyond just thinking about historiography and how we approach these topics in, for example, medieval literature — but if I let myself start talking about how these attitudes influence discourse about queer art being produced today, this post would have been even longer than it already is. Perhaps I’ll write another post exploring it from that angle.

(And I’ll note that I’m open to discussion as always, but reserve the right to moderate or close comments if the vibes are off, because this blog is my space and this is, as noted, a deeply personal topic!)

A tumblr post by mouse-doubleo100 dated Jan 5th: 'there's no platonic explanation for this' buddy you wouldn't believe what kind of platonic explanations im capable of

My academic research is focused on friendship in the Ulster Cycle, and my work on friendship is always informed by queer theory and related disciplines. That is to say, I look at friendship from a perspective that doesn’t assume certain relationships can only exist between people of certain genders or that gender and gender difference is always being constructed in a way that is familiar, and that allows the possibility for feelings and behaviours to exist within relationships even when not essential to the formation of that relationship. (For example, many marriages throughout history were not contracted because of romantic or sexual attraction, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that romantic or sexual attraction existed within them. The same may apply to many other forms of relationship.)

Recently, I’ve been writing an article exploring narrative and emotional parallels in the relationships between Cú Chulainn and Emer (his wife), Láeg (his charioteer), and Fer Diad (his fosterbrother), in a handful of late medieval/early modern texts. Considering the ways in which these relationships with men are constructed and structured in terms that resemble marriage obviously opens the door to exploring the homoerotic dimension of these relationships, and I’m very ready to do that — indeed, I went into this article thinking that was what I was going to be doing. But the more I allowed that openness to lead me to consider how relationships were actually being constructed, rather than just how I expected them to be constructed, I also found myself doing the opposite: considering the ways in which marriage was constructed to resemble these specific kinds of friendship.

To put it frivolously and anachronistically, I had started out looking for evidence that friendship was romantic, and come to the conclusion that marriage was platonic.

These terms are deeply problematic for thinking about historical relationships, and literary relationships of the past. The separation of the terms “platonic friendship” and “romantic love” is a remarkably modern one, even before we start dealing with additional linguistic complications of working with non-English material. My PhD has so far involved a great deal of work on the terminology used to define relationships and express affection, and what I have learned is that there is a huge amount of overlap, with relationships from military alliances to marriage to friendship to casual or illicit sex all being described with many of the same words. That doesn’t mean that these relationships were interchangeable to a late medieval Irish audience, but it does caution us to be aware that the lines between them may not be drawn in the same places that we would draw them, and the defining or distinguishing features of one type of relationship versus another may not be the features we would have focused on.

A Tumblr post by borgevino, dated January 2nd there are so many things on gods green earth that are not platonic but are also not romantic. the erotic, the familial, the unconditional, weird codependency, weird codependency (hatred edition), etc. let us all broaden our horizons

Of course, these terms aren’t exactly universally defined, concrete, or even helpful in the contemporary world, either. I spent a great many years trying to determine whether I experienced romantic attraction, and how one was meant to recognise it and distinguish it from earnest, passionate platonic friendship, especially if one removed sex from the romantic equation or allowed it into the platonic one. While the split attraction model — separating romantic and sexual attraction and acknowledging that people may feel them differently — is helpful for many asexual and aromantic people in conceptualising their feelings and their identity, I increasingly started to find it made me more confused, because I could not for the life of me pin down what made something “romantic” vs “platonic”. I eventually came to the conclusion that the difference is the label that the person in that relationship puts on it: the same behaviours may mean very different things to different people.

Admittedly, I still think I was possibly born in the wrong century and was destined to be a fourteenth century knight having a Profound Bond with my sworn brother such that we’ll end up buried together, rather than fumbling around in the twenty-first century trying to decide if “queerplatonic” is a term that has any use to me personally. (I also still find the split attraction model doesn’t wholly work for how I understand my own experiences, and as such, my exploration of aromantic approaches to history here largely encompasses asexual approaches without a clear distinction between them, though I’m aware that others experience them more distinctly.)

Tumblr post from an-ruraiocht, dated Feb 8: neither romance nor friendship but a secret third thing (fealty)

Nevertheless, this was a useful lesson to learn both in ordinary life (it teaches you to mind your own business about how other people define their relationships, and also frees you from thinking that certain behaviours are automatically expected within certain relationships and proscribed outside of them), and as somebody interested in history and the literature of the past (again, it frees you from thinking that behaviour and labels are automatically and unchangeably linked, such that a relationship that contains A must be B and a relationship that is X cannot contain Y).

It also creates a certain tension in how you talk about the past, and how you talk about queer possibilities in the past.

Once definitions become unstable and contextual, sentences get bogged down in caveats and uncertainties which can seem, especially at first glance, to participate in the erasure of queer history. Warnings not to apply anachronistic labels can become a denial of queer pasts — the truthful statement that an individual wouldn’t have understood themselves as homosexual because the concept of identity formed around sexual attraction was still a few hundred years off is taken as denying the possibility that the individual’s feelings and behaviours may have been more or less indistinguishable from those of somebody who would understand themselves as gay now.

And sentences like “this person expresses what we would probably now consider to be romantic love for another man, although in this time and place its expression does not fall outside normative expectations for close friendship”, while a fairly accurate representation of the tension of balancing contemporary and historical approaches to emotions and relationships, are taken by some as an example of the much-memed homophobic erasure: “Historians Will Say They’re Just Friends”.

