Amatonormativity is deeply embedded in Western society and intersects with other social systems. Understanding and challenging amatonormativity requires digging deeper and learning about these intersections. This guide addresses how amatonormativity intersects with white supremacy/colonialism, the cisheteropatriachy, ableism, capitalism, and desirability politics. There are a series of exercises and reflections to help you better identify and challenge amatornomativity. Sources and narratives are also included, which can be useful for more deeply engaging with certain material.
There are currently five versions of the guide/workbook (links below). You can also view the guide on pages 2-5 of this post.
Word count: 362 Reading time: Approximately 2 minutes This does not include the individual submissions.
For this month’s Carnival of Aros, the theme was on Well-being and Amatonormativity. The call for submissions can be found here. Participants touched on a range of different aspects of this with some writing about the adverse consequences of amatonormativity on well-being and others writing about how they handle the effects of amatonormativity. I hope the community can find some comfort in these relatable experiences and perhaps find some inspiration. Thank you to everyone who participated!
You can find the list of submissions below.
Michelle at Quiet ‘n’ Queer wrote about the difficulty of being yourself in the face of amatonormativity and having to hide who you are.
Mike examined the effect of continuously being asked if he’s lonely on himself and how the idea that single people are lonely impacts his ability to seek out support.
thinking-aromanticism addressed how not everyone, including alloromantic, buys into amatonormative norms and how it can be comforting to realize this. It asks, “Do allos really think that?” Potentially not!
Frawley wrote about the harmful effects of amatonormativity on their mental health before they realized they were aro and about their process of healing from that after embracing their aro identity.
L. E. Jeffreys (1, 2, 3) expressed how amatonormativity shows up in friendship and life through a series of touching poems.
CharCharChar demonstrated how they deal with amatonormativity by writing drabbles that that explore non-amatonormative relationships.
The Song System examined how the Aromantic Manifesto prompted her to think about the relationship between amatonormativity and a fear of undesirability (leading to the coining of a new term!) as well as how we can harness the power of language to create change.
Elin wrote about her experience of learning about aromanticism and the ubiquity of amatonormativity, especially in music, which she combats by giving new meanings to and rewriting songs about romance.
Artemis addressed how learning about amatonormativity helped her embrace and process her aromanticism by “flipping the script” and giving her something to challenge.
gracesofluck expressed her difficulties of living in an amatonormative society and how participating in the aro community has helped eir confront and be resilient in the face of amatonormativity.
Submitted by The Song System for the Well-being and Amatonormativity Carnival of Aros theme.
One of my favorite modern thinkers, Terence McKenna, said that language is the battleground of culture, and we can see this in the words evolved by and associated with the various social justice movements of the last couple of centuries: gender equality (misogyny, feminist, mansplaining,…); freedom of sexual expression (gay, lesbian, queer, twink, bear, butch,…); freedom of gender expression (transgender, non-binary, gender confirmation surgery, TERF,…). The debate over marriage equality is actually an argument over whether the meaning of the word “marriage” is owned by cultural conservatives or progressives. TERFs don’t want trans women to be included in the definition of “woman”. Microlabels and the dismissal they often receive are an important part of this fight too. By challenging the accepted and often inadequate language we’ve inherited, we open up new perspectives for ourselves and those who can relate, allowing us to further join together. Conservative forces can attempt to influence meaning too, of course (the backlash against feminism in the ‘80s and ‘90s being a particularly memorable example of this for me). But as a fundamentally defensive position, their worst insinuations as to what progressive terms mean can be dispersed over time, as long as rationality prevails, and the worst insults they can come up with reclaimed as badges of pride.
