Growing Up Acespec: A Speculative Approach to Queer Time

Queer temporality theory typically centres homosexual accounts of desire and thus leaves little room for the possibility of “not desiring” (Hanson, Making 250). Meanwhile, the growing body of asexual and aromantic (acespec) accounts of temporality often rejects queer theory altogether or conceptualises acespec desire in relation to queer desire as lack. It positions growing up acespec as an oppositional threat to growing up queer, just as queer theory positions growing up queer as an oppositional threat to growing up heterosexual. This leaves little room in either queer or acespec theory for conceptualisations of desire and experiences of time that are both homosexual or homoromantic (gay) and acespec [1]. As such, I argue that the emerging field of acespec temporality studies must erode queer accounts of time that mark growing up by sexual or romantic milestones, in order to speculate on alternative conceptualisations that make room for growing up gay and acespec. I explore this by placing two accounts of acespec time in close conversation with queer temporality theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton’s seminal account of “growing sideways” (Growing Sideways 2). In doing so, I find that acespec literary scholar Elizabeth Hanna Hanson’s theorisation of asexual time as stasis and cultural critic Ela Przybylo’s account of acespec time spells combine to illustrate how “asexually affirming” conceptions of queer time speculate on new cultural narratives about growing up (Przybylo, Asexual Erotics 28).  This article therefore challenges any “eronormative” worldview that would consider sexual or romantic milestones as the exclusive markers of maturity (Hanson, Making 47). [2] It also centres within acespec theory the experiences of time that resonate with gay asexual and gay aromantic identities specifically, to challenge acespec theories of time that conceptualise acespec desire as lack. For clarity, I define the terms gay asexual and gay aromantic respectively as identity categories that denote non-heterosexual desire for erotic relationships built on non-sexual and/or non-romantic pleasures. 

Asexual perspectives on time have not been a significant focus in the work of queer temporality theorists such as Kathryn Bond Stockton [3]. For Stockton, homosexuality is an alternate (sideways), queer version of the kind of sexual development conceptualised within psychoanalysis, which Stockton traces back to religious fundamentalism, the work of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin (Growing Sideways). Stockton’s introduction to The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century dissects the phrase “arrested development” scathingly as “the official-sounding diagnosis that has often appeared to describe the supposed sexual immaturity of homosexuals: their presumed status as dangerous children, who remain children in part by failing to have their own” (22). The rebuttal that follows re-reads Freud and Darwin to suggest that by their very own estimations, “arrested development is nonnormal growth, but growth nonetheless” (23). Thus, and specifically speaking to Freud’s account of homosexuality as perversion, Stockton argues that “perversions are characteristic of people who either extend themselves beyond the normal ‘path’ of ‘copulation’ or linger at midpoints along the way—and both of these diversions appear to be sideways movements or suspensions in relation to the road of copulation to be followed” (25). While Stockton’s account defends homosexuality as queer rather than arrested development here, it does so by situating queerness within psychoanalysis, and it therefore does so by excluding asexual perspectives.  

