Aro representation in LGBT places

[Mark]

On 2/29/2020 at 8:46 PM, nonmerci said:

My original idea was to create contents specifically for LGBT sites. That may just be me thinking this was common sense, but if there is any aro in these places they are more likely to identify as bi, gay, lesbian, etc than ace... so create content that actually adress the experience of being aro while not being ace was just logical to me.

Which is why I was so concerned by @Morgenfluss bringing up ace websites in this post. Which did look like they might be advocating using this as source material.

 

On 2/29/2020 at 8:46 PM, nonmerci said:

Also, there is other things that concerned all aros.

Given how diverse aros are I'm uncertain how many such things there actually are.
 

On 2/29/2020 at 8:46 PM, nonmerci said:

Like the Wikipedia page about LGBT symbol who present a lot of flag,  including the ace flag, but the aro one (there is not even an aromantic article or at least I don't find it; if you google "Aromantic wikipedia", the first response is... the article about asexuality;  I'd like to write one but right now I don't feel legitimate to write an article on a site where I never write anything).

IIRC there was a Wikipedia page on aromanticism which, somehow, fell outside their rules and was deleted, There is a page on Romantic orientation
Putting just about anything which starts "Aromantic" into Google tends to lead to articles about asexuality.
 

On 3/1/2020 at 12:41 AM, pressAtoQUEER said:

 

Ask @Mark, the user whose post I was responding to. They're the one who asked for proof of aro "stuff" on ace sites several times now.

I was asking @Morgenfluss for clarification about the "aromantic stuff on Ace sites" they brought up, along with why they though it was relevant to LGBT+ sites.

 

On 3/1/2020 at 10:35 AM, bydontost said:

Cool, I actually understand more about what you meant now. I don't agree that general descriptions of aromanticism should be prefaced with "an aro ace person wrote this", and even between one aro ace person and another, the mileage may vary. I'm thinking just of general "aromanticism is a romantic orientation that means x, y, z" style information, not "i'm aromantic and this is my story".

IME the latter can be rather more common than the former.
 

On 3/1/2020 at 10:35 AM, bydontost said:

 I've seen allo aros say that they thought romance is sex and friendship, so maybe this could be a narrative we could mention in basic introductions too.

Possibly also something to the effect that boy/girl friend is a friend you have sex with.

 

On 3/1/2020 at 10:35 AM, bydontost said:

I know we have a different definition of platonic too - I was surprised to learn, as allo aro, that platonic also can mean "non sexual", bc I always used it to mean "non-romantic, can be sexual". It's sth that requires a clarification in any case.

Prior to encountering the aro community I had never known it meaning anything other than "non-sexual" maybe also "non romantic" as a consequence of romantic coding of sex.
The closest I can find to your definition is Merriam-Webster with ": of, relating to, or being a relationship marked by the absence of romance or sex".
Though that could also mean "non-sexual, can be romantic" as well as "non-romantic and non-sexual".
TBH I'd rather avoid using 'platonic' at all.

 

On 3/1/2020 at 9:26 PM, Coyote said:

If queer theory counts as a "LGBT place," and if you'd like to see aromanticism introduced explicitly into queer theory scholarship, you might be interested to read about some existing perspectives on romance in queer theory. Short version: while "romance" isn't really a key word in the field, I'd say queer theory is overall pretty friendly and supportive of nonromantic sexual relationships, which could be a promising start for introducing more of an explicitly aromantic perspective.

It's, unfortunately, only a start. There's a lack of vocabulary for nonromantic sexual relationships (and attraction).
The sex is a keyword whilst romance issue is one of the many ways in which sex and romance are treated differently. Hence conflating asexuality and aromanticism, including the idea that aces and aros face similar problems, can be such a problem.

[Coyote]

2 hours ago, Mark said:

It's, unfortunately, only a start.

 

Yes, of course.

 

Some additional context (for those who don't feel like clicking through or just in general):

• In the humanities, there's some different fields/areas of scholarship like women's & gender studies, queer theory, gay & lesbian studies, critical disability studies, etc.
  • There is not, currently, afaik, any particular "aromanticism studies" or equivalent.
  • Note here I don't just mean "research studies about aromanticism." There's already some stuff like that, in the vein of like... surveys and stuff.
  • I mean more like an aro parallel to queer theory, as a whole body of scholarship on critiquing social norms.

So I guess I'll put this in the form of some questions:

• Is there any interest in making "aromanticism studies" a thing?
• Are there any aros in the humanities looking to get started on that?
  • If so, are you interested in drawing on queer theory as a starting point?
  • Does that count toward aro representation in LGBT places?

 

2 hours ago, Mark said:

There's a lack of vocabulary for nonromantic sexual relationships (and attraction).

 

Wh... Is there? ...I mean, there's room for improvement, I'd agree, but there is some vocabulary in the texts quoted that.... I, at least, interpreted as meaning nonromantic sexual relationships. Are you objecting that that vocabulary isn't good enough (disrespectful or too specific)? Or are you disagreeing with that interpretation as a whole?

 

Or, wait, did you just mean in general, not specifically in regards to queer theory?

 

2 hours ago, Mark said:

The sex is a keyword whilst romance issue is one of the many ways in which sex and romance are treated differently. Hence conflating asexuality and aromanticism

 

That's not so much an issue in queer theory because neither asexuality nor aromanticism is really on the radar in the first place.

 

In any case, queer theory's interest in sexuality as a primary category means that there's a lot of discussion contrasting legimitized/normalized sexual relationships against nonnormative ones, which... seems like the perfect opportunity for talking about romantic vs. nonromantic sexuality as a part of that framework, yeah?