I was recently floored by the Aromantic Manifesto by Yingchen and Yingtong. This flooring was partly my own fault – I left reading it until the last minute before an online discussion, and its depth and the quality of conversation it prompted ended up being more personal than I expected. I consider myself a politically astute person already – being aware of the social climate and various debates going on around trans issues has helped me a great deal in my transition, and I’ve been applying the same approach to understanding being aromantic too. So much of my own and others’s social behavior is explained to me by amatonormativity and the disconnect I feel from it. However, the Aromantic Manifesto takes this to a whole other level, challenging us to think about the social discrimination that masquerades as innate and natural romantic preference; the inherent queerphobia of romance, despite struggles for freedom of sexuality often being framed as the “right to love”; the hierarchies that the social pressure to replicate a romantic ideal creates within society but also within ourselves. In short, this is the politics of desirability (YouTuber Khadija Mbowe has done some great analysis here, specifically of how it relates to black women rappers rather than from an aro perspective though). In the same way that the existence of sexual minorities reveal a deep bias in mainstream culture’s way of thinking about and policing sex, so too does aromanticism reveal something very dark and controlling about the way that emotional intimacy is regulated. In fact, the challenge that out and proud aromantic people present to mainstream culture may be even greater and more fundamental than previous ones from other minority identities.
By its own admission, the Aromantic Manifesto isn’t perfect. Personally, I feel that it stresses social conditioning over genuine natural impulse (as I see it, the romantic urge is a real thing for many people, but it’s been exploited and distorted by cisheteronormativity to enforce unhealthy ideals). It’s also quite abstract, and I’d like to address that by proposing that we start creating more language that allows aromantic perspectives to make greater headway into mainstream culture.
At the very heart of romantic hierarchy – and the discrimination against those that must be deemed less worthy in order for it to exist – is the fear of loosing one’s perceived place within that hierarchy. Not knowing a name for this fear, despite having observed it as a huge influence on a great many people’s identities and motivations, I decided to create one with the help of gracesofluck, who was also at the discussion of the Manifesto. Pulling up an English to Greek translator, combining “desirability” with the noun “loss” or the verb “lose” gave ptosiepithymitophobia and chanoepithymitophobia respectively – the fear of loosing desirability. These don’t exactly dance off the tongue though. Gracesofluck solved this problem somewhat by using a negative – anepithymitophobia, the fear of undesirability. This works wonderfully, because the undesirability being feared could be one’s own, as threatened by a hierarchy, or that of someone else as taught by a hierarchy to avoid association with, leading to discriminatory behavior.
To my mind, anepithymitophobia needs to be pointed out and widely recognized for us to live in an equitable society. Not to say that people can’t desire, but rather to allow us to explore intimate emotional connection, whether romantic or otherwise, free of pressure from outside forces that would exploit our need for intimacy and social validation to achieve their own divisive ends. This is about greater personal self-awareness, not greater control. And about living with less fear, particularly of ostracism for whatever choices one might make in the pursuit of happiness. Maybe the vocabulary presented here will help – perhaps we could abbreviate it to aephobia, or stick with “fear of undesirability” to avoid Eurocentrism. But in both the wider cultural struggle against amatonormativity and individually as aromantic people in a culture which would exclude us without a second thought, the more descriptive we can be, the more power we have. Let’s not shy away from making language our playground, and a tool to prompt much-needed change.
Word count: 713 words Reading time: Approximately 3-4 minutes Content warning: Amatonormativity
Being aromantic, I feel intimately acquainted with the negative consequences of amatonormativity. Especially over the past year, I’ve been doing a deep dive into amatonormativity in order to better understand it and its impacts on society. The struggles of being aromantic can sometimes be dismissed or belittled or be used to pathologize aromanticism. This is why I find it important to name systems of oppression when discussing the experiences of aromanticism that are not so positive. I get frustrated when I see facts on queer mental health that demonstrate high rates of mental disorders but don’t contextualize them by explicitly naming the systems of oppression that contribute to these struggles.
Equipped with this knowledge, I have come to realize how many of my own struggles are rooted in amatonormativity. Especially as an adult when we are expected to be getting into committed romantic relationships and married, I find the negative impacts of amatonormativity very hard to avoid. It’s so pervasive, but I feel invisible when many around me just don’t see it (or don’t see it as a problem). It feels like shouting into the void sometimes. Amatonormativity has a toll on my physical, social, emotional, and existential well-being, which culminates in struggles with mental health. Making friends as an adult is already challenging, but it’s frustrating that whenever I try to make friends, I have to worry about whether or not they’re amatonormative (most likely they are to some degree) and if they’ll end up hurting me if so- whether intentionally or unintentionally. I have to contend with the fact that people I care so deeply about might end up so willingly giving me up because of their romantic partners. It feels utterly dehumanizing and devaluing, as if I’m not worth it because I’m “just a friend.” Getting my needs met is also a challenge, especially when much of society deems that those needs should be met in a romantic partnership. It is difficult to live day in and day out and cope with stressors when a lot of my needs aren’t met. Healing is relational (for me, at least), but healing can be prevented when attempts at relating to others is often disrupted by amatonormativity. I shouldn’t have to be able to “love” in order to have my needs met or to be cared for. Planning a future and looking ahead feels bleak at times as I wonder whether I will just continue to be in this same situation. Many things I want for my life feel unreachable.