A meme: Historical figure: *Never gets married, but lived, died, and was buried with same sex partner* Historians: "I've never seen two friends like them. They were very, very friendly men."

The tension arises because it is undeniably true that homophobia has erased erotic and romantic relationships in the historical record, whether at the time — by requiring individuals to conceal the nature of their relationship, destroy evidence, and/or express it in normative terms that obscure specifics — or subsequently in scholarship — by twisting and contorting evidence to explain how it can’t possibly be queer. There is an understandable desire to recover and highlight these pasts, to emphasise that queerness has always existed and to reclaim what has been lost.

But several challenges arise here. There genuinely is ambiguity in many of these relationships, both in terms of the behaviours they might have involved and in the labels that might accurately be applied to them. Even when we have reasonably accurate records of behaviours, we might not have records of feelings that would tell us what those behaviours meant to those people, and when we’re dealing with quite a different taxonomy of relationships, identities, and emotions, that is an issue.

And inevitably, many of these approaches end up falling into the same amatonormative trap.

“These two men described themselves as lifelong friends” Okay! “and it’s clear this relationship was the most important relationship in their lives” Great! “and it was passionate and potentially physical in its intimacy” Sure! “so this was definitely romantic, not friendship” Aaand you lost me.

“He describes the other man as the most important person in his life, there’s no platonic explanation for that” Isn’t there?

A Tumblr post from kiwimintlime, dated Dec 3 2024: not aromantic but I believe in their beliefs. "there's no platonic explanation for this" try harder bucko love is a beautiful wonderful multifaceted nebulous thing that shouldn't be reduced to the strict bounds of Tier One: Romance and Tier Two: Friends. get weird with it. love your friends deeply, wildly, passionately *and* platonically. cowards

You see, once you allow the possibility for friendship to be transformative, physical, lifelong, and passionate, there is no obvious reason to disagree with historical individuals’ characterisation of their relationships as ‘friendship’ — in fact, to do so runs the risk of erasing their self-definition and replacing it with ours, something that is not less of an erasure because the label replacing it is different.

Evidence for homosexuality is often found in the failure to adequately perform heterosexuality, in literature and in history. I’ve lost track of the number of novels I’ve read where a character, having reluctantly come out of the closet to a surprisingly understanding friend or relative, is told that it was their lack of interest in the “opposite” sex that gave them away. Queer readings of medieval narratives like Guigemar assume that the protagonist’s failure to conform to heterosexual expectations must mean that he should be read as potentially homosexual, despite the lack of evidence in that direction either — indeed, within medieval narratives themselves, failure to express socially expected attraction to women is taken as evidence that somebody must only be interested in men (cf. Lanval; actually, he’s neither gay nor aroace, but dating a fairy woman whose existence he is prohibited from revealing). The idea that inadequate heterosexual attraction might constitute a lack of any attraction is rarely countenanced.

We see this in many euphemisms used to describe queer people: “not the marrying kind”, “confirmed bachelor”. These phrases imply that lack of desire for the gender one can legally marry automatically suggests desire for the gender one can’t — and of course, this was often true, which is the challenge of it, because such phrases can’t be ignored as evidence of queer possibilities. Homosexual possibility dominates the subtext for many valid and understandable reasons — but once elevated to text, once that possibility becomes permissible and can be expressed openly, what is left unspoken? What of the confirmed bachelors and lifelong spinsters who still aren’t the marrying type? Whose ‘friendships’ were never a normative cover story; whose ‘lifelong companion’ was genuinely that; whose failure to claim a more legible queer identity was not a closet or a hiding place but a genuine expression of who they were?

As romantic possibilities expand, it can seem that aromantic ones diminish. If all the lifelong friends and passionate brothers-in-arms of the past were “actually gay”, what is left for those seeking models of another way to live, another mode of affection?

A Tumblr post from an-ruraiocht dated Feb 1st: imagine being a guy who has dedicated your life to your platonic soulmate and understood yourself in the tradition of an ancient friendship that transcended all others and it made you feel like there was a pattern for you to follow and a way to exist in the world as yourself, even when everyone around you kept assuming the relationship must be romantic and/or sexual. and then you meet those ancient friends and it turns out it was romance all along and just erased by homophobia. and you are furious about their erasure but giving them back their true story means surrendering the model and the hope and the love you thought could exist for yourself but you owe it to them. you owe them the truth of themselves instead of the Just Friends of erasure but there was never anything Just about Friends for you so now what ???
While this Tumblr post was about a specific (modern) novel, it also speaks more broadly to the experiences of grappling with queer history while caring about aromantic possibilities, hence its inclusion here.

This raises the question of what we’re really doing when we seek out queer histories. If our intention is to prove that people outside of a rigid heterosexual binary cisgender model have always existed, then we should take care to represent as many facets of those non-normative experiences as we can. What makes a relationship non-normative? What does it mean to defy expectations? What even are the expectations being defied? Amidst a rigidly heteronormative and patriarchal set of expectations, such as has dominated the past centuries, two women who chose to build their lives together rather than marry men were defying norms whether or not they were also having sex. Sexual activity is far from the only factor (or the most important factor) in claiming those lives as part of queer history, unless our definition of queer history includes only unambiguous sexual activity between people of the same gender (a deeply limited and problematic definition).

