Teaching Premodern Asexualities and Aromanticisms
by Liza Blake
As an aroace (someone who identifies as both asexual [“ace”] and aromantic [“aro”]) who went to college in the early 2000s, I found myself both drawn to and not entirely comfortable in premodern queer studies. I was delighted by the way queer theory helped me to challenge the role of heteronormativity in shaping the modern world. But I also sometimes found my own identity occluded: if a character refused or expressed a disinterest in sex or in relationships, a queer analysis was more likely to read this refusal as a sign of closeted or implicit homosexuality rather than considering that refusal or disinterest itself as a queer identity.
It was only close to the end of graduate school, and the end of my 20s, that I even discovered asexuality as a named orientation. I often ask myself how my academic career — and my life — might have unfolded differently if I had had a chance to learn earlier about the existence of the various things signified by the “A” in LGBTQIA+.
Most of this article will discuss pragmatic techniques for incorporating analyses drawn from asexuality studies into everyday readings and class discussions in the premodern classroom. But I began with a personal anecdote to express the urgency of such pedagogy. Aspec students (students on the ace- and/or aro-spectrum) could have their lives transformed by exposure to this identity; everyone, including allosexual students (students who are not asexual) can still benefit from tools that allow them to challenge not only heteronormativity, but also allonormativity (the normative assumption that all people experience sexual attraction, and to the same degree) and amatonormativity (the normative assumption that all people experience romantic attraction, and to the same degree; see also Brake, who coined this term). A bibliography, and a robust list of further readings and resources (including a sample syllabus and assignments) can be found at the bottom of this article; full citations to the authors referenced here can be found in that bibliography.
To talk about what it means to teach premodern asexualities, we must first think about what it means to teach asexualities, in the plural. Asexuality is defined in slightly different ways among members of the ace community than it is in academic discussions of asexuality. The introduction to Julie Sondra Decker’s Invisible Orientation is an excellent example of asexuality as it is normally defined by the asexual community: asexuality is a sexual orientation characterized by a lack of sexual attraction, or experiencing limited sexual attraction, or only under specific circumstances. Classifying asexuality as an orientation is central to this definition, and is a valuable activist tool to advocate for protections under the law.
In the academic field of asexuality studies, the goal is often less on defining asexuality as an orientation or identity and more on offering structural analyses of the “compulsory sexuality” (see Kristina Gupta) that structures our society, and on challenging allonormativity as a default. For instance, Ela Przybylo’s recent book Asexual Erotics announces itself as “less about an identity and more about critiquing sexually overdetermined modes of relating.” Scholars such as Przybylo, Gupta, Ianna Hawkins Owen, Vaid-Menon, and Eunjung Kim have also performed excellent analyses of the forces of hypersexualization and desexualization, asking how race and disability cause some bodies to have unwanted sexuality thrust upon them, while other bodies are denied access to sexuality. These structural analyses are vital for dissecting allosexuality as an unstated norm used to punish some people and bodies more than others. Though it does not use the word “asexuality,” Cameron Awkward-Rich’s “Prude’s Manifesto” (below) is a wonderful contemporary poem for raising some of these questions in a classroom discussion (see the introduction to Przybylo’s book for an analysis of this poem).
What does it mean to bring these two (community and academic) approaches to premodern texts? One way of thinking about premodern asexualities is to look for “ace rep” or asexual representation: characters or historical figures who might arguably have identified as ace if they had had the terminology. In the middle ages, this representation may look like the Arthurian knight Galahad who disavows sexual desire (Arkenberg), or Margery Kempe negotiating with her husband of several years (and father of her fourteen children) to begin having a “chaste marriage,” or to stop having sex. In the early modern period, it may look like seventeenth-century poet Abraham Cowley’s frank admission that though “I’ve often wish’d to love,” “Me still the cruel boy [Cupid] does spare” (an admission that he has never been shot by Cupid’s arrows, despite hoping he would). It may require a re-reading of Adonis’s refusal of Venus in William Shakespeare’s long narrative poem Venus and Adonis (Chess has discussed this with respect to adolescence, and Urvashi Chakravarty with respect to race and gender), or — as a recent production directed by Rachel Chung has beautifully demonstrated — a reading of the queer nymphs in John Lyly’s Galatea.