Given all this, how do we create lives we’re content with? How do we take care of ourselves? I admit that I sometimes feel a bit defeatist because of amatonormativity. It’s the dark cloud that hangs over me and impedes my thriving. As I try to build the life I want, it’s the torrential rain that tries to sweep away the seeds I sow. Despite the storm, I press onward and continue to hope for the best. One positive aspect of learning about amatonormativity, is that it actually helped me embrace my aromanticism. Before then, I wondered if I was a little broken, but afterwards I knew that it’s not me that is broken but society. Aromanticism for me is not just an orientation but it has also become a praxis for me, one that redefines how to relate to and care for others. This has helped me to become involved and active in challenging amatonormativity. For me, mitigating the negative impacts of amatonormativity isn’t just self-care but also doing things in a community. Participating in the aromantic community helps to reduce the negative impacts of being aromantic in a romance-focused society. My struggles feel less invisible, and it’s reassuring to know that there are people out there who relate. Enacting change also requires collective action and seeing the efforts that this community puts into advocacy and education and increasing visibility is inspiring and gives me hope. Amatonormativity is a force that threatens to take away our well-being, but we continue to create art, connections, knowledge, dreams, community. This is our resilience. We live in defiance of amatonormativity. Our very existence as aromantics in the face of amatonormativity is radical. Even if it’s hard and heartbreaking at times, I will continue daring to dream.
Word count: 408 words Reading time: Approximately 2-3 minutes Content warning: Amatonormativity
The Carnival of Aros is a monthly blogging carnival with themes related to aromantic and aro-spec identities and experiences. More information can be found here.
Theme
As a mental health researcher, I find it important to gain more insight into the well-being of aromantics and the potential relationship with amatonormativity. Being aromantic can be a wonderful experience, but larger societal systems and standards can create barriers and issues for many of us.
Amatonormativity is pervasive and can potentially prevent folks from living their full lives. While this affects everyone (even alloromantics), aromantics can be particularly affected by amatonormativity. It can impact us in numerous ways, from making it difficult for us to have fulfilling relationships to preventing us from being able to afford housing. From a survey of about 1,000 aro-spec respondents, 72% felt that it had a negative impact on their mental health. How much of an impact does amatonormativity have on your well-being?
Prompts
Generally, does amatonormativity have a negative impact on your life, especially as an aromantic person?
How much of an impact does amatonormativity have on your mental health, specifically?
Do you feel that amatonormativity impedes you from getting your needs met in any way?
Which areas of your life are impacted the most by amatonormativity?
Does or did amatonormativity have an effect on you coming to terms/accepting your aromanticism? Does it or has it had an impact on you coming out?
How does amatonormativity affect your a) present situation and b) future outlook?
What are some things you do to mitigate the impact of amatonormativity on yourself, such as with self-care practices?
How do you live your best life despite the challenges of amatonormativity?
How to Participate
Write a blog post or create content related to the theme- any platform is acceptable as long as it is public and has a link. Then, submit the link to me by commenting on this post or through email (gracesofluck@gmail.com). If you don’t have a place to post your own work, you can email it to me, and I will host it for you on my Tumblr. If you would like me to include particular pronouns or (user)names/social media handle with your submission post in the round-up, please let me know.
Deadline and Round-up
Please submit your posts by Tuesday, August 31st. I plan to release the round-up by Saturday, September 4th.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me!
Average reading time: 5 minutes Word count: 1023 words
What’s pod mapping?
Pod mapping originated within transformative justice work as a method of support around violence, abuse, and harmful experiences. It was created by Mia Mingus with the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC). It’s used to describe relationships of support around safety, accountability, transformation behaviors, or healing. Although it was originally developed for dealing with harm within communities, it can be adapted for more general support.
