Asexual Representation: The Lone Hero

The Walking Dead is a popular zombie narrative— a serious-epic comic book series which became a TV series.

Straight up, The Walking Dead is not my kind of thing. The comic books clarify their anti-femme position early: Men head off to hunt and kill zombies while the women are stuck in camp doing laundry at the river. A middle-aged, butch-encoded woman complains to her female companions about the sudden return to an earlier era, and wonders if women will still be allowed to vote once the zombie thing blows over. The younger, more fertile, more attractive women tell the butch feminist to stop worrying about women’s rights and just do what’s practical.

“Whatever,” says the butch woman, seeming to get the last word.

But on their walk to camp from the river, the women are distracted while chatting when they are approached from behind by a zombie and almost killed. An axe-wielding man saves feminist-butch woman’s life. I guess she learned her lesson.

More significantly, anyone reading The Walking Dead comic through a feminist lens is also sent a message by the male creators in that early scene: “Yeah, we know this is a masculine fantasy. It is what it is; no apologies. Feminists fuck off.”

There’s nothing subversive to see here. Zombie stories are very often about keeping (or returning) women in traditional subordinate position. Much has been said on this already, and much has been written specifically about misogyny in The Walking Dead franchise. A few examples:

• Does The Walking Dead Still Have A Woman Problem? (Season 3 update from Pajiba)
• Thoughts On Andrea from My Friend Amy
• The Walking Dead Has Become A White Patriarchy

At first glance The Walking Dead might seem like a neo-Western, but the ideology is fully in line with your classic pre-WW2 Western: A lone hero and a few close male allies struggle to build a safe community on the frontier while conquering ‘nature’.

Daryl Dixon is one of those close male allies— to Rick, the main character. Rick Grimes considers Daryl a close friend, more like a brother by the end.

Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead

Who is Daryl Dixon?

Daryl isn’t in the original comic books. He was created for the TV series (2010–2022).

The Walking Dead comic book series created by Robert Kirkman, captured the imaginations of readers with its post-apocalyptic narrative. However, the characters of Daryl and Merle Dixon, who would later gain popularity in the TV adaptation, were not part of the original comic’s storyline. Norman Reedus’s portrayal of Daryl became a fan-favorite, leading to the character’s solo spin-off series titled The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, where he embarks on a new chapter in France, searching for his former allies, Rick and Michonne, amidst human and undead threats.

— IMDb

(From that description you might think Daryl and Merle are a romantic couple, but Merle is Daryl’s older sister.)

Like many a good superhero archetype, Daryl Dixon gets an alliterative name. But he’s mostly a Western archetype — which predates the superhero narrative.

[T]he superhero genre is a modern adaptation of the western genre. Trade out the Old West for the New York, get rid of six-shooters and put in technological warfare, and introduce characters who are morally righteous (Captain America, Ethan Edwards, or Batman) versus unstoppable evil (Red Skull, Scar, The Joker) and you have one genre. All that’s truly different is the time period they are told in.

— The American Western and The Superhero Genre

(Some Marvel fans consider Steve Rogers asexual representation. Also Jupiter North of Nevermoor.)

Here’s Daryl’s entry at The Walking Dead Wiki. Before the whole zombie thing, Daryl was an unemployed redneck. But now is his chance to shine. He’s just the sort of guy you want (to be) in a Zombie Apocalypse. Daryl is great at:

• knife combat
• hunting and tracking
• navigation
• observation
• living in the woods

Daryl Dixon’s (A)sexuality

Fortunately, others have already delved into Daryl Dixon’s asexual characterisation on The Walking Dead, which saves me from having to watch the whole series. (I tried; I cannot.)

