wary but listening

[sciatrix]

so I'm commenting on the aromantic community again.

It's not...

I have such complicated feelings about it! It feels like the people who are continuing the conversations I had ten years ago are also erasing me and the context of those conversations, and I admit I get so bitter at the way that I only ever seem to hear from aromantic community and spaces when they're expressing derision at people who associate them with asexual communities, like there was some kind of cadre of aromantic allosexuals who came up with the whole thing.

And then the older I get and the less I'm convinced romantic orientation is a useful metric for talking about the way that people navigate the world of attachment, because I think the thing people are often talking about is more about limerence and less about the way you find people to grow together with and make families, but limerence is only really relevant when you're starting something new and not so much when you're moving together along a path.

And I worry about the endless hyperfocus on beginnings and not on journeys. Because I think that's what connection with people is, and at the end of the day, I think that the best things that aromantic community discussion has to bring to the table is to really emphasize the concept of chosen journeys that we take with other people.

Comments

[sylvaine]

Mmmyep. I know most of my vocabulary to conceptualise relationships and attachments and romance and sexuality from the ace/aro community, and yes I'm lumping them together because that's how things were when I was reading those conversations. (Actually, probably around the same time you were having them! (I remember voting on the ace flag & I'm still so damn proud at how that's just become The Official Flag now. I got to be part of something historic!))

[sciatrix]

I remember voting on it too! And, ha, in the AVEN thread I'm there and chiming in "...do we even need a flag, anyway?" and quietly being appalled at some of the more... enthusiastic designs.

I'm so glad to have been wrong about that. It's at Stonewall now, did you know?

[sylvaine]

I have awful memory for things like this, but I'm fairly certain I voted for the one that we ended up settling on. And I am entirely too glad that none of those, as you say, more enthusiastic designs were too popular. xD;;

Oh! I did not know that. Oh that gives me warm happy feelings. <3

[sciatrix]

I know! It was a real wait, really?! moment for me, too.

Stumbling in from a position of zero knowledge

[jesse_the_k]

And appreciating your point in the last paragraph! It’s relevant to so much in my life, as I become an old person.

Young people are all about beginnings, because that’s where they’re at.

Re: Stumbling in from a position of zero knowledge

[sciatrix]

Young people are all about beginnings, because that’s where they’re at.

Yes, and: I think that young people and people who don't have a stable family group are the people who are loudly having these conversations, because they are the people who are afraid. Whereas once you manage to find a person to click with, it's.... you get the feeling that you have different challenges, first, but also fewer models... and the models you do have aren't characterized by the starting-compatibility divisions anymore, they're characterized by the going-on-with divisions.

Like, my current relationship started with T firmly saying it's romantic, and me firmly saying that fuck if I know what romance is, but we agreed to go on anyway and see where we wound up. And that's been a solid foundation! I haven't actually changed my mind! But it doesn't matter as much as trying to meet each other in the middle that works for us does.... and that doesn't make for good blog copy. Not if you want to keep your partner, anyway!

[sebenikela]

also coming without knowledge of context

I just...don't understand the drive toward ever more specific categorization and ever more clearly delineated boundaries and ownership of symbols as though these things weren't fuzzy-edged and dynamic by their very nature.

Probably this is in part because my own sexuality is best defined as ????????????? but also just... words are good! words that help people feel seen/heard/real/etc are important! but can we not make them into borders we police?

(i really don't want to be that middle-aged white lady going ~why can't we all just get along~ but YE GODS)

possibly-uncharitable reaction courtesy of my current dragon age hyperfixation: "Never underestimate the enmity of those for whom outrage is a sport." (i need to make this an icon probably)

[sciatrix]

Oh, I've been banging that particular cane for nigh on a decade now, in the sense of... look, this probably makes me a curmudgeon, but I don't give a single solitary shit about words unless they come alongside a conversation. The Tumblr identity lists, or online glossaries? Oh, fuck that. Weird made-up words that come alongside an article talking about a person's experience, or what kind of attachments they want, or kinds of people they know? Now we're talking. I'll cheerfully pick up words as long as they're useful for particular kinds of conversations, but I feel like in some quarters there's a feeling that if you coin the word, the conversation will follow. Which: lol, no, sorry, not in my experience.

And also like... YES so much that re: the clearly delineated boundaries and ownership of symbols. Look, my queer community is a bright candle in the window of a warm lodge, with people coming in to talk to each other and find solidarity. If someone comes in and warms themself at the fire a minute and then finds that the conversants don't resonate, so be it! I can work with that! But I'm not putting a fucking bouncer at the door of a community that I want to be all about welcoming and support and building things together at barn raisings, you feel me?

(I have popularized at various times and in certain circles at least three relationship and identity terms, one of which I occasionally still get people cheerfully IDing as to me at meetup; look, wtfromantic was intended to be an expression of frustration with the frameworks I was sitting inside, but if you want to use it, rock on I guess and I'm glad the term resonated.)