If our intention is to dismantle assumptions about what types of relationships are possible, then this is likewise true: not only are other forms of romance possible, but lives outside of that framework exist. If we are seeking people whose experiences resonate with queer people today, then we should take care not to simply narrow our models in a new direction: aro and ace people also deserve to explore those resonances. And if we’re trying to recover the most accurate way that historical individuals might have described their relationship had they been completely free to do so, we need to grapple with the idea that that might not look like any of our options, because our entire model of feelings and social organisation would be alien to them.

At the same time, there are disproportionate efforts to censor, ban, and conceal alternative expressions of sexuality, and explicit sexual content is usually the first to go. Some might argue that aromantic and asexual stories represent less of a threat to these campaigns, and so will be less directly targeted, meaning that there is a need to bolster the visibility of stories where the most concerted effort at erasure is taking place — often through the reframing of queer relationships in ways that obscure their true nature, removing overt sexuality and replacing it with the less immediately challenging ‘friendship’. But while this may be true in some spaces (like historiography), aromantic and asexual people do face much of the same censorship, erasure, violence, and oppression in the public sphere as others do (and that’s before we start getting into granular nuances such as the overlap between aro and ace identities and other forms of queerness, such that aro and ace people may be facing that violence and oppression because of other aspects of identity as well).

Make no mistake: while friendships may not be an obvious target for queerphobia, aromantic and asexual people are. To a worldview that sees heterosexual marriage and reproduction as the only productive/acceptable form of adult sexuality, it remains a “wayward and unproductive” identity (to paraphrase Foucault). It offers a model for a future and a life that does not require conforming to heteronormative models, and it centres alternative forms of kinship, love, and solidarity that threaten a conservative insistence on the nuclear family as the primary site of interpersonal relation. Moreover, the nuanced approach to attraction, behaviour, and identity as all fundamentally separate things, a concept that underpins a lot of aro and ace thinking and indeed the entire split attraction model, really problematises a lot of the assumptions on which hegemonic norms of gender and sexuality rest: it dismantles hierarchies for relationships as well as liberating people from the expectations that certain behaviours require certain labels and certain labels require certain behaviours.

Tumblr post from wereh0gz, dated October 5th 2024 "There's no platonic explanation for this" actually there is you just have an inability to view displays of affection between two characters as anything other than romantic

From a historiographical point of view, the issue really lies in black and white thinking that offers only extremes of interpretation. We generally find two models of history dominating popular discourse: a heteronormative model, in which only male/female relationships may be readily accepted as romantic or sexual and so all same-gender relationships must be read as socially normative friendship, or an amatonormative model which, in being open to the possibility of same-gender romance or sex, reads all intimate friendship as actually romance in disguise. The latter is an understandable compensation for the former, which dominated much 19th-20th century scholarship, but is just as essentialising and limited. The reality in the vast majority of cases is going to sit somewhere between the two, and requires explorations of nuance and acceptance of ambiguity.

Many things may be true at once: bed sharing was a conventional form of intimacy for a lot of history, and some of those people were having sex; friendship in many historical societies was conceptualised as more physical and tactile than is typical today, and some kisses still had overtly erotic meanings; language of kinship and affection was complex and often used freely across different types of relationships, and sometimes when a man called another man his husband, he meant exactly what he said — and while conventions of passionate or romantic friendship have sometimes been used to conceal other forms of relationship from a hostile society, others have experienced such friendships as genuine, meaningful, and important forms of interpersonal relationship in exactly the terms in which they were described.

Sometimes, our desire to fit historical relationships into a box that we recognise does a disservice to both romantic and non-romantic experiences in the past. We will never know if something was “really” friendship or “really” romance until we stop projecting our expectations of what either of those things means and start looking — openly and non-judgmentally — at how they are actually being constructed in the sources and societies we’re working with, particularly when that challenges our sense of the divisions between them. To properly understand and appreciate a passionate physical friendship, we need a degree of openness to the possibility of queer sexualities, so that we can see what that friendship is and isn’t doing, and how it sits alongside counterculture and transgression; to properly understand queer sexualities, we need an openness to emotional and behavioural norms that may allow for a degree of physicality and intimacy outside romantic or sexual relationships that the homophobic anxieties of the modern world have largely eliminated.

The danger is that in trying to recover and celebrate queer possibilities in history and literature, queer people often participate in the erasure and exclusion of aro and ace possibilities by privileging romantic and sexual relationships above friendship and creating hierarchies of intimacy based on a modern amatonormative worldview. As a result, in celebrating alternative forms of love and its expression beyond romance and sex, such as friendship and kinship, aro and ace people are seen as erasing the more visibly embattled forms of alternative sexuality to replace them with something more ‘family-friendly’. Friendship-focused readings of literature or historical evidence are understood as an alternative to queer possibilities, rather than a queer possibility in themselves, and so positioned in opposition to gay and bi histories, rather than intrinsically connected to them.

This is an understandable tension with a real grounding in historiography, but it’s a tension that seems to be invisible to many, and so new forms of erasure and exclusion are perpetuated. There is a need to be more aware of this, and to allow aromantic and asexual perspectives to inform and deepen our exploration of these sources. In compensating for homophobic “Just Friends” narratives, we should be wary of reinforcing them by suggesting that there is, indeed, anything “Just” about “Friends”. Maybe friendship can be as transgressive, transformative, countercultural, physical, intense, and, yes, queer, as relationships more easily labelled as romance; maybe it can challenge hierarchies of gender and sexuality, push back against oppressive norms, and represent radical ways of life that should be celebrated as the queer histories that they are.

