Call For Papers: Global Asexualities and Aromanticisms 

Co-edited by Yo-Ling Chen (Independent Scholar) and Ela Przybyło (Illinois State University)

Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2024

Contact email: globalacearo(at)gmail(dot)com

In the past two decades, asexuality studies scholarship has grown exponentially, reflecting the rise of asexual and aromantic communities around the world. The majority of scholarship in asexuality studies, however, remains either on Anglophone ace communities, primarily in North America, or situated in Western sexual epistemologies. This edited volume seeks to explore a broader array of global asexualities and aromanticisms by gathering together scholarship on ace and aro identities, resonances, and their translations both outside of Western contexts and beyond Western colonial knowledge frames.

Acknowledging that modern Western notions of asexual and aromantic identities do not account for all nonsexual and nonromantic experiences across time and space, we intentionally make use of a porous and plural definition of ‘asexualities’ and ‘aromanticisms’ in framing this edited volume. In our understanding, asexualities and aromanticisms encompass identities, orientations, and sites of knowledge production and life invention that challenge compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity, or the universalized assumptions that equate sexual activity and romantic love with paramount human value. With this definition in mind, we seek to encompass both manifestations of asexual/aromantic identities as they occur in non-Western contexts and nonsexual/nonromantic explorations that exceed modern Western notions of sexual and romantic orientation. Likewise, we are also interested in work that draws on antiracist, Indigenous, decolonial, and non-Western bodies of knowledge to explore the intersections of compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity with race, Indigeneity, citizenship, location, geopolitics, coloniality, class, caste, gender, ability, language, and nation.

We envision a dynamic collection of academic research articles, non-academic essays, interviews, and English translations of the many manifesto/a/xs that have been written around ace/aro politics outside of the Anglophone world, as well as asexuality studies scholarship that is happening in languages other than English. We welcome submissions of abstracts from: activists, artists, writers, translators, and scholars at all stages of their careers who have an interest in challenging normative structures of sexuality and romance and have demonstrated a commitment to ace/aro flourishing and community building through their creative output and scholarship.

We especially welcome submissions that build on existing scholarship, including but not limited to: asexuality and asexual marriage brokering in China (Wong 2015; Wong and Guo 2020), compulsory marriage and nonsexual women in India (Singh 2022), practices of castration and eunuchism in Asia (Chiang 2012 and 2018; Reddy 2003), asexuality and herbivore masculinities in Japan (Colecio 2022; Fotache 2014; Lehtonen 2018; Morioka 2013), antisexualism in Russia (Siggy 2014), queer singlehood in Chinese literature (Heinrich 2013), asexuality and non-Western kinship forms (Kenney 2020 and 2024), marriage refusal and transnational feminisms outside of North America (Chen 2023), Black and antiracist theorizations of ace/aro possibilities (Brown 2022; Miles 2019; Owen 2014, 2018, and 2024; Smith 2020), hypersexualization and desexualization in dialogue with Asian and Asian-American contexts (Kim 2017 and 2024; Lee 2020), celibacy and Hindu nationalism (Alter 1994; Basu 1993; Haynes 2020; Reddy 2003), asexuality and religiosity in Poland and other Eastern European contexts (Kurowicka and Przybyło 2019), disability and ace/aro identities (Gupta 2014; Kim 2011 and 2014; Yergeau 2017), and theorizations of the erotic that center Indigenous worldviews in dialogue with ace/aro communities and knowledges (TallBear 2018 and 2021).

Please email abstracts (up to 300 words), along with a 100-word bio, to globalacearo(at)gmail(dot)com by September 30, 2024. Accepted contributors will be asked to submit pieces of up to 5,000 words, due in Spring 2025 (see anticipated timeline below). We welcome previously unpublished essays on asexualities and aromanticisms that challenge compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity, especially as they intersect with race, Indigeneity, citizenship, location, geopolitics, coloniality, class, caste, gender, ability, language, and nation; perspectives from across Asia, Africa, South and Central America, the Middle East and West Asia, Eastern Europe, and Indigenous Nations, communities, and knowledges anywhere in the world; and abstracts for English translations of key ace/aro advocacy texts or scholarship and interviews with key figures and activists in the aforementioned contexts. We are thematically interested in submissions dealing with, but not limited to: 

• studies with asexual and aromantic communities in the aforementioned contexts

• translation and ace/aro identities and politics across language contexts

• engagements with transnational, postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial ace/aro queer and trans studies

• non-Western and Indigenous literary and cultural studies explorations of ace and aro identities, communities, and ways of life

• asexualities and aromanticisms in non-Anglophone literatures and cultural studies

• critiques of compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity in dialogue with critiques of settler colonialism, occupation, displacement, anti-Black and anti-Asian racisms, Islamophobia, and cisheteronormativity

• explorations of kinship, friendship, and queerplatonic relationalities that center non-Western modes of relating and intimacies

• theorizations of the erotic that are grounded in Indigenous and non-Western ways of knowing

• attunement to the body, embodiment, and non-Western and Indigenous ways of being as they intersect with aceness and aroness

• attention to femininities, masculinities, agender, Two-Spirit, nonbinary gender, and other gender expansive embodiments in dialogue with ace and aro communities and knowledges 

• transnational feminist approaches to marriage refusal in non-Western contexts

• celibacies and singlehood across geopolitical contexts and in dialogue with ace and aro theories

• critiques of the nation-state, homonationalisms, and border imperialism that dialogue with ace and aro knowledges and communities

We are in contact with an interested editor at Routledge about this edited volume and will take steps to secure a book contract once we have a sense of the pieces in the collection and its eventual structure. We aim to secure the contract once we have a full book proposal, i.e. before the manuscript is complete.

Anticipated timeline:

CFP for abstracts closes: September 30, 2024

Editorial responses: October 31, 2024

Chapter in-progress online workshops: November 2024

Full pieces due: April 15, 2025

Edited pieces returned to authors: June 30, 2025

Revised/Final drafts due: September 30, 2025

Copyediting and Proofs: Fall 2025

Launch: 2026