#intersectional representation

You may or may not have heard about this anime, but if you had it was likely from Anifem’s glowing reviews of the series, Fanbyte, or perhaps the viral clip of two characters discussing gender norms and a father-figure who is transgender.  There’s also a very relevant post by The Afictionato on how it compares to other underdog stories in sports due to the fact that it comes “directly from minorities.”  To put it succinctly, Stars Align has been sold as Fall 2019’s progressive darling…

… which is initially part of what drew me in to give it a shot.  Representation is cool, and well written representation is awesome has always been my viewpoint. 

Don’t forget which blog you are reading.

Okay so maybe Haikyuu also got me interested in sports anime in general recently but I digress, the point is for the reasons described I ended up watching a few episodes every time I went to my grandma’s house (she had the Funi subscription, I was stuck with CR at the time). Despite the plot being somewhat cliché here and there I enjoyed it, a lot actually. 

The emotional core is more than strong enough to activate your suspension of disbelief like any good vanilla Shonen or Isekai flick.  But this is not what I’m talking about today, today I’m asking you to humor me for a bit on something else.

It occurs to me that Lt. Uhura was a level of representation that is still unusual today. She's two categories different from a straight white ablebodied cis man - black AND female.

The next character who comes easily to mind who is more than one step away from that standard is Geordi LaForge, for being both black and disabled. Though his disability straddles an awkward sort of line between being accommodated and being magically cured - he is blind, and uses an artificial aid to mitigate this, but it does so by almost making him not blind. If you want to, you can argue that it's sort of erasure, not representation. You'd have to be in a pretty bad mood though.

Kinda makes me want to do some sort of rudimentary graphic rundown of Star Trek characters, and how diverse they really are individually from the infuriatingly accepted "human neutral" of cishet white ablebodied man.

Do people realise that ace people headcanoning characters as ace--be that person disabled or abled--are not likely to portray this character as desexualised, because ace people desperately want and need agency, identity and authority in their portrayals and headcanons? Something that doesn’t exist in a desexualisation narrative?

Do people realise that this constant slew of warnings is incredibly, unbelievably harmful to disabled aces? In no way is the experience of being asexual that of being desexualised; to conflate the two strips disabled aces doubly of agency, identity and authority. Yet every time we turn around, we see warnings about never linking two of our identities; we are told that being a disabled ace is the same thing as being a desexualised disabled person.

This constant narrative of warning doesn’t support me, a disabled ace. In fact, I suspect that being told that disabled ace headcanons are a form of desexualisation strips me as much of agency as a disabled ace as does the desexualisation of disabled characters as a disabled person!

Neither, in any way, treats me as a person with agency, identity or authority over my own experience and intersecting identities!

Asexual people do not benefit from desexualisation any more than disabled people do. A desexualisation narrative isn’t an ace-positive one. Allosexual abled people write these sorts of narratives, engaging in both ableism and allosexism because they see both being disabled and being asexual as less adult and less human, thereby linking these in coding that strips the character of agency. When you say that ace people shouldn’t headcanon disabled characters, you are placing the fault for the very allosexism that harms us--the way we are seen as less than adult and human--at an ace person’s feet. The narrative of desexualisation isn’t ours, so why do people insist on denying ace people expression when abled allosexual people are the problem?

When people say “don’t headcanon disabled characters as ace unless you’re disabled”, I don’t feel protected. I just see fewer headcanons--and resulting canon narratives--about people like me, in a world where there’s few ace protagonists and few disabled protagonists created as empowering representation.

We are told, over and over, that being a disabled ace is the same thing as being a desexualised disabled person.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQH9Mggz0us)

Autistic a-specs get to exist, and given that most canon or coded portrayals are usually written by allistic allosexual/alloromantic people who don’t have a clue about how to positively write autistic, ace and aro characters (never mind autistic and a-spec characters), we absolutely get to exist in headcanons. We need to exist in headcanons.

It’s not like we get to exist much of anywhere else.

Do some people headcanon an autistic character as aro, ace or aro-ace so they don’t have to ship them? I’m sure it’s happened. How is it the fault of a-spec people, though, that our identities are being used to justify or allow someone else’s ableism? Why should a-spec autistics be told that we’re not allowed to exist in someone else’s headcanon just because some folks are ableist?

Why are we erasing autistic a-specs instead of addressing the ableism?

I’m finding it increasingly hard not to see this ongoing conversation as a simple statement that you don’t want to have complex discussions about autism, ableism, asexuality and aromanticism.

