Ace and aro lesbian art and theory with Agnes Martin and Yayoi Kusama

ABSTRACT

This article draws on the field of asexuality studies and the growing work of aromanticism studies to think about whether and how we can theorize lesbian studies from asexual (ace) and aromantic (aro) perspectives. Aces experience “the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity” (Asexual Visibility and Education Network) and aros experience little or no romantic attraction to others. While lesbian studies has countless examples of “asexual resonances,” or lesbian theorizations that focus on intimacy between women in ways that do not centralize sex and sometimes do not centralize romance—such as those of Boston Marriages and intimate friendships, women identified women, single lesbian figures and spinsters, and lesbian kinship networks that are erotic if not sexual or romantic in nature—little work thus far has explored lesbian identities using the frameworks of asexuality and even more so of aromanticism. This piece explores ace and aro lesbianism by focusing on two artists: abstract expressionist Canadian-American painter Agnes Martin (1912–2004) and pop art multi-media Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b.1929). Martin has been regarded as lesbian and Kusama as a sexually repressed heterosexual, with neither artist widely understood nor celebrated for the ace and aro elements of their identities, despite evidence suggesting that both artists might be ace and aro. Opening up understandings of lesbianism beyond the sexual and romantic, I argue, allows for a dynamic positioning of lesbianism as a relational quality that can be extended to countless artists, figures, literary texts, and films.

KEYWORDS:

• Asexuality
• aromanticism
• agenderism
• lesbian art
• ace and aro art
• relationality
• Agnes Martin
• Yayoi Kusama

Disclosure statement

The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to two anonymous reviewers, to Erika Sparby, and to the guest editors, Nicole Seymour and Ella Ben Hagai, for feedback on the piece.

Notes

1 The term “sexual imperative” was available before the rise of ace theory, coined by Hollway (1984). Other terms in use by ace theorists include “sexualnormativity” (Morrissey, 2016), “sexual normalcy” (Kim, 2014), and “sex normativity” (Chasin, 2011).

2 Appears in an interview by Jenny Attiyeh (2001, 7). Also cited in Princenthal (2015, 299).

3 Kusama (2011, 109).

4 Interestingly, Harley Guo (2020) argues that Andy Warhol was himself asexual and aromantic and Benjamin Kahan (2013) argues that Warhol was queerly celibate.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ela Przybyło

Ela Przybyło is Assistant Professor in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Illinois State University. She is the author of Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality (Ohio State University Press 2019), editor of On the Politics of Ugliness (Palgrave 2018), and author of many peer-reviewed articles and chapters on asexuality including in such journals as Feminist Formations, GLQ, Sexualities, and Feminism & Psychology.