[sebenikela]

it's almost as though words are things we use to describe human experiences and not actually magic talismans (talismen? talispersons? sorry i'm tired) that define existence!

someone who knows things about linguistics would be able to say it better but like...words mean things because we collectively decided they're useful shorthand for complicated experiences? they're useful for creating narratives about stuff, and humans like making narratives to tell ourselves about why things are how they are, but the specific words are not the most important part!

I'm not putting a fucking bouncer at the door of a community that I want to be all about welcoming and support and building things together at barn raisings, you feel me?

YES EXACTLY. Are you being a jerk? then you should leave. otherwise? come in, hang out, bring snacks.

humans idek

[lokifan]

someone who knows things about linguistics would be able to say it better but like...words mean things because we collectively decided they're useful shorthand for complicated experiences? they're useful for creating narratives about stuff, and humans like making narratives to tell ourselves about why things are how they are, but the specific words are not the most important part!

YEP. I mean, I'm a language teacher, I care about specific terms, but that's also how I know that CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I feel like one of the consequences of stretching the "born this way" argument way beyond what it actually explains (*) is that the splitters have won out over the lumpers in a big way. I get a lot of pushback on the understanding that queer identities are both contextual and intersectional; and people can have multiple identities.

And then there are those of us who jumped into the qualitative paradigm in this area with both feet and feel those words would be better used like pigments to paint autobiographical watercolors. I'll use whatever words fit the epic poem of my life.

(*) Disclaimer: Pointing out that some aspects of sexuality are socially constructed in no way suggests that sexual orientation is mutable. That my partners smell really good is likely immutable. My discomfort with some heterosexual rituals is socially constructed.

[sciatrix]

(Good disclaimer.) Yeah, I think you're right about that; people try to explain the differences in the way other people describe themselves or identify in the context of reducible differences in biophysical phenotype, and that gets.... complicated?

For example, for me, gender falls along that pathway: I think I could reasonably identify as either nonbinary or the way I do, which is gender-non-conforming-butch, and the reason I have chosen to identify the way I do is contextual in and of itself: I am most comfortable identifying my gender tradition under a broader umbrella of female under which it has historically been... associated, often, even while it slides out of that tradition and is overlooked and ignored. Someone else might decide they are more comfortable underscoring the disconnect between butch and female, or thinking of female as a more specific gender tradition than I do. (I think of it as a looser collection of a whole bunch of often-unnamed gender traditions influenced by class and culture, with a hegemonic understanding of "female" controlled by dominant races, classes, and cultures. But that hegemonic understanding doesn't encompass all the traditions that sit unacknowledged in that country, you feel me?)

But all that shit aside, I can envision equally well a scenario in which I would prefer to identify as nonbinary, pick up a more focused and discrete understanding of what "female" means that doesn't include my own experiences and identified-tradition of gender, and feel most comfortable requesting alternate pronouns that would underscore that disconnect. (As it is, I squirm when my disconnect isn't acknowledged and squirm when people don't acknowledge my connection in equal measures.)

Fuck, it's complicated. I don't choose to be comfortable or not be comfortable, I don't choose what lets me experience comfort and what makes me itch and my skin crawl, but the framework I use to cue people into the type of experiences that are most relevant to mine changes based on my cultural context. It's communication all the way down.

[sylvaine]

This makes me think of the way bisexual and pansexual works, where it means essentially the same thing, but choosing one or the other still means something to people because it's about what you're associating yourself with along with that term.

[sciatrix]

Yes! That is exactly how I feel about it--and with the cheerful admission that people will totally identify as pansexual, bisexual, pan/bi interchangeably, omnisexual, "fuck your labels," "heteroflexible," Kinsey ___.... depending on what they want to communicate at any given time.

[sylvaine]

Yes! And with the caveat that for research purposes, depending on what exactly it is you're researching, you might lump all of those together, but that doesn't mean that you're erasing anyone's identity, it's just, you need quantifiable data if you want to do quantitative data analysis...

(I realise this is barely relevant, I just saw a thing the other day on twitter again that made me groan and roll my eyes)

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I'm a bit of a crank on the bi/pan/queer mess and have a longer post queued up but...

Few of us have the luxury of being entirely self-made and self-actualized persons. I'm a survivor of explicitly anti-bisexual violence. I can't escape from the cultural reality that straight culture hates bisexual people and bisexuality in distinct ways by preferring a different label.

[sylvaine]

Yeah. I can also see why that connection might lead one to reject that label, but your argument makes so much sense to me.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Yes, I agree.

[writerkit]

And that middle paragraph is such a relief to come across today after coming across the acquaintance on Facebook ranting about how alloromantic ace people (well, they called them "straight ace people") aren't *really* queer and they're not *really* oppressed and I have been resisting going and yelling because I know it won't do any good. So thank you.