For acespec scholars, on the other hand, the depiction of asexuality as arrested development, or “stunted growth” is prevalent within queer as well as heterosexual theories of development and is harmful to asexual communities (Milks 100). In the last decade or so, there has been a significant focus on critiques of “feminist and queer attachments to sex” for scholars in the rapidly developing field of acespec studies but comparatively little acespec scholarship exists on temporality (Pryzbylo, Asexual Erotics 39).  This image of asexuality as a sign of stunted growth, arrested development, or as Hanson describes, “stasis” (“Toward” 348), implies that where straight individuals grow up and gay individuals cannot grow up but grow sideways, acespec individuals cannot grow at all. Przybylo extends this view by suggesting that asexuality marks a queer failure even of “queer failure” (Halberstam 96). For queer temporality theorist Jack Halberstam, queer failure implies that queer sexuality fails to meet the heteronormative expectations of hegemonic society or cultural institutions such as marriage that uphold heteronormativity (96). In this sense, Przybylo points out that asexuality functions as another form of queer failure, but also fails to meet the eronormative expectations of queer society or communities that uphold eronormativity. By way of example, Przybylo and acespec critic Kristina Gupta separately analysed the depiction of lesbian bed death as a trope in queer media that “indexes an anxiety around the loss of the promise of sex” by constructing nonsexual lesbian intimacy as “a dreaded state”, marginalising acespec lesbian experiences of nonsexual pleasure and desire by marking them as “an erotics of failure” (Przybylo, Asexual Erotics 64). Likewise, Gupta’s analysis of film “portrayal[s] of lesbian nonsexuality” calls for “pressure on the category ‘lesbian’ to accommodate nonsexual or asexual women” and thereby “counterbalance the narrowing pressure exerted on the category lesbian by sex-normativity”, or eronormativity (104). All this posits dominant cultural considerations of asexual temporality as the ultimate failure to grow up or mark time at all—“a form of backwardness, stunted or arrested development” even in terms of queer development (Asexual Erotics 93). Przybylo further argues that the asexual child is “rendered impossible within queer theory because it smacks of the repression of desexualization” (Asexual Erotics 92). Here, “[d]esexualization is […] distinct from asexuality in that it imposes an absence of sex and sexuality not as an erotic possibility but as a biopolitical strategy, dispensing the promise of sex only to those who are understood as having a right to it” (Przybylo 67). In other words, where the notion of sexual drives is central to psychoanalysis, asexuality makes no sense in psychoanalytic terms, which queer theory interrogates and frequently adopts in its critiques. It follows that “asexuality is rendered, at best, irrelevant and unnecessary to queer analysis, and at worst, bad politically, functioning to undercut sex and sexuality’s centralizing energy in queer community and politics” (Asexual Erotics 92). Evidently, the sticking point between queer theory and asexuality studies is psychoanalysis, or, more specifically, queer theory’s return to psychoanalysis at each critical juncture. Therefore, if queer theory has come of age by reckoning with its psychoanalytic forebears, acespec studies must navigate both. 

As Stockton asserts that “there are ways of growing that are not growing up” (The Queer Child 11), Przybylo offers “growing into” asexuality as “an empowering term” that “suggests a process of growth and of becoming” (Asexual Erotics 102) that is neither heterosexual nor queer. Where they differ is on their conceptualisation of delay, which Stockton finds to be a “sexual delay” of latent longing and which Przybylo asserts not to be a delay at all. Stockton claims that growing sideways involves sexual delay because “children grow by delaying their approach to the realms of sexuality” (Growing Sideways 62), adding that “we know how sexual delaying sex can be. Sexual delay as an active arrest […] is a way, we say, of “maturing” sexually—a sexual growth to the side of sex” (63). Conversely, one way to “grow into” asexuality for Przybylo is through exhaustion; “asexuality could be a desirable site to grow into … as a site of rest … or as a form of queer fatigue” (Asexual Erotics 102). The latter form of queer fatigue speaks to a “fatigue toward the sex-positive inclinations of queer politics—that is, a queer fatigue”, which might also be perceived as an asexual iteration of queer failure, “a threat to a queer developmental model that sees sexuality as ever-present throughout the life cycle, and as central to maintaining the bonds of queer community” (103). Notably, Przybylo is wary of “queer theoretical commitments to the child as definitively and universally sexual (that is, desiring sex and focused on attaining sexual pleasure)”, which she says “come to constitute their own particular imposition on children, the figure of the child, and on how we understand ourselves as adults” (Asexual Erotics 98). Przybylo’s criticism of queer theory is shared by a number of asexual scholars, as she insists that in dominant accounts of queer temporality “the sexual surfaces as the only possible mode of queer relating and desiring” (Asexual Erotics 97). There is a kind of asexual fatigue expressed by acespec scholars then, an exhaustion with accounts of queerness that constantly seem to turn toward the sexual—growing sideways but then up. As Gupta suggests in her response to the negative queer critical reception around the film The Kids Are All Right, which portrayed the lesbian bed death trope, “[i]n responding to stereotypes about sexless lesbians, these feminist and queer scholars explicitly or implicitly rejected nonsexuality as a part of the lesbian experience”, and “critiques of sex-negative aspects of society can also bleed into a rejection of nonsexuality” (114).  As such, it is as though acespec theorists are waiting—perhaps ironically—for queer theory to grow into its own asexual possibilities. 