 

[sennkestra]

I know this is derailing the thread a bit, but since the topic of wikipedia came up, here's some thoughts from following the many-years-long struggle to make even basic updates to the ace wikipedia page:

 

First, you can see more about why pages have been changed (including edits added and edits rejected) by looking at the "View History" and "Talk" pages at the top. At the moment, it looks like the reason aromanticism does not have it's own page is because of an overall lack of content, especially a lack of wikipedia-acceptable "reliable sources" that can be cited or that information can be drawn from - this was also one of the biggest hurdles the asexuality page faced when people tried to start cleaning it up. (Instead, it is made part of an overall romantic orientation page, where you can find current talk notes).

 

Generally speaking, wikipedia editors will often reject edits that aren't linked to citations of some kind of newspaper, semi-traditional news media (huffington post etc.) or academic article  (and will often not allow pages from orgs like AVEN or AUREA, which makes things extra difficult). So before you even start editing the page, it helps to gather any news or academic article that mention the information you want to include (like flags, terms, definitions, historical events, etc.).

And if there aren't any articles available....it helps to have a list of things that are needed, and then you can recruit help to try and get people to mention them in any interviews for articles for things like ASAW, pride month in June, etc. (Contacting local or student papers around these events can also help.) This is the part that requires some patience, because sometimes it can take a couple years of education and media outeach before you have enough citable source material for everything you want to include.

 

If anyone is particularly interested in getting up to date, it might be worth starting a new thread and reaching out to other parts of the aro community to see if there's anyone else interested in setting up a wiki team to tackle the project of figuring out what information we want to include, finding sources for it, angling to generate sources if needed, and then actually learning a bit about wiki editing guidelines and actually starting to suggest edits.

[arokaladin]

24 minutes ago, sennkestra said:

First, you can see more about why pages have been changed (including edits added and edits rejected) by looking at the "View History" and "Talk" pages at the top. At the moment, it looks like the reason aromanticism does not have it's own page is because of an overall lack of content, especially a lack of wikipedia-acceptable "reliable sources" that can be cited or that information can be drawn from - this was also one of the biggest hurdles the asexuality page faced when people tried to start cleaning it up. (Instead, it is made part of an overall romantic orientation page, where you can find current talk notes).

 

Generally speaking, wikipedia editors will often reject edits that aren't linked to citations of some kind of newspaper, semi-traditional news media (huffington post etc.) or academic article  (and will often not allow pages from orgs like AVEN or AUREA, which makes things extra difficult). So before you even start editing the page, it helps to gather any news or academic article that mention the information you want to include (like flags, terms, definitions, historical events, etc.).

It would definitely be good to get a wikipedia up, and from google search results it seems like it shouldn't actually be too tricky to get a few initial sources. On the first couple pages I found a few good articles (cosmopolitan, the guardian, huffpost) that have some good definitions for aromanticism, romance repulsion, and some greyro identities. There's also a lot more discussion of allosexual aros than I'd expected in these too which is brilliant. Unsure if we'd be able to use them as sources, I'll have to look at the reliable source link much more in depth, but it's promising to see all from a surface level search. 

 

I also did a quick search for aromanticism on google scholar, which unfortunately brings up almost exclusively articles on asexuality that I assume must mention aromantics in passing. A search for amatonormativity gets a lot more results, but I'd have to look through them much more closely for anything relevant to aromantic basics. Brake's essay coining amatonormativity will obviously come in handy. 

 

[Morgenfluss]

21 hours ago, arokaladin said:

It would definitely be good to get a wikipedia up, and from google search results it seems like it shouldn't actually be too tricky to get a few initial sources. On the first couple pages I found a few good articles (cosmopolitan, the guardian, huffpost) that have some good definitions for aromanticism, romance repulsion, and some greyro identities. There's also a lot more discussion of allosexual aros than I'd expected in these too which is brilliant. Unsure if we'd be able to use them as sources, I'll have to look at the reliable source link much more in depth, but it's promising to see all from a surface level search. 

 

Those are all good sources that I frequently use as well (especially the Guardian article). Another site I know of would be what it means to be aromantic by the Insider. It is a bit focused on AroAces, but also gives a good general overview concerning AlloAros and aromantism in general. In case you do decide to tackle the task of starting a Wikipedia page concerning aromantism, this might be a good source. Psychology today also has an article. https://scarab.bates.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1283&context=honorstheses talks mainly about asexuality, but also heavily focuses on amatonormativity as well as on the spilt attraction modell and QPRs. The author mainly cites tumblr and AVEN amongst other sources, but this might be more accepted as a source. 

 

I hope this helped a bit!

 

EDIT: I just looked over the Wikipedia sources site and it does say that websites aren't allowed as sources, so AVEN directly is out. If we manage to find people using AVEN as a source in a secondary paper there should be no problems. In other news, I would be willing to help with Wikipedia, maybe translating the English into German. I don't know yet how much time I'd have for that but it seems like a great idea so far.

[hemogoblin]

On 2/29/2020 at 9:17 AM, Jot-Aro Kujo said:

Then... What was your point? I’m not saying this to be rude, I’m just genuinely confused as to why you brought it up. No one is saying ace sites don’t mention aros ever, and that’s not the point of this thread, so I’m a little confused as to its relevance. (And, as an allo aro, I’m quite tired of seeing arophobic ace spaces get praised for doing the bare minimum, ngl.)

 

Super delayed response after my original, admittedly defensive, response. Sorry about that - I needed some time to digest and think. I realize I stepped into this thread without a clear purpose or reason for posting, then I posted while only trying to interpret other people's words instead of just sharing my own thoughts. This really only served to detract and derail from the original purpose of the thread. I am deeply sorry about that and would like to apologize about that to you, @Mark, and the other participants of the thread. I am sorry, and I'll do more work to sit back and learn more rather than speaking out about things I am ill-informed about.