[sylvaine]

I don't know if this helps you, but every time I come across that particular bit of nonsense I take a deep breath and remember the time an anon on tumblr said that "cishet trans" people don't belong at Pride, because that always makes me laugh.

[sciatrix]

oh my god anon you fool

[sylvaine]

I remember that as the exact moment when I realised that "cishet" had lost all meaning, at least in the context of tumblr Discourse^TM

[writerkit]

That makes me laugh too. That right there is a Thing, that is.

[sciatrix]

*whistles* Yeah, those folks can fuck right the hell off. And that's usually the context in which I pick up all my gay-passing glory and lean into what I can own of a romantic orientation and boom down: yeah, fuck you! This is hard! You exclude them, you exclude me, and I promise you the straight people can't tell us apart!

I'm glad it was a balm, anyway. Those people piss me the fuck off.

[sylvaine]

Yes! This is what I miss about the aroace conversations on AVEN and here back in 2012 or so. There were people blogging about their thoughts and feelings and coming to a conclusion wrt to what words they are using for that, and that's how we get to words like "zucchini", which imo are much more meaningful with that context behind them. xD And on tumblr it's... yeah, so much of it is just lists, and I'm sure those are useful to some, but I mostly just find them boring and alienating because they're so contextless. Okay, I'm [word], so now what? When there's a longer post about a word, you feel much less alone with it, I think.

(Also I am still amused that wtfromantic became, like, a Real Thing, and then people morphed it to quoiromantic because wtfromantic was too irreverent, and I'm just sitting here thinking that was the point of it, oh my god this is hilarious.

Were you the one with zucchini and queerplatonic, too? I just remember mostly I was reading your blog & kaz's blog along with a bunch of AVEN stuff at the time, so ihni what I read where, just that it came with the people and the feelings attached.)

[sciatrix]

Yeah, those were the other two I was remembering! I didn't come up with either--meloukhia named both things in a conversation on kaz' blog--but I think I popularized both of them over on Writing From Factor X, because I think I had a lot more readership at the time.

I'm still laughing about wtfromantic, especially because several people from the Aces in Austin meetup have since heard my irritated spiel about define romance anyway and all of it is confusing and gleefully started identifying that way. (Offline, I pronounce it "what-the-fuck-romantic," which I believe also alienated some of the folks who picked up quoiromantic, because there was cussin' in it. My good dudes, I love me some swears; I'm not mincing that oath for a word I never intended for anything but expressing my own ornery dissatisfaction with paradigms in the first place!)

Oh, also, while I'm being nostalgic: next year will be the ten-year anniversary of the If You Can See the Invisible Elephant, Please Describe It post, which a) was a self-indulgent piece largely meant to tweak the nose of my good buddy Sam, b) was (although metaphorically) largely written with romantic rather than sexual orientation in mind, and c) still attracts a helpful allosexual writing me thousand-word comments about what sexual attraction feels like for them every six months or so.

I'm vaguely tempted to go back and revise it or something.

[sylvaine]

Oh riiiight, meloukhia! I got so used to seeing their blog linked in other context that I had forgotten the ace connection.

!!!!, Dude, I distinctly/em> remember that post! That was one of the posts that I read while trying to figure out what the fuck "romantic" even meant, and one of the ones that led me to the conclusion "oh good, nobody else knows and my alloromantic friends aren't helping either so I'm going to proceed like it's not relevant to me". Shit, of course it still gets Halpful comments. *slightly pained laughter*

(I may no longer identify as aromantic, but I do still firmly believe that, at least for me, the act of defining something as a romance is the most important factor in something being a romance. Lol.)

[wellthisisnice]

hey! hey! did you know? that wtfromantic was translated as QuéCarajoRomanticx in spanish?

and it has its own page in the Asexualpedia! which i've had to share at least once, when there was a conversation about it --the experience, not the term-- in my local whatsapp ace group. (i think the page its a mix of the wtfromantic AVENwiki page and the quoiromantic one at the aromantics wiki.)

[sciatrix]

I did not know that! My goodness, that's awesome!

the endless hyperfocus on beginnings and not on journeys

[osteophage]

I went and created a DW account just to be able to comment on this. Hi.

"The endless hyperfocus on beginnings and not on journeys" is such a good way to describe it. And it's partly understandable (I love introspection too, I get it), but also sometimes good grief is it exhausting. I was just talking about this with Elizabeth the other day (although I don't remember where). There's a lot of... atomizing of the nuances of inner feelings, which is all good and fine, except when it seems like that's crowding out any conversation about the bigger picture. Like how amatonormativity can't be combated with just "visibility" and how our society structures the norm of the nuclear family.

...Relatedly, you also may be interested in this post.