About the Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography

Welcome to The Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography, a resource designed to help researchers find relevant writing on a variety of topics in asexuality studies and aromanticism studies. For practical advice on how to use the searchable bibliography and answers to other questions, please refer to the FAQ page; here on the About page, we will instead describe our vision for the project and situate its work among other, comparable resources available online.

Our goal for this website was to aggregate, categorize, and tag both academic and community writing on asexual and aromantic theory, allowing people interested in the study of these two critical queer theories to more easily find writing relevant to their interests. We want our bibliography to encompass writing on both asexuality and aromanticism, including (under the umbrella of aromanticism) theories of singleness and amatonormativity that do not outright state their relationship to aromantic identities. We have dubbed this archive The Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography not to conflate the two identities, but also to make it possible to locate research on aromanticism (both on its own right, and insofar as it relates to asexuality research). We hope that making aromantic research visible as its own category will open up avenues for further study on both topics (including the two topics as separate fields).

This website is meant to build upon excellent previous work in creating such collections of citations and references. Two important precursors to our project are AUREA’s “Research on Aromantics” compilation (2019), which archives research on aromanticism; Claudie Arseneault’s AroAce Database (2017), which catalogues works of fiction with aro or ace characters; and the Ace Archive, which focuses on historical documents which reveal asexual resonances. Our project differs from all three in our compilation of both asexual and aromantic sources; we depart from the AroAce Database and the Ace Archive, in particular, with our focus on academic research and community writing about asexual and aromantic theories and identities, rather than fictional representations or historical documents. We are also indebted to several focused research archives that are found in primarily Google Doc form, including Aasha Foster and Ianna Hawkins Owen’s “Asexuality and Race Resources” list (2014) and Liza Blake, Simone Chess, Catherine Clifford, and Ashley ‘Aley’ O’Mara’s “A Bibliography for Early Modern Asexualities” (2020). Our website is also in dialogue with the incredible work performed by sennkestra’s public Asexual Research Zotero archive (2017), which assembles lists of scholarly research on asexuality. Because of our bibliography’s focus on the humanities, sennkestra’s collection of research on asexuality is, in some ways, more comprehensive than ours, as it includes much more sociological research from beyond the humanities. However, as is described in more detail below, our bibliography includes more research and writing on aromanticism as well as asexuality; tags every source it includes, making it easier to navigate and to find relevant sources; and includes both academic and community writing. We see our work and sennkestra’s as complementary; each, we think, contributes something different to the community of asexual researchers.

The following principles have guided our work in shaping this Bibliography:

  1. We wanted to create a bibliography that was tagged and searchable, so that researchers could more easily find writing relevant to their research topics or interests. Our team has read and tagged each item that makes its way onto the bibliography, using a set tag list. The tagging system makes it possible to quickly find research relevant to a given topic, not always easy in long, untagged lists of research.
  2. We wanted our bibliography to integrate non-academic work from the ace and aro communities, as well as academic research. Many key ideas about asexuality and aromanticism, and elements of ace theory and aro theory, were developed in online, community environments, and sennkestra has written compellingly about the tendency of academic researchers to overlook the community origins of some key concepts of asexuality theory. We believe both academic and activist communities have shared concerns and questions, and have tried to make that visible in our shared tagging system cutting across both academic and non-academic sources. We hope to make voices from the ace and aro communities that are often missing from academic discussions audible through this archive.
  3. We tried to be as inclusive as possible, with some limits and caveats. Asexuality studies is a large field that spans many disciplines, but focus of the preliminary version currently published has been on humanities- and theory-based resources, as well as resources for educators. We have already added, and will continue to add, psychological and sociological sources onto this database to touch on scientific discourses on asexuality that influence theoretic formulations, but we wanted to make sure that the primary focus and accumulation of articles in this database supported theoretic and educational work.
  4. Because of the academic backgrounds and research interests of the two project co-leads, we especially prioritized adding scholarship on asexual and/or aromantic readings, as well as sources on historical identities. We have therefore added sources that discuss nonsexual or nonromantic identities through history, and that discuss historical pleasure outside of sex and romance more obliquely. Sometimes this means adding secondary sources that talk about undesiring sex in terms of “virginity” and “chastity,” or singleness with “bachelorhood.” We do not mean to conflate those terms with asexuality and aromanticism (respectively), but rather to show how these sources have discussed asexual and aromantic resonances in different terms in the past, before the full, robust, and mainstream articulation of asexuality and aromanitcism as identities and orientations. For example, earlier scholarship on historical “virginities” often takes note of lack of desire, which intersects with theories of nonsexualities. 
  5. We included articles not just as a way of endorsing their argument, but to make as much research visible as possible. This does not mean that we agree with the findings, arguments, or approaches of every entry added to the bibliography–indeed, some articles directly contradict others included in the bibliography. We have done this to provide researchers the history of asexuality studies, including what may now prompt more critique than imitation.
  6. We hope to create a space for paid scholars to take over some of the labor of accumulating and processing sources, so that the burden of asexuality research does not unfairly fall on unpaid communities of volunteers. Academia has long used the resources created by online communities without using its own time and money to contribute to or uphold these communities.

Above all, we hope that this archive of asexual and aromantic voices past and present can facilitate the theoretical and academic study of this identity, with a special attention to points of intersection between asexuality and other identities, including race, gender, and disability.   

Though the bibliography is primarily a list of research rather than a collection of the articles themselves, we have provided direct links to sources where possible (because the writing is available in an open-access journal, or through a publicly available blog, etc.). However, some of our sources are locked behind paywalls, or are not widely available in open-access format; where this is the case, we have included the publication information for each, to allow researchers to find them at their own institutions. If you are an author and would like to send us a link to an open-access version of your article (e.g., an Academic.edu upload, or a version posted to Humanities Commons), please do get in touch!

This project was created using the generous funding of a University of Toronto Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) Graduate Project Partner Grant.  Learn more at the CDHI website.

If you would like to add an entry to the Bibliography, or need to ask the project co-leads a question, please contact us using the Contact Page.

To learn more about our team, and those who have contributed to this project, please see our Contributors Page.

The Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography was created with generous funds from a University of Toronto Critical Digital Humanities Initiative Graduate Partner Grant , and was initially launched September 2022.