Of course, to make such analyses is to risk anachronism, though scholars such as Simone Chess and Melissa Sanchez, writing about adolescents and Protestant chastity respectively, have argued convincingly that at least some early modern authors understood asexuality as an orientation in the modern sense. Aley O’Mara’s groundbreaking work, moreover, provides careful and thorough historical analyses of how the Protestant Reformation in England rewrote chastity as a “Catholic” perversity, and, in the process, laid the foundations for allonormative and heterosexist social structures that persist to this day.
The point in looking at premodern texts with an asexual representation lens is not, for instance, to take a “canon” allo gay character and transform them into a definite asexual. Rather, I would simply ask at the minimum that teachers allow for the possibility that a queer-coded character’s queerness might mean not that they are necessarily gay, but that they could be on the ace or aro spectrum instead, or in addition. When early modern poet Katherine Philips writes numerous poems about the passion she feels for her women friends, and writes about those friends using tropes more commonly used in contemporary love poetry, it is possible to speculate on whether that “friendship” is a code for lesbianism. But it is just as possible to read these poems through an aspec lens — and indeed ace and aro communities, following Philips, frequently argue for the need to revalue friendship as just as intense as, and not lesser than, romantic or sexual relationships. Many premodern texts can be useful for these kinds of conversations, working as they do to broaden the concept of love to include not only sexual or romantic attraction but also philosophical or divine love; see, for instance, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, or George Herbert’s “Love [I]” and “Love [II].”
Often readings that might start as being open to thinking about the pre-histories of asexuality and aromanticism (as reading for “ace rep”) can also shade into structural analyses. I have argued, for example, that when Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing each say they want to live as “bachelors,” and seem to announce themselves as aro, we should be open to the possibility of taking them at their word (start at 8:46 in the YouTube video below):
But an aspec reading of the play should also analyze critics’ and theater makers’ reluctance to take the characters at their word, and their desire to see the two characters married off at the end. A structural analysis would analyze the amatonormative forces that cause the other characters in the play to refuse to let them remain single, and would extend that analysis to ask why centuries of theatrical directors and textual editors of the play have rewritten the ending to make the two characters’ persistent mutual refusal into a more traditionally “happy,” alloromantic ending.
Learning to read early modern texts with a structural analysis rather than starting from “ace rep” or identifying ace characters — thinking about asexuality studies as “less about an identity and more about critiquing sexually overdetermined modes of relating,” to return to the Przybylo quotation above — opens up an even larger number of premodern texts to the insights of asexuality studies.
For instance, while an “ace rep” reading of the Ovidian Pygmalion myth might see the sculptor as a possible figure of ace representation (Ovid reports that he “did utterly eschew / The womankind” in an influential sixteenth-century English translation by Arthur Golding), a structural analysis drawing on the insights of disability studies as offered by Eunjung Kim might focus instead on how Pygmalion hypersexualizes the statue, leaving no place for her to consent to the sex-acts performed on her either before or after her transformation into a human. When I taught the Pygmalion myth in my “Early Modern Asexualities” course, I paired it with the discussion of stone in Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies, and thought with my students about early modern and modern discourses of “frigidity” with John Marston’s satirical epyllion The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image. Likewise we thought through asexuality, race, hypersexualization, and desexualization in sixteenth century sonnets alongside Kim F. Hall’s analysis of “fairness” in sonnets in her Things of Darkness, and Ianna Hawkins Owens’ essays on asexuality and race. Allonormative assumptions structure far more texts than those that have characters explicitly refusing sex or disavowing desire.