Rather than pursue a new model of time that might be called asexual, Przybylo theorises a more ambiguous “time spells temporality” that focuses on an “engagement with desire that challenges the typical temporalities of maturity narratives and intergenerational love” (Asexual Erotics 109,31). Her asexual approach to time seeks to locate examples of moments, photographs, intergenerational relationships, where erotic forms and structures of “both sexual and asexual” desire blur in ways that destabilise cultural depictions of what might commonly be interpreted as sexual desire (91): “I try to question and complicate what are perceived to be sexual motivations for relating—that is, the assumption that it is a desire for sex and sexual attraction that motivates people to form intimate bonds with one another” (27). Coinage of the term time spell as a theory of acespec temporality suggests that acespec temporality is conjured in Przybylo’s account, perhaps constructed by, and within, a particular relationship. Just as “asexuality is not an elaboration of something lost or denied; [but], quite conversely, a marker of something found and understood about oneself, a site of self-meaning, a welcome term in the process of self-understanding” (93). Notably, however, this construction also relies on an erosion of meaning, at least initially. Przybylo describes time spells as:

… direct[ing] our attention to the blurriness of what might qualify as “the sexual” in the first place, gesturing toward an erotics that is not encompassable by sexual desire, framing queerness as about an erotic desire for parenting, community, and family, and in a sense challenging rather than reinstating a queer focus on sex and sexual desire. (Asexual Erotics 106) 

Here, rather than theorise a non-desiring model for asexual time, Przybylo is “holding on to erotics as a term that offers possibilities distinct from sexuality […] an alternate mode through which to imagine bodily proximity, and the pleasure or desire flows that might or might not be associated with them” (110). This account of asexual erotics extends considerations of queerness in ways that may affirm nonsexual pleasures as forms of desire, strategically leaving space within existing models of desire for the possibility of not desiring but without seeking to formulate a model that evades desiring logic altogether. 

Still, centring asexuality around eroticism and reframing acespec time as asexually affirming queer time risks the appearance of splitting hairs. For instance, Przybylo writes that “experimenting with time spells” challenges the same narrative of development, of growing up, that Stockton also critiques (108); time spells enact a similarly queer temporality where they create “alternate temporal orders than those encountered under the straightening effects of capitalism, heteronormativity, and colonialism” but do not necessarily enact explicitly asexual temporal orders (108). Thus, Przybylo stops short of indicating how time spell temporality could structure what might be called an asexual narrative, in the way that queer temporality structures narrative non-linearly by disrupting chronological, heteronormative or “chrononormative” time (Freeman). Here, chrononormativity refers to an account of queer temporality by theorist Elizabeth Freeman, which posits that time structures bodies as they conform to cultural norms in order to be considered culturally productive. Thus, where time spells structure moments ambiguously, as both sexual and asexual, I posit that they rather de-structure or erode instead of disrupt. 

This idea can be extended through Hanson’s notion of asexual possibility, which she views as the threat of stasis in narrative that seeks to erode meaning. On theorising an asexual temporality that might structure narrative, Hanson argues that because all articulations of desire feed into psychoanalytic frameworks, there is no logical way to conceptualise asexual desire outside of sexual desire, where it is configured as lack. Therefore, she finds there is no way for asexuality to overcome the dominant psychoanalytic model of sexual development, and in turn no way for acespec theory to create space for itself within queer models of temporality. Taken further, Hanson argues, an asexual narrative structure may not be possible at all, because psychoanalysis structures the logic of signification. Hanson writes: 

The nonexperience of sexual attraction that subtends asexuality’s location outside the economy of object-oriented desire in a psychoanalytic framework can’t be comprehended by the same metonymic slipping and sliding that the arbitrariness of the sign under Lacanian psychoanalysis attributes to the relation of signifier and signified. (Making 205)