• ‘The Walking Dead’ Diluting Daryl Dixon’s Asexual Appeal Is A Downer by Sneha Jaiswal
• Daryl Dixon: the aroace rep we deserved by @whitewolfofwinterfell, expressing frustration that Daryl Dixon was clearly written as aroace for 10 entire seasons, but in SE10E18 writers decided “to take all that away in a single 40 minute episode”, the shoe-horned relationship with Leah. The main issue: “viewers had very limited screen-time with Leah and [it therefore seemed to us] that the relationship essentially erupted out of no where.”
• The Walking Dead Boss Finally Confirms Daryl Dixon’s Sexuality: “There was a possibility early on about making Daryl Dixon’s character gay…I can make it official: Daryl Dixon is straight.” (2014) Kirkman’s words confirm that the creators do not consider asexuality an orientation, but rather a behaviour. This is fully expected for pre-2014 showrunners and writers, who would not have known (through their own lack of curiosity and a brief Internet search, frankly, that asexuality is an orientation, not a pattern of behaviour.)
• Is Daryl a Virgin? by Carlos, a fan of the show who expresses regret that Daryl didn’t ‘wife up with Carol’. He also praises main character Rick for having the foresight to surround himself with capable men, especially men who are stronger than he is i.e. Daryl. This says something interesting about the ‘rules’ for this character archetype: Right hand man who is no sexual threat.
• The Walking Dead’s Daryl reveal is a missed opportunity for asexual representation by David Opie tells us what the writers eventually do with Daryl — they decide to give him a romantic/sexual story after all, as a lead into the spin-off series starring this character as the main guy.
• Why a “somewhat asexual” Daryl Dixon is not enough : the importance of labels in queer media — a 2019 paper by Reinier Johnson for Master of Arts in Media Studies (whose last semester of graduate school was funded by Michael Sheen through GoFundMe). Link to Prezi presentation is here. Johnson compares what writers did to Daryl to what Riverdale writers did to Jughead — in both cases, asexual men were made straight.

“The Forever Question”

‘The Walking Dead’ star Norman Reedus says he has read Daryl as asexual and even receives fan mail thanking him for it by Kirsten Acuna (2019). Reedus calls the question about his character’s sexuality “The Forever Question” — which is exactly what it feels like to be ace and illegible, for the record — except it’s you, not the guy you play as part of your job, and it’s your entire life.

When Julie Sondra Decker published The Invisible Orientation in 2014, asexuality really was invisible. Ten years of collective aspec visibility activism and I would now argue that asexuality is — in some circles, at least — visible. But we remain illegible. I would now call asexual orientation the illegible orientation.

Illegibility does not sit well with folk. This is a very difficult concept for the fully legible (majority) population to wrap their heads around, but when people can’t work you out at a glance, or after a brief conversation — regardless of whether they’re right or wrong about you — this has serious consequences for your social life, including for your work life (which is an extension of the social).

Intersectionality of course comes into it: If you’re male and your sexuality is illegible people fill in the gaps and illegible people are rarely gifted a generous narrative. If you’re Black and male, even more so.

Several cognitive biases are at play, including:

• The Illusion of Transparency: The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by others, and to overestimate how well they understand others’ personal mental states.
• Outgroup Homogeneity Bias: Individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.
• Gestalt Theory: Our brains rearrange things so that they make sense (to us).

Daryl Dixon Celebrated as Fictional Asexual Representation

Far more interesting than The Walking Dead franchise itself: Why and how does an audience decode a fictional character as asexual?

Most interesting of all: How do allosexuals and asexuals differ in who is deemed ace or not?

The vast majority of people on asexual forums are either asexual or questioning. From this I can tell that Daryl Dixon is an asexual fan fave from within the ace community.

Outside the aspec community, fans filled the ‘hole’ in Daryl’s romantic and sex life by shipping Daryl with various female characters.

Daryl Dixon and Woodrow Call

The Daryl Dixon character archetype existed long before The Walking Dead. Like many aspects of the traditional (pre WW2) American Western, Daryl comes from the Western tradition.

We see a similar archetype in Woodrow Call from Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (a Pulizter Prize winning anti-Western).

What do these two guys have in common?