Bluesky post by Néide (@seneolas.bsky.social): at all times i am holding in my heart the tension of bringing to light queer histories obscured by hostile cultures and imprecise terminology and also thinking that passionate lifelong friendships are a) just as important as romance and b) just as much a part of queer history

Maybe, sometimes, when historical figures label their most intimate and significant lifelong relationships as friendship, we should believe them — and see what new opportunities that offers for our understanding of the queer past.

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24/09, Doloro – Part II (TBA Readalong)

On the 24th September, Isabel goes to school, still suffering from severe and miserable stomach aches, and asks Grace Whittock for help finding a doctor. But it’s Emma who answers, giving her the number of a non-profit clinic for low-income civilians: The Sunshine Project. When Isabel’s anxiety gets the better of her, Emma helps her out by calling her brother, Leo, who volunteers at the clinic, and asking him to help Isabel get an appointment.

It’s a fairly short scene, but one that allows Emma to demonstrate her willingness to help Isabel – and her tacit understanding when Isabel’s fear gets the better of her – as well as giving us the names of two new characters, Leo and Daragh Vernant. It’s also a scene with a long history, though it’s changed considerably over the years.

In the first draft of this book, Isabel did her own research and found that Dr Vernant (originally a separate character from Daragh) was her best option for accessing healthcare. But while she was talking to Graham about it, Emma overheard, and came out from among the library shelves to contribute to the conversation – her first meeting with Isabel.

I mentioned in a previous post that the Sunshine Project (a name it only acquired in a much later draft) was, at one point in the book’s history, more focused on reproductive and sexual healthcare, and that was a focus in the earliest versions of this chapter. Isabel had made the appointment using a phone at school, since she didn’t have one of her own; the receptionists, overhearing the name of the doctor she was seeing, gave her Knowing Looks that she didn’t understand, which is what she was asking Graham about.

From the conversation that followed, in which Emma explained that her knowledge of Dr Vernant’s practice was because she’d accompanied several friends there for STI testing and similar appointments, we got a glimpse of Isabel’s sex repulsion. More than a lack of interest, in earlier drafts Isabel found the entire concept of sex distasteful, and that came across strongly in these chapters.

Isabel is, of course, asexual, but attraction ≠ action, and not all asexual people are sex-repulsed. Some are; others are indifferent or disinterested; and others are actively interested in it and may seek it out. In more recent drafts, I’ve tended to write Isabel as disinterested, with a side of bafflement that anybody finds the idea appealing, because she doesn’t really get it; I’ve downplayed the profound disgust she felt in the first draft. This is mostly due to my own more nuanced feelings about her sexuality and how I wanted to portray it, but also because it was incredibly hard to convey her own personal sex-repulsion without it straying into seeming like she was shaming others, since it was rarely her own actions she was having those feelings about.

These details also became a lot less relevant as the nature of the Sunshine Project shifted and expanded. But versions of that conversation with Emma persisted until Draft V (by which point it was no longer her first meeting with Isabel, but her second, as in this version):

“Though you might as well get tested for chlamydia while you’re there.”

“That won’t be necessary,” she says emphatically. Emma raises her eyebrows, but doesn’t press the point. “I needed a doctor’s appointment, and I’m not registered. That’s all.”

“It’s your call. And don’t worry, Dr Vernant’s legit for, like, regular stuff too.”

“You know a lot about her, Emma,” says Grace.

“Yeah, my friends always make me come with them when they fuck up.” She seems unconcerned by this, and by swearing in front of a member of staff. “Why they think I can offer moral support, I’ve no idea, but I’ve been five times. Herpes, chlamydia, pregnancy, Alice’s hormones…”

“That’s enough,” the librarian interrupts. “Spare us the details.”

Now, though, the focus is more on Isabel’s anxiety about seeking out healthcare – her fear of discovery, her past trauma creeping up on her. It gives us a glimpse of Emma’s backstory, when she mentions her sister helping her through her panic attacks, and we start to understand why she stopped to help Isabel when she was panicking in the bathroom, even though she was a stranger.

It’s also our first mention of Leo and, while he only appears very fleetingly here and in this book more generally, I do want to give a shoutout to Leo, my beloved. (For those who haven’t read it yet, he plays a much more significant role in The Hummingbird Killer, so this isn’t just me being randomly attached to a background character, I have my reasons.)

I think that’s all there is to be said about this scene, so it’s over to you. Emma is really the star of the show here, and we’re getting hints of what she’s going to mean to Isabel later on, but what did you think of her at this point? I confess, I love the ending of this chapter, and Emma threatening to fight the universe for Isabel – that showed up in around Draft VI, if I remember correctly, and I went out of my way to keep it. What about you? Any standout lines for you?

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Being Yourself On Purpose

It’s Ace Week! It’s also French publication day for The Butterfly Assassin, which is super appropriate, because Isabel is asexual, so this is her week.

I’ve talked before about asexual “representation” in The Butterfly Assassin, and how there arguably… isn’t any — not if you define representation as explicit labels and discussion of a certain identity. This is a balance I’ve grappled with over the past year, wondering how much to emphasise that element of the book. The fact of the matter is, this is a book that’s all murder, no sex — an upper YA book where the most important, intense relationship is a platonic one, and where opportunities for that relationship to develop into a romantic or sexual relationship are deliberately avoided in favour of taking the narrative another path — and that, much more than labels, is what matters to me, and it’s what my younger self needed.

