Michael Paramo

◈ Profile

Michael Paramo is an artist and researcher who was born on the unceded lands of the Tongva nation in Southern California. He created the platform AZE (azejournal.com) in 2016 as an online literary magazine for asexual people. His debut book Ending the Pursuit: Asexuality, Aromanticism, and Agender Identity was published and listed by Ingram Academic as a course-recommended text in Political Sociology in 2024. Paramo’s research focus is found at the intersection of queerness, modernity/coloniality, and the sensorial world. His research is cited in articles for Sexualities, Popular Communication, Southern Cultures, Journal of Folklore Research, Journal of Tolkien Research, and Human Sexuality Counseling: A Sex Positive Approach (2023), among others.

◈ 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 [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