Carnival of Aros March 2020: Aromanticism and Gender

[Magni]

Hi, I'm running carnival of aros this month and the topic is aromanticism and gender, the call for submissions can be found here.  I wanted to start this thread to encourage people to talk about the subject and hopefully getting conversation going will help encourage people to post submissions.  Also, I know tumblr isn't for everyone, so if people do post submissions they can reply to this thread with a link to their submission as another way to get it to me.

 

 

I chose this topic because I feel my aromanticism affects my experiences with gender.  I'm nonbinary, specifically agender, and I also use the term arogender as a descriptor.  It took me much longer to identify my gender, in part bc I misattributed my desire to wear baggy "neutral" clothes like t-shirts as being due to a desire not to be perceived as "attractive" due to me being aro and ace.  There's also an interesting symmetry between my identities since they are all defined by what I do not feel rather than what I do feel, and it's difficult to notice the absence of something.  Also, in general I think it is fascinating how so much of conventional gender roles seems to be intrinsically tied to relationships and what is considered desirable?

So yeah, feel free to share any thoughts and experiences on this thread, and I hope people feel inspired to post submissions for CoA

[Scoop]

I want to write something for this month because I enjoy the blogging carnival and writing and your prompt, but I am strugglinggg.

 

All I'm really coming up with is that I don’t think about gender all that much and I never thought about romance either. Maybe this means something, maybe it doesn’t. I could write about expectations and overlap? Women are generally expected to want a relationship and desire romance. I could probably reference arogender and maybe even he/him lesbians. I don’t feel a dissonance between my orientation and gender, but I suppose that still gives me something to explore. 

[Magni]

Yeah, that sounds interesting.  In general I think it's fascinating how gender roles interact with expectations of romance.  Hmm also stuff like....in middle school I felt alienated from other girls bc I wasn't "boy crazy" since not interested in romance, and stuff like that where feel different from post people of gender can overlap with other feelings of gender and stuff?

[aro_elise]

i was thinking that too, how my not wanting a romantic relationship or marriage (or kids) is criticized or dismissed because women are supposed to want those things.

[Apathetic Echidna]

I wrote something! though it seems to have turned into a rambling wall of text: https://mesotablar.dreamwidth.org/12317.html 

 

 

and with this post I break my hilarious post count of 666

Edited March 31, 2020 by Apathetic Echidna
to goodbye the number of the beast

[raavenb2619]

Here is my submission:

https://raavenb2619.wordpress.com/2020/03/31/musings-on-my-aromanticism-and-gender/

[Magni]

Thanks to everyone who submitted! I just posted the roundup, found here.