I’m finding it increasingly hard not to see this ongoing conversation as a simple statement that you want to do only the minimum work possible in disability activism.

I’m finding it increasingly hard not to see this ongoing conversation as a simple statement that you don’t care if a-spec autistics are collateral damage.

I’m finding it increasingly hard not to see this ongoing conversation as a simple statement that you are happy to create an artificial division between my autistic and my a-spec identities, one that in no way benefits me as an a-spec autistic.

I’m finding it increasingly hard not to see this ongoing conversation as a simple statement that you don’t care if a-spec autistics don’t exist.

I’m finding it increasingly hard not to see this ongoing conversation as a simple statement that you are a terrible activist.

I have words for this conversation that keeps on happening even though many, many a-spec autistics and a-spec disabled people have spoken up over the last six months and called this hate for what it is.

They’re words like “ableism” and “acemisia” and “aromisia”. Words that should never describe something that is ostensibly an activist conversation.

It’s heteronormativity, in that it’s expected that a woman is the last thing these cis men want and need. It’s also amatonormativity, in that having a home, job, income, interests and friends are never once treated as enough by the narrative, to the extent that we’re subjected to umpteen episodes with all the characters but Sheldon moaning about how they can’t get a girl as a romantic or sexual partner. This is followed by umpteen episodes all about the characters making room in their lives for a romantic partner and, totally not coincidentally, becoming less neurodiverse-coded as they shift to lives focused more on amatonormative, heteronormative relationships.

As an ND aro-ace, this is a heartbreaking message, and it’s one backed up by the vast majority of narratives offered to me.

A home, a job, an income, ability to nerd freely and a group of equally-nerdy neurodiverse friends? That’s the dream for me, right there. That’s all I want, as an aro-ace autistic who doesn’t want or need a romantic and/or sexual partner. The precious thing that the characters of The Big Bang Theory open the narrative already possessing? That’s my end-goal, someday. It’s treated by the narrative, though, as though it is easy to get, childish, unimportant. Yet my history, my truth, is that those things are incredibly hard for me to get!

(It actually shows how little the writers of The Big Bang Theory actually understand the neurodiverse coding they write into their characters, because they do not understand that, actually, many neurodiverse people struggle to make, have and keep those kinds of platonic and familial relationships. Some of us don’t even want them.)

Every time I turn around, as an aro-ace person, there’s a new message that found family and platonic relationships are not enough for me to star in a story. Every time I turn around, as a neurodiverse aro-ace, there’s a message that the things I am struggling to achieve are easy and normal to get--so easy that even the ND-coded characters of The Big Bang Theory can manage it! It leaves me feeling that not only am I not able to become an adult (through the having romantic and sexual relationships with others) I am not even able to reach the “child” entry position from which these sorts of narratives begin. The combination of my lack of interest in romantic and sexual relationships (via the lack of attraction) and my neurodiversity leaves me feeling as though I am nothing.

Twice over, I am a child--in fact, I am less than one.

I don’t exist. In a world where sexual and romantic relationships, or even just the wanting of them, grant one a degree of recognition by narrative as someone trying to be adult and hence worthy, I don’t exist. I don’t even exist as a child with the second-best of close platonic housemates and relationships; I don’t exist in any kind of way that grants me positivity and agency as an adult. I just don’t exist--save as a warning message for how people are not supposed to be.

Narrative tells me the steps I need to take to be a human that matters in story, and the truth is that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to make it up to the starting line. But, since I can’t make it past the starting line, that doesn’t even matter.

It absolutely breaks my heart to be continually confronted with my own worthlessness, and yet I can’t escape it. It’s there, always, in all the stories that surround me. I am not an protagonist with agency. I am not the kind of adult who matters.

This is why I need stories about being aro-ace and neurodiverse. This is why it is a slap to the face to hear people say that aro-aces get all the autistic narratives, even though those narratives largely end up being about characters like Sheldon Cooper, finding adulthood through amatonormative romance narratives. Or characters who are never treated as proper adults because they lack these things! This is why we need to look at what it means that we define adulthood and agency via sexual and romantic relationships--and, in fact, actually how we define adulthood and agency and worth at all. This is why we need stories about neurodiverse characters who are aro-ace, whether they want platonic relationships or not, and we need them to treat us as though we are intrinsically adult and valuable, as though we are worthwhile protagonists no matter our relationship or or neurodiverse status.

