Asexuality, Affect Aliens, and Digital Affect Cultures: Relationality with the Happy Objects of Sexual and Romantic Relationships

Abstract

Asexuality and aromanticism remain understudied sites of research in interpersonal and family communication. Situated within Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication (CIFC), this study leverages affect theory to understand how asexual and aromantic people construct relationalities within a sex and romance saturated society. A critical thematic analysis of Instagram accounts run by asexual and aromantic people reveals how they create community based on their alien affect to the “happy objects” of sexual and romantic relationships. Results reveal how asexual alien affect is mobilized to critique allonormative happy objects, circulate community objects, and share alien affect with broader communities.

Keywords:

• Affect
• Aromanticicism
• Asexuality
• Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication
• LGBTQ

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Julia Moore for her feedback on an early version of this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Although in popular use of the term “attraction,” romantic attraction and sexual attraction are often assumed to be the same, asexuality works from the split attraction model. Romantic attraction is the draw toward someone based on feelings of/desires for romance, while sexual attraction is the draw toward someone based on feelings of/desires for sex.

2. In this article, I use “allonormative” and “allosexual” as they are used in these Instagram accounts. Allonormative identifies society’s expectation that people be sexual and not asexual. Allosexual identifies anyone who is not asexual. As Pryzybylo (2019) notes, much of the language concerning asexuality, such as these words, arose from online countercultures and not from within academia.