Living in an amatonormative society can leave many aromantic folks feeling as if we’re missing support systems that can be crucial to our everyday well-being and needs. While some of us engage in partnerships, whether they be romantic, platonic or queerplatonic, many of us don’t and are potentially lacking in support and connectedness. When society deems that long-term care occurs within romantic relationships or nuclear families, this can leave many of us with little options for support. Many of us feel isolated and don’t know who to turn to in times of need. Perhaps we have some friends we can receive emotional support from, but when it comes to more domestic or instrumental needs, which are often relegated to partnerships, we might not have someone to rely on. This is especially so if you are disabled or marginalized in other ways. This amatonormative capitalist nuclear family world isn’t built for us, especially those of who reject (romantic) partnerships. To remedy this, turning to community care may be a necessity (and a form of resistance against the systems that put us in these situations!). Pod mapping subverts the idea of care being based on love and desirability.
Who can be a part of my pod?
Pod mapping can be used to determine who can support you and who you can support. You can create a pod map for specific circumstances (for instance, related to disability needs) or one that is more general. It’s important to keep in mind that this requires reciprocity. Pod mapping incorporates mutual aid, and it should therefore be mutual. For every person you include in your pod, you have to think not only on what they can do for you but also what you can do for them.
The people in your pod don’t necessarily have to be your closest or most intimate relationships. They can also be neighbors, people from a club or organization you’re a part of, co-workers/colleagues, university cohort mates, fellow aros, etc…! The key ingredients for anyone in your pod are trust, care, respect, vulnerability, and accountability. Care in this situation does not have to be based on emotional closeness or love.
An important part of pod mapping is consent. Those you include in your pod should be aware of their place in it and what you’d like from them and what you’d be able to do for them. We all have something to contribute- if you’re unsure of what skills you have, check this out. There are many ways to contribute:
delivering groceries
financial support
emotional support
being a buddy (going places with someone or running errands with them)
(cooking) food
helping with chores
helping with disability needs
being a sounding board or helping someone problem-solve
providing a room or a couch for someone to crash on
giving people rides
translating documents
babysitting or helping with child-rearing
helping navigate bureaucracy and paperwork
and more!
If you have any mental health or psychosocial disability needs, you can consider filling in a mad map. This can be especially useful for your pod when you are in need of aid because your pod won’t have to be trying to figure out what you need. With map mapping, you already make it clear what you need. You can listen to a tutorial here. Even if you don’t live with mental “illness” (not everyone identifies with illness) or madness or disability, map mapping might still be useful for times of crisis and need!
Asking someone to become a part of your pod can look like:
“Hello, I am looking for someone to become a part of my pod or support/mutual aid group. Would you like to be a part of it? I generally need support with [insert your needs]. What do you think you can contribute? In return, I can [insert what you can contribute]. What can I contribute to you?”
Having a conversation on mutual trust, respect, and accountability is also recommended to make sure that you and your pod are on the same page.
Filling in your pod map
To fill in the pod map, you’ll first need the worksheet. The map can be accessed here.
[Image Description: A diagram composed of three rings of circles with a grey circle in the middle. Surrounding the grey circle is a ring of bold-outlined circles. The next outer ring is comprised of dotted circles. The most outer ring is comprised of larger regular black outlined circles. At the bottom of the image there is text that says “Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective Pod Mapping.”]
2) The surrounding bold-outlined circles are your pod. Write the names of the people who are in your pod. We encourage people to write the names of actual individuals, instead of things such as “my church group” or “my neighbors.”
3) The dotted lines surrounding your pod are people who are “movable.” They are people that could be moved into your pod, but need a little more work. For example, you might need to build more relationship or trust with them.
4) The larger circles at the edge of the page are for networks, communities or groups that could be resources for you. It could be your local domestic violence direct service organization, or your cohort in nursing school, or your youth group, or a transformative justice group. [This can also include queer support groups!]
You can also watch this video on how to create a pod map!
Credit goes to Mia Mingus and BATJC. Be sure to check out the original source of pod mapping at BATJC for further information and to honor the original intention of pod mapping.