(I’m not saying that sexual and romance narratives aren’t needed for autistic characters. They are. But asexual and/or aromantic narratives for autistic characters who are not treated as children for both their autism and their asexuality and/or aromanticism are also needed!)

I need stories that tell me I am an adult, that I am worthy and valid and important and deserving of the hero narrative, right now. As I am right now. Without romantic and sexual relationships, without the close-knit friend circle and secure job, writing as a person who had to move back in with my parents because I actually am just that disabled--writing as a person who considers talking to someone else online via text a massive accomplishment because I am terrible at being social.

I need people to question how it is romantic and sexual relationships function in the stories that matter, and I need people especially to examine this when it comes to how these things indicate worthiness and adulthood--especially when your character is neurodiverse, when neurodiversity itself is already treated as something that makes us less adult.

I’ll never fall in romantic love. I doubt I’ll have another sexual partner. I don’t even know if I’ll ever get to a point where I’ll have a QPR or best friend as housemate.

But none of that, none of it, makes me any less deserving of being a hero in a story written by someone else. None of it makes me less adult. None of it means that I lack agency--save for my having to operate in an ableist world that routinely tries to deny it.

So please, please--let’s start celebrating stories that don’t put sexual and/or romantic relationships front and centre. Let’s start celebrating stories that don’t require sex and/or romance as a shorthand for indicating a character’s adulthood.

And, speaking as someone who is disabled, neurodiverse and aro-ace--give me well-written disabled and/or neurodiverse aro-ace characters in stories without sexual and romantic relationships. Give me characters who are never treated as a child for any of those identities, or characters who are by others in a narrative that points out everything that is wrong with this trope because yes, we do deserve better.

Give me characters that tell me, right now, I am adult.

I am queer because I am non-binary, pan, ace and aro.

When you tell my cis ace and aro siblings that they are not queer, you are attacking, questioning and invalidating my queerness. You are attacking, questioning and invalidating everything that made me not belong in straight society, everything that made me not conform to amatonormative relationships. You’re attacking the aro teen who went to dances with boys hating every moment of it because that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re attacking the aro teen who had to field off questions about when they’re getting a partner while never knowing why they didn’t want one. You’re attacking the aro-ace adult who had no language for their differences and spent a decade in queer spaces not talking about it. You’re attacking the aro-ace trans adult who bought genre books about trans characters only to discover most of them revolve around romance and (romantic) love and don’t speak to my experience of transness at all. You’re attacking the aro-ace trans adult who feels ignored and excluded once again.

When you tell me I am welcome because I am non-binary and pan, you make me less by stripping away the parts of me you don’t wish to see. You make me less by ignoring how much my asexuality and aromanticism shape my transness, genderlessness and my pansexuality. You make me less because you cannot see how these are merely faces of the same shape.

In truth, you show me just how much you don’t care about differences you don’t share. The thing that hurts me most, though?

Queer folk are supposed to be better than the allo cishets.

That’s the promise I was given. Here, in queer spaces, I have siblings, kin, a home. We together have suffered isolation and exclusion and hurt. We know what it feels to be hated for a facet of our being. We know what it feels to not know what we are save that it isn’t what society tells us we should be. We know what is to be different and strange - doesn’t queer encapsulate that? Isn’t it a rallying cry? It’s us, in our differences from an oppressive culture, spitting in the eye of tired, restrictive, limited illusions of normality? Unifying, with all our differences in sexuality, gender, relationships, expression, race, history, ability and experience, under one bright banner to defy the oppression of the constricted way of being handed to us by Western society?

But that flag is trampled underfoot, the colours obscured by mud. Now it’s “SGA and trans”, unmindful of the cruelty of that initialism. Now it’s a locked gate; entry only acceptable if you’re the right way of being queer. (You probably shouldn’t use that word, by the way, because the right to self-identification and pride in that identification, too, lie buried in the mud.)

I am queer. MOGAI. LGBT+. I prefer queer but I belong in those categories. I am part of the group those words refer to. So are my ace and aro siblings, if they also feel that sense of belonging and connection. All of them.

I’m not here for someone else to pat me on the head and condescendingly allow that I might belong for only the correct decided-by-someone-else reasons.

I am here to tell you that I belong, as I am, all that I am, and that it was never your place to decide for me.

I am here to hold you to the promise I was given, all those years ago.

I am here to extend that promise of self-declaration and community to others.