• They are a main character, but not the main character. Their male companions (the stars) have romantic and sexual aspects to their lives whereas these guys do not. This ‘rule’ of popular storytelling explains why writers turned Daryl into a sexual-romantic person before he was ‘allowed’ to star in his own spinoff series after he emerged as a fan favourite.
• Their work ethic is second-to-none. Although Daryl was unemployed pre-apocalypse, he’s really into his job now, fighting zombies, protecting his community. Likewise, nothing distracts Call from his work. Call has a low tolerance for cowboys who are… well… cowboys.
• Whereas civilisation doesn’t suit them, the wilderness embraces these men. They shine alone in the forest or on the prairie, including while away from women. These men are self-contained and self-sufficient in general, not just when it comes to sex. The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman has said of Daryl Dixon, “”I think that he’s a very introverted character and I think that’s somewhat his appeal.” The ‘strong, silent type’ is known to appeal to straight women. Some men mistake this attraction for ‘women like simple guys who can control their emotions’. In reality, the fantasy of the ‘strong silent type’ is a female fantasy about men who don’t need to be constantly looked after. Women are so often expected to care for everyone else around them in real life. In contrast, the strong, silent male fantasy does not need anything from her.
• They’re laconic. (They don’t talk much.) However, Daryl Dixon starts to get a lot more dialogue in Season 9, which was very much noticed by fans.
• They are cheerless. One commenter on an excellent YouTube video about how asexuals are portrayed as psychopaths in fiction said, this: “Even though asexuals have little passion for sex, I think that passion is instead channelled towards their hobbies, lifestyle and to make good friendships. It’d be nice to see them portrayed as highly passionate, sociable and enthusiastic rather than cold, lonely and heartless.” This is because a non-zero number of allosexuals unfortunately believe that asexuals must be miserable.
• Their creators refuse to make these guys “completely asexual”. Larry McMurtry gives Call a love story in his youth which likely led to a son. The creators of The Walking Dead clarified for the record that they consider Daryl “somewhat asexual” (whatever that means). It’s highly likely that by “asexual” they mean “doesn’t have much sex” rather than the intra-community definition referring to someone’s innate orientation rather than behaviour. (Cf. We wouldn’t hear popular show creators describe a character as “somewhat gay” without considerable backlash.) Were these men to exist in real life, their backstories of partnered sex would not make them any less asexual. By contrast to all the men around them, they are not as interested in pursuing sex. That, to me, is the most robust definition of the label, perhaps especially when it applies to men. This is because partnered sex with women is considered a prerequisite of masculinity.
• They’ve seen some shit. Daryl Dixon actor, Norman Reedus: “I think [Daryl] has a lot of issues that he’s dealing with that if he’s going to go there, he’s going to really mean it, so you have to be really careful with it.” Call spent most of his life as a Texas Ranger. All of McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove men have seen some shit, but Call is the only guy on the prairie who doesn’t turn to sporting women at every opportunity. This is partly why I appreciate the asexual representation exemplified by Woodrow Call.

I’m confident in saying that allosexual story creators are not including Woodrow Call/Daryl Dixon Cowboy Virgin Male archetypes for queer diversity reasons. So let’s talk instead about their narrative purpose:

• The Daryl Dixon Archetype contrasts well against the guys with sexual story lines. In an ensemble, each man represents a different aspect of ‘men’. If men have a sexual side, they also have a side which is capable of hyper-focusing on work, to get the job done. Men such as Call and Dixon remind male viewers that they, too, have these powers within them, and also appeals to the fantasy of the lone hero.
• Shipping fandom can go to town with these guys, imagining across many seasons who these tough guys might hook up with. (Modern storytellers will at some point be accused of ‘queerbaiting’.)
• Whenever a fictional man isn’t interested in sex, his work ethic goes up by equal measure. This makes everyone (including the audience) feel safe in the knowledge that, should zombies invade the camp, Darryl Dixon is ready and waiting. (If zombies come in the middle of the night, Darryl won’t be having sex. He’ll be scouting the forest for zombies, not trying to catch the eye of some campsite love interest.)

What do these narrative functions tell us about how The Common Man™ thinks of asexuals?

• We are the inverse of player types. Not true of course — hypersexual asexuals exist. But storytellers love a contrasting duo, exaggerating differences just a bit for conflict, interest and other dramatic purposes.
• Most people have a prurient interest in everyone else’s sex life, including in the sex lives of fictional characters. So when a main character’s sexuality is kept deliberately illegible, unexplained, this serves as a form of ‘sexual mystery boxing’. Whatever’s going on with this character in the mind of the audience is probably way more interesting than anything the creators are allowed to (or have time to) show on the screen anyway.
• American popular fiction is more Puritanical than many would like to admit. What did the Puritans like? Work ethic. If asexual men aren’t distracted by sex, they must have brain cells left over for other things e.g. work or, in The Walking Dead, the work of survival. This is something asexuals and Autistics have in common: We may be deemed useless in the romantic and sexual arena, but so long as we’re good for the community in other ways, our existence is justified. This is the Rudolph narrative: Ostracised by his peers, Rudolph was only accepted once his nose became useful. He was never accepted for being himself. Also, the idea that men are better at their jobs when not distracted by sex says something interesting about societal attitudes towards sex, with different repercussions for men and women. (According to this way of thinking, it’s easy to cast women as temptresses and men as unthinking, simplistic beings — almost zombified, since we’re talking about zombies.)
• Asexual people are frequently assumed to be asexual due to having seen some shit. (The trauma narrative.) This is to do with the Sequential Causality Bias:

Sequential causality is generally considered to be very important in plotting. It is often thought to be the difference between a simple story, which just presents events as arranged in their time sequence, and a true plot, in which one scene prepares for and leads into and causes the scene that comes after it.

— Rust Hills

Asexual Men Can Only Ever Be Sidekicks

The tentpole example of this duo is often said to be Don Quijote and Sancho, from a famous parody of the chivalric tradition. These guys oppose and complement each other.

Others go much further back, to the Poem of Gilgamesh (before 1500BC). In Gilgamesh we find the civilizing hero and the savage helper (King Gilgamesh and his travelling companion Enkidu — literally part animal, part human.) Contributing to the theory that sex (or absence of sex) in fiction never just means sex, Enkidu becomes civilised when he has sex with a human woman. In folk and fairy tale, food is also frequently used to turn someone from human to fairy or the inverse. Enkidu is also made to eat human food — bread and beer. Together, the sex and the human-made food bring him into the realm of the human. But he’s still got a few animalistic advantages, like he can sniff and track really well. This comes in handy on his master’s journey.

Does the super ancient narrative of Gilgamesh remind you at all of how asexuals are frequently thought to be good at stuff because we’re asexual? Like, ostensibly we have more free time to spend on other pursuits, but actually, maybe this has something to do with being seen as not fully human? A bit like… Enkidu?

This trope has been used many times, over many centuries since Gilgamesh. White men taming ‘savages’. Robinson Crusoe and Friday, Ismael and Queequeg from Moby Dick, Jim Hawkins and John Silver from Treasure Island (at first an apparent role reversal, until the reveal that Silver is the more bloodthirsty — a “false” helper), Asterix and Obelix…

The Example of “Guigemar” (12th century)

Arthurian Grail Knights famously pledged themselves to chastity and virginity. But as Hannah Piercy says in the essay “Ar ye a knyght and ar no lovear?” Men Who Resist Love:

Abstracted from a religious context that celebrates chastity and virginity, men’s resistance to love starts to look more unusual. There are some examples of men who express either hostility or active indifference to love in romance, but there are not many such portrayals.

— Hannah Piercy, Resistance to Love in Medieval English Romance: Negotiating Consent, Gender and Desire (2023)

Published very recently, Hannah Piercy considers how some famous Romantic figures can offer insights into queer sexualities. She includes and specifically names asexuality.

Piercy offers “Guigemar” (named after its hero) as an excellent example of asexuality, pointing out that this Breton lai* is very well-known among scholars for the hero’s a(anti)pathy towards love, but so far no one has done an aspec close reading. If anyone considers queer, they jump to the conclusion that if a man isn’t interested in women then he must be gay.

*lai: a form of medieval French and English romance literature, usually short

Piercy reads Guigemar as specifically aspec because the hero’s attitude is not “prideful refusal”, but simply “lack of interest”. The poem is very specific about his disinterest in love and hints at disinterest in sex.

Unfortunately for Guigemar, his lack of interest in sex and romance makes him lost, and therefore in danger.

The poem illuminates how, in the time period it was written, virginity was celebrated only in religious contexts. All other men were expected to fall in love and have sex.

By my view, this aligns exactly with contemporary Western culture and modern rules around ‘proper’ masculinity. We see it most obviously in conservative Christian churches, but this is only because pastors and preachers are inclined to put these views into words, not because mainstream society doesn’t also think this.

By the end of the poem, Guigemar has accepted love. We might interpret that as aspec erasure, but Piercy asks us to consider a different reading:

Could we not also read Guigemar in the other direction: rather than Guigemar’s acceptance of love effectively straightening his initial asexuality, couldn’t his asexuality queer his acceptance of love?