That doesn’t mean labels aren’t important, though, nor that Isabel’s identity will never be discussed in more depth in the series. I’m a little over halfway through the editing process for the sequel to The Butterfly Assassin at the moment, having finished structural edits and with line edits coming rapidly over the horizon, and one of the things I love about this book is how it gives Isabel more space to explore who she is.

Some spoilers for book one ahead, so if you haven’t read it yet, might I suggest you go grab a copy before venturing further? (Unless you like spoilers, in which case, you do you!)

In The Butterfly Assassin, a major source of tension and conflict is the fact that Isabel has been poisoned. As such, she spends the majority of the book trying hard not to die, focused solely on survival. It is not a narrative that gives her a lot of time to start worrying about whether or not she feels sexual attraction, because it would be deeply unnecessary to her current situation.

Now. I have been told, and have gradually come to observe from my own reading, that this in itself is a pretty ace perspective. Turns out, allosexual people and characters do start thinking about sexual attraction at deeply inconvenient moments, up to and including while Trying Not To Die. Who knew! And I know from personal experience that identity crises do tend to assert themselves at times when you should really be focusing on other things; that’s why I had a gender crisis in the middle of my A-Levels, because I no longer had the brainspace to repress it.

But the fact of the matter is that Isabel is very, very good at repressing things, and not particularly prone to navel-gazing, and as such, it would never occur to her to try and put a label on an absence of certain feelings. She’s so convinced she’s messed up by her childhood that if she recognised a difference in her own behaviour compared to anyone else’s, she’d simply chalk it up to that and move on.

I think this is a common story. I think there are a lot of people whose experiences resonate with ace experiences, and might plausibly fall under that umbrella, but they will never seek out that label. They don’t need to. It isn’t relevant. Some might think the rest of the world is exaggerating about their sexual attraction; others are aware that they’re different, but have chalked it up to some other factor in their life or upbringing or current experiences.

And that’s fine. Nobody is ever obliged to use any label for anything. I find my own sexuality increasingly slippery and hard to pin down, particularly as my sense of gender shifts and matures. I still find it resonates most strongly with ace experiences, but I’m also very aware that asexuality is a spectrum, and that not everybody who sees themselves as belonging to that spectrum is in the No Attraction Ever category, nor is attraction synonymous with interest in sex.

I’m also increasingly aware that romantic attraction can be a slippery thing. To my mind, there is no objective, concrete, identifiable difference between romantic and platonic affection in terms of its expression and what it looks like to an outside observer. The difference is in what it means to the people in that relationship, and how they label it, and what it means to them. One person’s queerplatonic relationship might look identical from the outside to another person’s romantic one, but that doesn’t mean it is identical, if that’s not how those people experience it.

This … dislocation, almost, or at least separation of Objective External Perception from Concrete Labels And Terminology has been freeing. Imagine the possibilities if I say, “It doesn’t matter what you think this relationship is, to me it’s X, and that’s what matters.” Some people kiss their friends. Some people don’t kiss their romantic partners. Why are we assuming that to qualify as one thing or another, certain behaviours or actions have to be exhibited?

I’ve got sidetracked. I’m sorry. At one point I had an actual purpose in writing this post, but at this point it’s purely, “Finn muses on what asexuality and aromanticism mean to them,” and that is probably not why you’re here. Back to TBA…

Except it’s not really a sidetrack. One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about seeing reader reactions to The Butterfly Assassin is how several people have said they don’t normally read books without romance, but that they didn’t feel anything was missing from mine. One person even said that it felt like the friendship hit the same beats as a romantic relationship would have done, in terms of how it grows and develops. That’s deliberate. I’d read a lot of books growing up where the cold, “emotionless” character was “humanised” by sexual attraction and romantic feelings, and I wanted to explore the possibility of platonic affection serving the same purpose, breaking through their shell. There are a lot of ways to love people; why was only one being valued?

It makes me think a lot about what people are looking for when they prioritise reading books with strong romantic elements. I know what I’m looking for when I pick up a romance novel; I’m rarely looking for it when I pick up a fantasy or sci-fi book. But maybe what others are seeking, when they say they want strong romance subplots, is actually just human connection, intensity of feeling, those moments when a character realises their feelings for another have broken through their walls and rules and intentions and changed how they respond to having plot happen to them. And I see no reason why you can’t get those feelings from an intense platonic friendship.

(NB: An ace protagonist doesn’t, of course, preclude the possibility of romance, because asexuality and aromanticism are not synonymous. However, as Isabel is ace/aro and those aspects of her identity are significantly entwined, in this specific case, there’s a lot of overlap, and I will sometimes use one as shorthand for another. This is not intended to erase the identities of those who are ace and not aro, or aro and not ace, but I know that my terminology sometimes blurs in ways that could seem careless, hence the clarification.)

Book two once again has one of those intense friendships at the heart of it, but there’s a difference, because it’s no longer the only friendship that Isabel has, and there is a lot more space for Isabel to start reflecting more on her place in the world around her and how she relates to the people she’s surrounded with. In book one, she’s isolated, with very few friends of her own age, almost all of whom she’s lying to. She’s only just escaped from a traumatic upbringing that, in particular, has left her isolated for the past eighteen months, forbidden to see anyone except her parents and one other person. This is not the case in the sequel.

Without wanting to give too much away before the title and cover and blurb are revealed, one of the things I like about book two is that although the narrative voice is still very much in Isabel’s head — it’s in third person, but it’s such a close third person it sometimes feels closer than first, to me — the scope of the story is broader. It’s like the camera has stepped back, and we get to see more of the city, because Isabel is living in it, engaging with it, experiencing it.

