Michael Paramo

◈ Profile

Michael Paramo (b. 1993) is a Mexican-American artist, writer, and researcher who was born on the unceded homelands of the Tongva in California. His work broadly focuses on soul repair and interconnectedness in the modern/colonial world from a queer anti-colonial perspective. He created the literary art journal AZE (azejournal.com) in 2016. He published his debut book Ending the Pursuit in 2024, which went on to be listed as a course-recommended text by Ingram Academic. His dissertation focuses on the use of autoethnographic intuitive artmaking as a method of transformative education.

◈ Book

Ending the Pursuit: Asexuality, Aromanticism, and Agender Identity (Unbound, 2024). Course-recommended by Ingram Academic in Political Sociology (2024). Cited in Sexualities, Southern Cultures, Journal of Tolkien Research, and Context: A Journal of Music Research.

◈ Dissertation

“Mutant Methodologies: Intuitive Mixed-Media Autoethnographic Approaches Toward Transformative Education” (2026), Ph.D., Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, University of British Columbia. Supervisory Committee: Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Erin Baines

◈ Peer-Reviewed Publications

• “Loosening the Romantic Grip: Envisioning an Aromantic Turn to Decolonial Love.” (Routledge, Upcoming 2027).

• "(Un)Making the Dominator: Does Earth Consent?" Feral Feminisms, no. 15 (Fall 2025), 10-20.

• "Virtual Intimacy and Queer Confrontations in The Last of Us: Left Behind." Video Game Art Reader, no. 2 (2018 [2022]), 75-85.

◈ Interviews

• Geeks OUT International. April 1, 2024.

• ITV. February 14, 2024.

• PsychCentral. October 26, 2021.

• HuffPost. April 9, 2019.

• VoiceAmerica (w/ Tristan Taormino). October 11, 2019.

• ANMLY. October 23, 2017.

• The Orange County Register. April 24, 2017.

◈ Select Citations

• Journal of Tolkien Research (2026). Courtis, S. “For an understanding of aspec people, I turn to Ending the Pursuit by Michael Paramo, a work which deconstructs what it means to be aspec and questions the binary thinking of the Western world.”

• Popular Communication (2026). Bury, R. “According to Paramo, the late placement of the impassioned kiss between the girls meant the player has no option to skip it, thus making identification with Ellie an unambiguous identification with her queerness.”

• Sexualities (2025). Jukes, J., & Bayer, R. “Brown and Paramo link their turns away from compulsory sexuality, conceived as asexual activism, to wider critiques of white supremacy, heteronormativity and neoliberalism, situating ‘asexual’ in a broader coalition of refusal.”

• Southern Cultures (2025). Campbell, E. “In Ending the Pursuit, artist and writer Michael Paramo uses the term azeness to describe ‘the experiences of ‘absence’ that are shared by asexual, aromantic, and agender people amidst the norms and expectations of cisheteropatriarchy.’”

• Journal of Folklore Research (2023). Gilman, L. “Paramo asks, ‘Whiteness is dominating the ace community, but the question is: Why?’ [...] The term ‘asexuality’ remains ‘elusive and esoteric’ and ‘maintains a strong positionality within highly selective and highly white online spaces.’”

• Human Sexuality Counseling: A Sex Positive Approach (2023). Litam, S. D. A. and Speciale, M. “Michael Paramo provided a comprehensive framework of attraction that expands and critiques the historical definition of attraction.”

◈ Google Scholar
◈ Wikipedia

Contact: mdparamo@gmail.com