Quoi Identity Survey: Results

Thank you to everyone who participated in or helped to spread the Quoi Identity Survey. This survey was released on March 6th, 2022 and ran through April 7th. It collected 428 responses in total.

[Crossposted to Pillowfort.]

Quoi Identity Survey

Now announcing the launch of the Quoi Identity Survey.

The purpose of this survey is to investigate the identities, demographics, and community involvement of those who affiliate with the quoiromantic, quoisexual, or quoigender umbrellas. Quoiromanticism is a concept that originated from a disidentification with romantic orientation, due to the specific intracommunity norms of the asexual community. The same principle has since been applied to gender and sexuality. However, you do not need to identify with a specific term in order to participate in this survey. If you are unsure whether you are part of the intended demographic, you are invited to err on the side of yes.

Click here to take the survey. It will remain open until April 7th.

If you can, you are invited to spread the survey link and help collect more responses. Questions can be asked in the comments below (no account required) or via this contact form.

In addition to WordPress, the survey has been shared on Pillowfort, Twitter, Tumblr (here, here, and here), Arocalypse, AVEN, and Reddit (on r/quoiromantic, r/quoisexual, r/quoigender, r/aromantic, and r/voidpunk).

Edit: the results have now been published.

Dear Bi Lesbian Defenders: Stop Throwing Me Under the Bus

If you’re out there arguing against identity policing, that’s great. While you’re at it, try making room for people like me, too.

This post explains how defenders have been lured into an essentialist framework, what the problem is, and how to fix it.

[Crossposted to Pillowfort. Preview image: Tire Track in Concrete by Darren Hester (GrungeTextures), licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.]

Ace of Spirals

This is a followup post to A Case for a Convergence-Divergence Spectrum, so if that terminology is new to you, start there.

Previously, I explained convergence and divergence as a gradient, a subjective judgement, and a matter of degree. For example, I’d map myself on the divergent end of the spectrum — with a narrow, specific orientation rather than more broadly-encompassing one. However, that also comes with a few caveats.

[Crossposted to Pillowfort. Preview image: Spiral Selfie by Howard Ignatius, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.]

A Quoiromantic Perspective on Compulsory Romantic Orientation

Romantic orientation: some people identify with one, some people don’t — but the problem comes in when everyone is expected to have one. This post spells out my (quoiromantic) perspective on compulsory romantic orientation by sketching out a few different ways this expectation can manifest in certain contexts. Note this post is largely just rehashing things already familiar to my regular readers; for everyone else, the goal of this post is to serve as an introductory primer on the topic.

[Preview image by Nccmrm97, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.]

The Call (to Abandon Card Suit Sorting) is Coming from Inside the House

This month we’ve got yet another case of somebody over on Tumblr trying to revive card suit sorting, plus even more people claiming it was only abandoned because of the anti-ace brigade. I’ve put this post together just to explain that, in actuality, this narrative is false. The call to get rid of that junk isn’t some hostile outsider perspective. The call is coming from inside the house.

In this post, you will find what I mean by “card suit sorting,” how it’s not quite fair to fellow aces, and how this connects back to larger problems of absolutist thinking within the ace community.

[Crossposted to Pillowfort. Preview image by Poker Photos.]

(What) does the aro community want (with) quoiros?

A post about being quoiro amid aro-ace conflict & feeling unsure of my relationship to the aro umbrella. Crossposted. One part personal reflection post, one part invoice to the aro community, and one part gratuitous smattering of links — all centering around two questions: Does the aro community want quoiros to be counted among them? And if so, am I supposed to consider myself to be, in certain circumstances, “basically aro”?

Crunching the Umbrella and Spinning the Reinvention Treadmill

[Note: This post has been crossposted to Pillowfort.]

Back on March 8th, the day before I published my Genealogy of Queerplatonic, Siggy published a response of his own to the whole discussion, titling the post as “Death of the coiner” (an allusion to Barthes’ “Death of the Author”). In Cor’s addition onto that post, co wrote:

my main response is that it’s useful and arguably necessary for us to document and continually notify people of the pattern of semantic drift in words having to do with rejecting models and how they are reinscribed within those models to be less threatening

This post is about the same thing and that same dynamic: the pattern of ambiguous gray areas and umbrella words getting crunched into narrower redefinitions, leaving the need for their original ambiguity unmet, and paving the way for others to come along and try to reinvent the wheel.

Romantic Orientation and the “Split Attraction Model” are not the same thing

[Edit: If you’re reading this post in the year 2021 or later, I would recommend An Actual History of The Term “Split Attraction Model” for a quicker, shorter read.]

A few days ago, when I mentioned on Pillowfort that I wanted to write something about the development of the “romantic orientation” model, I was helpfully pointed toward this post on the “split attraction model” at Historically Ace. I appreciate that, and I think it’s a handy collection of information. However, I have a problem with that post: it’s not actually a history of “the split attraction model” as a term itself. The phrase “split attraction model” appears in the post only three times, two of those times being as introduction and the other solely to specify that something else would not be considered an example of it. The timeline of that post ends at 2007, which is actually before the phrase “split attraction model” even entered into circulation in the ace community.

For comparison, I think this is like if I had written “a history of relationship anarchy” and then only, solely charted examples of the use of queerplatonic — which is to say, maybe it’s not wildly-off base, but it still falls short of what it actually promises. As related as they are, and as much sense as it makes to discuss the two alongside each other, the history of one is not the history of the other. A history of the “split attraction model” still remains yet to be told.

Quoiro / WTFromantic: a brief timeline of disidentification with & personal rejection of romantic orientation

Featured in this post: the coinage and meaning of wtfromantic, the subsequent coinage and meaning of quoiromantic, some discussion over competing definitions, and a sampling of personal reflection posts on the topic demonstrating its continued relevance over the past eight years. Formatted by year, with select text excerpts in blockquotes.

[Note: this post has been crossposted to Pillowfort. Updated 8/13/22. Preview image by Darkday, CC BY 2.0.]