[…]

Rather than endorsing the trajectory from romantic a(nti)pathy to love, the generic dissonance in Guigemar may enable us to register the effects of pressure to form romantic and sexual relationships. As Julie Sondra Decker points out [in The Invisible Orientation, 2014], the association of asexuality with adolescence may hold some truth not because asexuality is exclusively an adolescent experience (it is not), but because this is the time at which many people realise they may be asexual, just as it is the time at which many people of any orientation start to understand whom and what they desire.

— Hannah Piercy, Resistance to Love in Medieval English Romance: Negotiating Consent, Gender and Desire (2023)

I’ll attempt this reading next time I encounter a ‘cured asexual’ narrative, in which initial asexuality was simply a temporary state of sexual immaturity.

Note: The Breton lai is a very specific form of literature which is designed to be read at a metaphorical level, opening it to many interpretations. So I won’t necessarily accept asexual erasure from contemporary popular storytellers! (It is still a travesty what writers did to Jughead, even though I have never followed that particular show.)

Piercy also has this to say in possible defence of “Guigemar”:

No stranger himself to alienation from desire, Guigemar now appears to have internalised the compulsion towards love and sexuality and to ventriloquise it to others.

— Hannah Piercy, Resistance to Love in Medieval English Romance: Negotiating Consent, Gender and Desire (2023)

The word ‘ventriloquise’ reminds me very much of Bakhtin’s theory around heteroglossia: multiple voices. In fiction, authors use a variety of voices (sometimes coming out of the same character) to express various viewpoints within a text.

An example from contemporary storytelling: The adolescent boys in the 1980s movie Stand By Me (based on a Stephen King short story) sometimes seem to speak as themselves, but at other times seem to be channelling other sources. These young characters are influenced by many different voices:

1. The language of authority (from parents, teachers et al)
2. Absolute language (general wisdom of the community) “Everyone just knew [Chris] would turn out bad.”
3. The opposite to the language of authority (e.g. from the older teenagers)
4. The language of childhood (contrasting with the argot of the older boys in Stand By Me)
5. The language of mass media (the boys in Stand By Me embark on an Odyssey to find a dead body, perhaps partially because to them that’s what ‘adventure’ looks like)

Stand By Me examines what happens when The Voice of Authority becomes the boys’ inner voice. They gradually start to sound less like boys and more like dispirited men. In the coda, we learn that the narrator has never since adolescence had such a close friendship with another man.

Likewise, Hannah Piercy is asking us to consider that “Guigemar” can be read as start-to-finish aspec in nature, not because Guigemar the man has been ‘converted’ to heterosexuality, but because he has tragically internalised the Voice of Authority which — in the Medieval Era as it is today — is that a real man must fall in love and have sex, outside the very specific exception of religious contexts.

Closed Body Men

Bartolomé and Parra call fictional men who are sexless, austere and laconic closed body. These guys tend to be loquacious, sexually dominant, and/or love their food and drink — open body.

Closed Body and Open Body Men in Comedy

In his writing guide Secrets of Story, Matt Bird writes about a common character ensemble in comedy. Ensemble characters will very often correlate with heart, head and stomach. One character is driven by their emotions, another by logic, another by food.

Matt Bird adds a possible fourth addition to this cast: The sex-obsessed character. We see this in many contemporary comedies, from Silicon Valley to Australia’s Kath and Kim. Sometimes a character is interested in both food and sex. Where there’s that fourth addition, it tends to be either/or: The character focused on food is no longer focused on sex.

Closed Body Men as Humorless and Broken

In Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, which has its moments of comedy, Woodrow Call and Augustus co-star. By the end of the series, it is only Woodrow who is left alive — but barely. He is missing a significant chunk of limb. In line with how he feels about sex, he is alive in body but now his broken body at least matches his spirit.

Despite the story belonging to both Gus and Call, Gus is the ‘relatable’ character. Gus gets most of the good lines. Because Gus talks so much, we get to know him better. We know that Gus is driven by hedonistic pleasures, especially with beautiful women. He also likes to appear more educated than he really is. In contrast, Larry McMurtry keeps Woodrow as an enigma.

Contemporary Heroes Cannot Remain Asexual

The case of Daryl Dixon is more typical of the adventure genres: Until audiences fell unexpectedly in love with the character, he was a sidekick. It is absolutely no coincidence that as soon as Daryl became the main character in his own story, he was given a legible, normative (straight) sexuality.