Book two gives us an Isabel who has friends, or at least colleagues — a day job, putting her in a position of interacting daily with civilians who challenge her sense of self and open her mind to new possibilities. And, yes, they are mostly queer. Again, this wasn’t a deliberate choice, or a box-ticking exercise (“okay, we need a character who uses they/them pronouns, and a character who’s gay, and a character who’s bi…”). I have very few straight cis friends, and when I come to write, I write characters who feel real to me, who look like the world I see around me. So, inevitably, they end up mostly being queer, because that’s the world I live in.

In a queernorm environment, there’s no need for anyone to come out, because nobody is ever assumed to be straight. But still, in many queernorm settings, there’s an expectation that characters will be interested in someone, even if options are less circumscribed. I didn’t want to fall into that trap, either, but I wanted to see Isabel realising for the first time that her experiences might not be Default Setting. Not to alienate her, or make her feel different, but to allow her to be herself more consciously.

One of the ways I’ve done this — and I’m excited for you to read this part — is to show Isabel picking up some of the terrible romance novels we encountered in book one, when Emma was collecting them. I hope that nobody takes this detail as me mocking Romance as a genre. I have been very public about the fact that queer historical romance novels got me through the pandemic, and if I poke fun at cliché Mills & Boon style romance novels here, it’s done with love. I had a lot of fun coming up with awful in-universe premises (an assassin who falls for their target! two assassins from rival guilds who have a meet-cute over a dead body!) and I knew, as soon as they showed up in book one, that I would want to come back to them properly.

(Psst. If anyone wants to write one of these as fanfic, it would delight me. Or, you know, if anyone wants to pay me to write one of these, I will do so with glee and gusto. Just know that it would be intentionally Extremely Cringe.)

So. Isabel reads terrible in-universe romance novels. (Her friends and colleagues are quick to assure her that good romance novels do exist; she continues to stubbornly read the terrible ones, because Emma collected them, so they mean something.) And she doesn’t get it. And she turns to her flatmate, to her friends, and is like, “Explain this to me.”

The thing I love about this is that it gives us space for Isabel to examine her feelings in a hypothetical situation — but it also lets her explore them with others who, unexpectedly, share some of those feelings. One of the characters she talks to is aro, but bisexual. One of them is ace/aro. Neither of them use labels, because they don’t exist within the setting in the same way that they do in our world, but they’re able to give Isabel perspectives that help her understand herself.

That is representation, for me. Not necessarily specific labels that map directly onto real-world experiences, although these can be helpful for some, life-saving for others. But to have those perspectives, those new ways of seeing the world that allow you to understand your place in a continuum and then explore it deliberately and consciously… I think that’s what really matters, when it comes down to it. And whether readers relate to Isabel’s place in that continuum or not, I think seeing it is part of what allows us all to be ourselves more consciously.

In fact, some of the characters that were the most helpful to me in figuring out I was trans were not trans characters. It was those who made me say, Oh, that’s NOT me, that really helped solidify things. Experiences that I couldn’t relate to that made me prod and poke for the reasons why. But it was also characters in settings where they didn’t have words for things, because I wasn’t ready to put labels on things, and I wasn’t willing to commit to a label. There’s something gentler about seeing yourself reflected without necessarily acknowledging first what that would mean.

In the end, what is any coming out process, what is any exploration of gender or sexuality, but learning who we are and starting to do it on purpose?

Book two shows Isabel learning a lot more about who she is, and doing some of it on purpose — even the parts she doesn’t necessarily like about herself. And her purposeful self is ace/aro, and feels platonic affection so intensely that it can break through all her walls and repression, because there’s never been only one kind of love.

I’m very much looking forward to sharing that with you.

In the meantime, you can grab The Butterfly Assassin now. In English or in French. Which is super exciting to me, even though my French is appalling.

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Schrodinger’s Asexual Representation

Today is the first day of Ace Week — formerly known as Asexual Awareness Week — and this year’s theme is “Beyond Awareness”. What exactly this means, I’m not entirely sure, but I would imagine it’s about going beyond “asexual people exist” and into having more interesting conversations about it. I thought, then, that I would talk a little about stories, representation, and ace characters, through the specific lens of The Butterfly Assassin and its protagonist, Isabel Ryans.

It may seem strange to talk at length about a book that doesn’t release for another seven months, but now seemed like a good time: because it’s Ace Week, because I’m about to start working on the sequel again, and because I wanted to respond to some of the reactions to book’s announcement.

When I announced The Butterfly Assassin, I mentioned that Isabel is asexual, and emphasised that the book had no romance: the most important relationship is an intense, ride-or-die friendship. All of this is true, but when I saw how people responded to the news that the protagonist was asexual, I began to wish I hadn’t mentioned it. Not because they were hostile: on the contrary, people were excited by this news, and several people told me they couldn’t wait for more ace rep. Somebody else, knowing the kind of thing I generally write, responded to my Instagram Story with, “So there’s all the queer rep, yes?!”

And that struck me with terror.

Why? Because Isabel’s asexuality is never explicitly labelled on the page. I felt immediately certain that those same people would read the book and then take to social media to call me out for claiming representation that isn’t there, or say it’s a cop-out, or subtweet about how it’s Problematic to say a book has ace rep if the only representation it has is the absence of romantic/sexual relationships, or, or, or…

I know that the Internet is impossible to please, and that even the most careful, thoughtful representation will always make somebody on Twitter angry. Writing as though social media is looking over your shoulder is an absolute mind-killer, because you will never be unproblematic enough to be “safe”. So I know that I shouldn’t worry too much about what hypothetical future readers will say if they decide they don’t like me. But I do worry, because I think there are a lot of valid concerns in criticisms like this — some of which I wanted to assuage today.