Here, Hanson views asexuality as requiring its own logical form completely outside any signifying system dominated by psychoanalytic versions of desire, including queer theory. The problem she identifies is that the logic of asexuality, which Hanson treats as a meta-construct to distinguish from asexual identities, is impossible to signify in our existing system other than as stasis. In turn, this suggests that an asexual narrative would be impossible to recognise in our existing signifying culture; an asexual narrative would require a structure that “opposes forward movement, closure, and […] embodies stasis, the suspension of desire, the non-event” (269), which would “dismantle linear temporal movement and causality” that dominates modern accounts of temporality and narrative theory (214). Essentially, if asexuality cannot signify, how can it narrate?  Following this, Hanson finds that asexuality is present in narrative, as in conceptualisations of temporality, as an underlying “refusal of closure” that threatens temporal structure where the “logic of asexuality dissolves the meaningful relationship between narrative middles and ends, dragging narrative’s forward movement not just off course but to a screeching halt, shutting down the possibility of meaning and closure” (237). This suggests, by Hanson’s conception, that asexual time erodes the meaning of time altogether rather than simply blurring, disrupting, or queering it. To this point, Hanson remarks that asexuality “describes what we might otherwise call the queering of time, narrative” but qualifies that it is “a very particular kind of queering, one that tends to arrest rather than divert narrative movement” and “effaces rather than disorders” binaries (158). Taking this onboard, Przybylo’s conceptualisation of an acespec time spell can be viewed as an experience of time that does not “challenge the typical temporalities of maturity narratives” by blurring or disturbing linear time but by eroding temporal meaning altogether (Asexual Erotics 31), in order to then speculate on alternatives outside of psychoanalytic frameworks. 

It follows that the logic of temporality we see in queer theory works differently in acespec theory, where there is no structural logic to desire, no promise of sex or sexuality but rather a negotiation of pleasures that conjures desire for reciprocity. Perhaps acespec time is more analogous to an indeterminant present; unmarked time, which may be experienced as fatigue or as a site of speculation and possibility. Where acespec temporality studies can erode queer, psychoanalytic, and other dominant theoretical accounts of time that mark growing up by sexual or romantic milestones, it creates space for more speculative conversations about growing up gay and acespec that require alternative conceptualisations, and new narrative forms. Placing Kathryn Bond Stockton’s queer account of sideways growth in conversation with Przybylo and Hanson’s work suggests how acespec theories might move away from psychoanalysis—an unscalable block to asexual possibility. Rather, an acespec approach must reconceptualise accusations of arrested development waged against acespec individuals, not as growing sideways-and-then-up, and not as static threat to growth, but as growing otherwise—without expectation. Acespec development infers growing without a qualifier: not growing sideways or growing into anything in particular, but just growing—directionless and aimless by societal standards perhaps, but growing still, in unexpected ways. 

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks to Dr Shastra Deo for encouraging this site of speculation. 

Endnotes

1. I adopt the term gay here as an identity category inclusive of homosexuality and homoromanticism within the acespec community, but note that it has a significant history as an identity category prior to the conceptualisation of the split attraction model and outside the acespec community.

2.  I adopt and extend Hanson’s term here, rather than deploy some of the more widely used terms within existing asexuality and aromanticism scholarship, such as “compulsory sexuality” (Gupta, “Compulsory” 131) and “amatonormativity” (Brake), to situate my argument as an interrogation of dominant accounts of erotic desire across both asexual and aromantic continuums. For clarity: Hanson originally defines eronormativity as underlying heteronormativity, referring to dominant perspectives that promote sexual orientations as universal, naturally formed identity categories and that deem sexual desire intrinsic to humans (Making 20). My extended definition of eronormativity here refers to dominant perspectives that promote sexual and/or romantic desires as universal erotic desires deemed natural and intrinsic to humans.

3. For an overview of queer temporality studies, see Elizabeth Freeman’s foundational special issue introducing the field as a subfield of queer theory in the early 2000s.

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