Another productive way of teaching asexuality beyond “ace rep” includes formal analyses of the genres, especially dramatic genres (such as Elizabethan comedy and Jacobean city comedies), whose plots march towards marriage and couples. An excellent model of this kind of reading is Elizabeth Hannah Hanson’s essay on nineteenth-century bourgeois marriage plots; she argues for an asexual understanding of narrative structure that disrupts or delays this forward march to the altar. While her argument is in many ways specific to Victorian novels, it is a fascinating exercise to ask students of premodern literature what comparable literary forms and structures they can think of in medieval and Renaissance texts we have read for the class. When I teach Margaret Cavendish’s closet drama The Convent of Pleasure I ask students to think about how the small explosion of micro-plays in the middle of the play, which depict the miseries of marriage, potentially complicate the marriage (and so the “happiness”) of the play’s ending.
In short, teaching asexuality in the premodern literature classroom entails both an awareness of asexuality as an identity, and a familiarity with the insights of asexuality studies as they help us unpack the allonormative and amatonormative ideologies that structure our world. All of the above suggestions assume a teacher interested in learning the basics of what asexuality is, and wanting to know more about how the insights of asexuality studies might work as analytical tools that can be added to a much larger toolbox with which to approach premodern texts. For those wishing to explore more deeply, I recommend the “Further Reading and Resources” section that follows, including especially the collaboratively built and maintained “Early Modern Asexualities Bibliography.” I also provide below sample materials from a semester-long undergraduate seminar I taught on “Early Modern Asexualities,” including the reading list and several assignments designed just for this course. I am also happy to be contacted directly to talk about premodern asexuality in pedagogy and research.
Further Reading and Resources:
See the full Early Modern Asexualities Bibliography, developed by Liza Blake, Simone Chess, Catherine Clifford, and Ashley “Aley” O’Mara, for our most robust list of relevant secondary sources. Full bibliographical information of the authors listed above can be found in that bibliography: https://tinyurl.com/earlymodacebib. For introductions to asexuality as an identity, see Julie Sondra Decker’s Invisible Orientation and Angela Chen’s Ace (both listed in the bibliography above).
Watch the ACMRS Early Modern Asexualities Roundtable for short position papers thinking about the intersection of asexuality and early modern literature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vSgG02fH6M.
Download my “Early Modern Asexualities” undergraduate syllabus, as well as three “Targeted Research Writeup” assignments asking students: 1) to bridge early modern critical race studies with asexuality studies; 2) to watch and respond to an Ace-Con panel and reflect on academic v. community discussions of asexuality; and 3) to track citations and summarize discussions in non-academic ace and aro blogs and online forums.
Sennkestra maintains a working bibliography of asexuality research (not specific to the humanities or to premodern studies) with Zotero: https://www.zotero.org/groups/950137/asexual_research. See Sennkestra’s blog “Next Step Cake,” for blog posts on asexuality and aromanticism written from a community member deeply engaged with academic research as well. Relevant Categories to explore from this blog for readers of this article include Ace History, and Asexual Research, and Sennkestra also links to other ace and aro bloggers: https://nextstepcake.wordpress.com/.
Watch panels from the virtual Ace-Con on such topics on ace research, ace rep, asexuality and disability, asexuality and neurodivergence, and Black Aces: https://asexualityconference.org/program/.
Explore community discussions on the AVEN (Asexuality Visibility and Education Network) forums: https://www.asexuality.org/.
Liza Blake (she/her, @medrenliza on Twitter) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, working on early modern literature, women writers, and textual editing. With Drs. Aley O’Mara and Catherine Clifford, she is co-editing a collection of essays entitled Early Modern Asexualities. With Jenna McKellips (Univ. of Toronto), she is project co-lead on an in-progress digital tool called The Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography, which will tag both scholarly and community writing about asexuality and aromanticism to make it easier for asexuality and aromanticism studies researchers to find relevant research and writing.