An open notebook reading "it feels a little like power, but it's not a game Isabel's ever been interested in playing" lies on top of a large, creased asexual pride flag. Beside it are two brown notebooks, on which the words "The Moth Trilogy" can just about be made out. One has a rainbow-coloured butterfly sticker on it. Above those are two kitchen knives.
This quote is possibly the closest Isabel comes to labelling her sexuality in this book.

In fairness to myself, what I actually said on Twitter was that the book had an “asexual protagonist (admittedly, she hasn’t figured that out yet)”, and in my blog post about the announcement, I mentioned that Isabel lacks the vocabulary to describe herself in those terms. But I suspect that by publicly labelling my protagonist in this way, I created an expectation that the word would be used, and therefore, inevitably, I’m going to disappoint some people.

Here’s the thing. Isabel is asexual. The question of whether she’s aromantic is a little more complicated; I see her as being somewhat like myself, in terms of very occasionally experiencing romantic attraction under particular circumstances. Some people might call this grey-aro, or demiromantic; I don’t use these terms for myself, preferring to yeet my sexuality under the far less complicated and gender-expansive term “queer”, so that’s partly why I’d hesitate to put any specific label on my character. Suffice to say that Isabel’s somewhere in the approximate vicinity of “ace/aro”.

(As this discussion makes clear, asexuality and aromanticism aren’t synonymous. For me, though, they’ve always blurred into each other, and I see Isabel’s experience as similar, so throughout this post, I’m using “asexual” as a loose catch-all term to encompass her general lack of interest in romantic and/or sexual relationships.)

[ETA as of 2023: My feelings about this have solidified much more in the direction of labelling Isabel as aro, so you’ll often see me do this online. This was something that became clearer to me the more time I spent writing her; at the time of writing this post, I was still on the fence about it.]

In The Butterfly Assassin, there are a number of reasons why she doesn’t label herself in this way, and it has nothing to do with me trying to hedge my bets or because I don’t understand the value of seeing a term like that on the page. Believe me, I do. The first time I saw an asexual character in a book — Quicksilver, by RJ Anderson — I cried, because it was the first time I’d seen the word used anywhere other than Tumblr, and it made me feel seen.

So I understand the value of words and labels, even though on a personal level, I’ve moved away from trying to pin myself down with a specific term. I understand that people can be disappointed when a book doesn’t have the obvious, explicitly labelled representation that they were hoping for. I thought very hard about this, and the absence of the term in this book wasn’t a choice I made lightly.

One factor is that the book is set in a fictional closed city, which has been largely cut off from the outside world for the past century. While they have access to a small amount of external media, and smugglers bring in more, they aren’t engaging with the exact same cultural understandings or material that we, in our world, engage with. Queer communities within the city have developed their own terminology and ways of labelling themselves, which aren’t necessarily the same as our own — particularly with regard to identities that have only begun to be labelled more recently.

A challenge of the worldbuilding in this book, however, is that we only see what Isabel sees — and Isabel isn’t in those communities, nor is she one of the technologically-minded types breaking through the city firewalls to access the unfiltered internet. She’s a teenager with no friends, and absolutely no support network; she’s been deliberately prevented from forming those kinds of connections by the people who raised her. This means she largely isn’t aware that those communities even exist, let alone how they’re describing themselves.

The city itself isn’t as heteronormative or homophobic as many parts of our own world, so queer relationships often pass unremarked. In fiction, this is often called a “queernorm” world — a world where queerness doesn’t have to be explained or necessarily labelled, because there’s no assumption of straightness. It’s another reason why the city’s inhabitants don’t always use the same labels and terminology that those in the outside world do; they have different priorities, and different aspects of their identity which seem important on an everyday basis.

Priorities are big part of why this book doesn’t explore Isabel’s sexuality at any length: to put it quite simply, she has bigger problems. She’s in hiding, using a fake name, making poor life decisions, and — for a solid chunk of the book — facing what seems like certain imminent death. All her energy is going on staying alive, rather than worrying about romance and whether or not she’s interested in it. (Although the fact that it’s such a low priority for her at seventeen may be another clue that she’s ace… as a teen, I never could understand why people in movies would start making out during life-or-death situations.)

Finally, there’s the fact that Isabel just… hasn’t figured that stuff out yet. It’s the first time in her life she’s even had a friend her own age; opportunities for figuring out where her romantic/sexual interests lie have been few and far between. I mean, I had a normal upbringing, went to school, and had access to all the usual pop culture, and I still didn’t figure out I wasn’t straight until a similar age; it took even longer before I started finding specific words that fitted. I’ve never related to the “born this way” or “always knew” narratives that are so dominant, and Isabel, who’s been through a lot of trauma and hasn’t had the opportunity to explore her feelings, has even more reason to be a late bloomer in terms of figuring things out.

And I think that’s okay. More than okay, I think that’s important. For every person who “always knew” they were gay or bi or trans, there’s someone who hit their early 20s and went, “Wait, this isn’t right,” or started transitioning at 40 or got all the way into retirement before they found a word that made them feel understood. We need stories about the late bloomers, the people who had to untangle their sexuality from trauma, the people who repressed their feelings and the people who just never had them, the people who didn’t think it mattered until they met a particular person, and everyone else who didn’t understand themselves until much later in life.

