Michael Paramo

◈ Profile

Michael Paramo is a Mexican-American artist, researcher, and Ph.D. in social justice who was born on the unceded lands of the Tongva in Southern California in 1993. He created AZE journal (azejournal.com) in 2016, an online literary magazine for asexual people that went on to reach 15,000 followers on Twitter and was cited in Alice Oseman’s Loveless (2020) as well as in academic journals [for a full list]. In 2024, he published his debut book Ending the Pursuit, exploring the subjects of (a)sexuality, romance, and gender from a historical and sociological perspective. The book was listed by international publishing distributor Ingram Academic as a course-recommended text in Political Sociology. Paramo’s research has been cited in academic journals and books, including Sexualities, Popular Communication, Journal of Folklore Research, Human Sexuality Counseling: A Sex Positive Approach (2023), Southern Cultures, and the Journal of Tolkien Research. He has interviewed for PsychCentral, HuffPost, Buzzfeed, Geeks OUT, VoiceAmerica, and The Orange County Register, among others. His focus can be found at the intersections of queer survival and dreaming, human to media interfacing (especially in relation to music and video games), and the formation of the modern/colonial world.

◈ Book

• Ending the Pursuit: Asexuality, Aromanticism, and Agender Identity (Unbound, 2024). Listed as a course-recommended text in Ingram Academic’s 2024 Sociology Catalog under Political Sociology.

◈ Dissertation

• “Mutant Methodologies: Intuitive Mixed-Media Autoethnographic Approaches Toward Transformative Education” (2026), Ph.D., GRSJ, University of British Columbia.

◈ Peer-Reviewed Publications

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

• "(Un)Making the Dominator: Does Earth Consent?" Feral Feminisms. [2025]

• "Virtual Intimacy and Queer Confrontations in The Last of Us: Left Behind." Video Game Art Reader. 2019 [2022].

◈ 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. “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. “Michael Paramo uses the term azeness to describe ‘the experiences of ‘absence’ that are shared by asexual, aromantic, and agender people’”

• Journal of Folklore Research (2023). Gilman, L. “Paramo asks, ‘Whiteness is dominating the ace community, but the question is: Why?’”

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

• Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary (2020, University of Texas Press). Geffen, S. “When European settlers devastated the Americas, they ‘looked to the sexual and gender variance of Indigenous peoples as a means of marking them as racially inferior and uncivilized: a justification for a forever unjustified genocidal conquest,’ wrote Michael Paramo.”

Google Scholar ◈ Wikipedia

Contact: mdparamo@gmail.com