Google Docs Version (creates a personal copy that can be edited- requires Google Drive account)
I’m still looking for translators (and narrators for audio versions) to work on other languages for this guide! If you’re interested in helping out, please fill in this form. As I receive more translations, I’ll be posting them here.
As I was reading Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, I was struck by how an aromantic praxis, one that includes mutual aid and community care, could be informed by and tie into the disability justice ideals around care work.
One part that particularly stuck with me was about how receiving care should not be dependent on being loved or desirable. “I think about the need for care that can be accessed when you’re isolated, disliked, and without social capital—which many disabled people are.” This drives home even more for me how amatonormativity and ableism intersect. When care is dependent on being loved, it leaves many to fend for themselves by themselves, especially when being loved means being in a (usually romantic) partnership. I’ve experienced many times how amatonormativity prevents me from receiving the care I need because that care is often reserved for romantic relationships.
When I think about how isolated aromantics can be, moving care work from the individual (and in this case from an insular couple or nuclear-family form) to the collective or community is so necessary. I’m abled, but I think often about how much work it is to handle everything on my own and that daily functioning is only going to become harder to do by myself. Especially as I get older, I find it increasingly difficult to “adult”, to manage all my household tasks and job while taking care of myself and those around me. The amount of time and energy I have to put into self-care to ensure I can function is overtaking any joy or spontaneity of living. But I know that without that self-care, I wouldn’t be able to keep up. I’m afraid to get sick because I’m afraid that it means I’ll be wiped out or with less energy, my life coming to a standstill, while the world moves on, expecting me to still be productive, and then I’ll have to scramble to catch up, meaning I can’t afford to take the time I need to fully recover (which is really the deeper issue here- our society doesn’t allow us to take proper down time and so much of our worth is dependent on our productivity. Getting or being sick is not an issue in and of itself, but our current social systems makes it so because of ableism). While I can rely on a couple of friends from time to time, what happens to me when they are also in crises or if they move away or if people decide to prioritize their romantic relationships and I need help? Living alone also means it’s harder and takes more planning to access care I need. Although I’m describing my own experience, I think many others encounter similar situations, and I think about how something like care webs of community members could help.
While aromantics and folks with disabilities face different challenges, I think there is a wonderful opportunity for solidarity. Aro activism must include disability justice and accessibility in order to be truly anti-oppressive, and in the end, it will benefit all of us. There is also so much to learn from disability justice and disabled folks.
Amatonormativity is all around us, but what is it really? Perhaps you have heard about it, but you’re still not sure what it means or how to be aware of it or what to do about it. While there is growing awareness, there is still a lack of resources on how to recognize and challenge amatonormativity. This guide and workbook aims to explain what amatonormativity is by giving examples of how it manifests and how it can be harmful. Through a series of exercises and reflections, you can learn to better identify and challenge amatornomativity. There are also a number of sources and narratives to help you understand its impact and learn from lived experiences.
There are currently five versions of the guide/workbook (links below). You can also view the guide on pages 2-4 of this post.
Timestamps 00:00 Start 00:06 Order of contents 00:30 Definitions 02:12 What is amatonormativity? 02:48 Amatonormativity can look like… 02:52 Cultural and personal examples of amatonormativity 04:40 Structural and institutional examples of amatonormativity 06:18 How is amatonormativity harmful? 14:59 Challenging your amatonormativity 15:38 Pre-reflection 16:37 Exercise 1 17:34 Exercise 2 19:07 Exercise 3 21:01 Exercise 4 22:14 Post-reflection 22:49 Sources and narratives 26:27 Credits
Things to keep an eye out for:
In the coming months, I’ll be working with others to translate this workbook. The languages available will be dependent on which translators I can acquire. The languages available can be viewed here. If you’d like to help translating, please fill in this form.
Part 2- Digging Deeper is also in the works. The exact content of the workbook is still being figured out, but it will touch on some ways in which amatonormativity intersects with other systems (and how these affect BIPOC and folks who are neurodivergent/have disabilities), focus more on these structural/institutional elements, and potentially address how we can do care and relationships differently. The aim is to have it available by the end of summer/beginning of autumn.
Update (November 2021): Part 2 is now ready and can be accessed here!
Graces of Luck 