Isabel doesn’t understand herself. I know her better than she does. I know her better because The Butterfly Assassin isn’t a standalone, so I’ve seen the progress she’ll make as she begins to process what she’s been through and figure out where she stands in the world. I know that she’ll eventually feel safe enough to start figuring that stuff out, and talking about it to people she trusts. (I know that eventually there will be people she trusts.)

But right now, in book one? There are passing references to her lack of interest, but they’re just that: passing references. Not in-depth conversations or explicit labels. The primary way her asexuality manifests in this book is that there are two relationships which could have been romantic/sexual, and aren’t. One is the “shared trauma” type of relationship — two survivors of the same crappy situation — and the other is the “first kindness type” — i.e. the same person who has ever been nice to Isabel. I’ve seen novels develop both of those types of pairings into romantic ones, and I decided I had no interest in doing so.

So I didn’t.

And that’s it: that’s the asexual murder book. It’s the fact that it never even occurs to Isabel to think about people in those terms. She thinks she’s too focused on survival, the same way I thought I was just really great at the whole “no sex before marriage” thing my evangelical upbringing encouraged. Eventually she, like me, will figure out that there’s more to it than that — but right now, it’s the absence of those thoughts that provides the key to understanding her sexuality.

But that absence means something. That absence is what I was looking for as a teenager. More than a label, more than a word, what I needed was to see a life, a path, a way through adulthood that didn’t assume I would eventually settle down into a relationship. I wanted to know that that was allowed. I wanted reassurance that friendship wasn’t something we grow out of. I wanted stories that didn’t revolve around a type of relationship I wasn’t interested in.

Beyond awareness, to me, means going past “asexual people exist”, going past coming out stories (though there is always space for these, and we always need them), and into the realm of possibilities for the future. It means telling stories that give us space to exist, without pressure to explain our lack of interest. It’s amatonormativity — the positioning of normative romantic/sexual relationships as central and essential to people’s lives, without which we’re incomplete or broken or failures — that puts pressure on us to label ourselves in the first place; I want stories without that.

I wanted to write a book that says: friendship can be every bit as intense and devastating as romance. I wanted to write a book where romance never crosses the protagonist’s mind. And I wanted to write a book where I didn’t necessarily have to explain that with concrete terminology. After all, friendship can be important to everyone, regardless of their sexuality, and even if people want a romantic relationship at some point, that doesn’t mean they’re looking for one at all times. There’s space in everyone’s lives for a narrative outside of romance, one that focuses on all the other types of interpersonal relationships we navigate daily.

(I recently realised that, quite unintentionally, I’d created a story where Isabel’s singleness is entirely unremarkable. Almost all of the secondary characters in this book are single, barring Isabel’s parents; one character references a past relationship, but otherwise, there are basically no couples. Not because they’re all ace — far from it! But because it was so irrelevant to the story I was telling, it simply never came up. More than a queernorm world, perhaps what The Butterfly Assassin offers is a single-norm world…)

That doesn’t mean that Isabel’s asexuality isn’t canon, or that it’s a “word of God” situation, only confirmed outside the book itself. As I said above, The Butterfly Assassin isn’t a standalone, and Isabel won’t always be a terrified, traumatised teenager with a very limited sense of self. In the sequel, we’ll get the chance to explore these aspects of her character more, partly through conversation with another character, who is also ace. (And no, the term still isn’t used, for the worldbuilding reasons outlined above, but their orientations are unambiguously discussed.)

This second ace character is very important to me, because Isabel arguably falls into the “emotionless asexual” (or at least, “emotionally repressed to the point of not actually realising she has feelings”) trope. I didn’t want to imply that her asexuality was related to that aspect of her personality, or that it’s solely a result of what she’s been through. It’s not. The other ace character is a much more functional person in general, and one of the most loving and emotionally open characters in the whole thing; he just happens to also be ace/aro. It was important to me that this was the case. There’s also an aro character who isn’t asexual, and more queer rep in general.

And in book three, if we get book three (the deal so far was for two books), Isabel has the opportunity to encounter more queer people who actually do use labels, and to start figuring out how her identity fits into that web. That book’s at a very early stage right now, so I can’t tell you whether she settles on a specific term. But I promise you it’s something I’ve thought about, and I can see her having a far more concrete understanding of her own identity by the time her story eventually comes to a close.

So no, my asexual murder book doesn’t use the word “asexual”. But it’s still the book that I wanted as an asexual teenager: a book that centred friendship, that didn’t shove two characters into a relationship just because they interacted a few times, and finally, a book that didn’t interrupt life-or-death moments with kissing.

And while Isabel’s sexuality may be ambiguous in book one, I hope that as the trilogy progress, it becomes more and more apparent that she’s ace, even if she never reaches the point of using that specific word. Not because the words aren’t important. But because sometimes people haven’t found their label yet, and that doesn’t mean they’re any less asexual.

If that’s not the ace rep you were hoping for, then I’m sorry. And I hope that one day I’ll write a book with the kind of setting where the characters can use these labels unambiguously, because like I said, I know how important it is to see yourself in a book, when it feels like most of the world doesn’t think you exist. But I still wrote this story for people like us, and I hope you’ll give it a chance anyway.

🖤🤍💜

The Butterfly Assassin will be published on 26th May 2022. You can add it on Goodreads or pre-order it now.