The Lone Ranger-Helper Duo and its Origins

Vladimir Propp went deep into the structure of classic fairy tales. He wrote about the Helper archetype in storytelling. Roland Barthes and Algirdas Greimas have also talked about fictional Helpers . These perspectives are pretty well known.

A lesser-known essayist is Ariel Dorfman, who is especially interested in the archetype of the Lone Ranger and his sidekick. The Lone Ranger is a popular 20th century character across comics, movies and TV. His sidekick is the Indian Tonto (the ‘savage’).

There are various takes on this:

• The Lone Ranger has an ‘Indian’
• Batman and Green Arrow have adolescents
• Zorro has a ‘mute’
• Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon have women

Features of Lone Ranger Helpers:

• disenfranchised from power
• mutilated or ill-treated in some way
• too young or too old
• resentful and hurt
• unwilling to submit

They are outcasts. In the 20th century, the backstories of these characters were left out of the narrative entirely. These days, the trauma stories of characters are likely to be woven into the plot.

Daryl Dixon, designated redneck in his everyday American life, was also an outsider. He looks hyper-masculine, but is he? Without a sex life, can he be?

Frequently in these stories, the Helper character (whatever their stated or apparent gender) embodies the feminine. To be a sidekick is to be subordinate, and to be subordinate is to be feminine. So there’s that.

If Daryl Dixon is masculine in every other way — killing zombies, saving people, living alone in the woods just fine — to deny this guy a sexuality is just one other way writers might signal to audiences who is the Main Guy (Rick) and who is the Sidekick Helper (Daryl).

It is also important that these guys remain laconic.

Speak little. Contribute much.

— South Atlantic Review

Of particular note: The sidekick is frequently expendable. Unless he can save himself by becoming a fan fave and turning himself into the main character (like Daryl Dixon), it is well-known that the most dangerous character to be is the hero’s best friend.

The character most likely to die in any major series, regardless of genre, is the hero’s best friend, girlfriend or most beloved relative.

— TV Tropes, Friendly Target

What I mean to add to the conversation: It is important to audiences that the Helper/Sidekick best friend does not upstage the hero. This means he doesn’t get a fully-realised sexual and romantic plot thread of his own.

What does this say about how we view sexuality itself? Aside from being more relatable (to allosexuals), men who have sex are more worthy and laudable. Men who don’t have sex are more expendable.

Allosexual audiences will likely view the Daryl Dixon archetype as straight but broken. Queer-literate (but not fully accepting) allosexuals may view this archetype as asexual, but still broken.

In The Walking Dead, asexual viewers get a taste of what it would be like to see genuine asexual representation in popular narrative. Ultimately, though, these men are created in a way that makes them palatable to allosexual audiences. They cannot be asexual by orientation, only “asexual” by behaviour, due to their traumatic backstories, and the traumatic circumstances they find themselves in, living on those Western frontiers and suffering through dystopian hellscapes.

Despite increasing asexual visibility in fiction, to allow asexual orientation in a Cowboy-Dystopian-Lone-Hero would be destabilising for contemporary viewers, especially perhaps for cishet male viewers, who may not have considered, ever, that masculinity and sexuality are two discrepant aspects of their own identity.

Instead, the “asexuality” of the Hero speaks only to his invincibility, mystique and his noble self-reliance, free from feminising influences.

REFERENCES

Bartolomé, José Manuel Pedrosa, and Mary Fitzhugh Parra. “The Hero, the Savage, and the Journey: Don Quijote/Sancho… and William/Rainouart, Tamino/Papageno, Robinson/Friday, Ismael/Queequeg, Asterix/Obelix.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 72, no. 1, 2007, pp. 191–211.

Bird, Matt. Secrets of Story. Penguin, 2016.

Kijinski, John L. “Bakhtin and Works of Mass Culture: Heteroglossia in Stand By Me.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 10, no. 2, 1987, pp. 67–81.

PIERCY, HANNAH. “‘Ar Ye a Knyght and Ar No Lovear?’: Men Who Resist Love.” Resistance to Love in Medieval English Romance: Negotiating Consent, Gender, and Desire, Boydell & Brewer, 2023, pp. 37–74

Larre Bildeston is the author of a contemporary (aromantic) asexual romance The Space Ace of Mangleby Flat (2023), set in Australia and New Zealand.