This article draws on the field of asexuality studies and the
growing work of aromanticism studies to think about whether
and how we can theorize lesbian studies from asexual (ace)
and aromantic (aro) perspectives. Aces experience “the lack of
sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire
for sexual activity” (Asexual Visibility and Education Network)
and aros experience little or no romantic attraction to others.
While lesbian studies has countless examples of “asexual resonances,” or lesbian theorizations that focus on intimacy
between women in ways that do not centralize sex and sometimes do not centralize romance—such as those of Boston
Marriages and intimate friendships, women identified women,
single lesbian figures and spinsters, and lesbian kinship networks that are erotic if not sexual or romantic in nature—little
work thus far has explored lesbian identities using the frameworks of asexuality and even more so of aromanticism. This
piece explores ace and aro lesbianism by focusing on two
artists: abstract expressionist Canadian-American painter Agnes
Martin (1912–2004) and pop art multi-media Japanese artist
Yayoi Kusama (b.1929). Martin has been regarded as lesbian
and Kusama as a sexually repressed heterosexual, with neither
artist widely understood nor celebrated for the ace and aro
elements of their identities, despite evidence suggesting that
both artists might be ace and aro. Opening up understandings
of lesbianism beyond the sexual and romantic, I argue, allows
for a dynamic positioning of lesbianism as a relational quality
that can be extended to countless artists, figures, literary texts,
and films.
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