Toward Asexual Utopias

ABSTRACT

This article examines how asexual (ace) kinship and community provide a relational groundwork for futures that move past our current anti-ace worlds and into utopias built on myriad intimacies beyond sexual connection. The authors examine two speculative fiction novellas with ace main characters to highlight the ways that aceness is constrained within our anti-ace world and yet simultaneously offers hope for a utopian horizon that humans can enact through asexual intimacies now. Seanan McGuire’s first novella in her Wayward Children series, Every Heart a Doorway, and Meredith Katz’s The Cybernetic Tea Shop are read for the ways that they constrain and enable asexual utopias. To bridge everyday asexual potentialities in the present and the future worlds they can build, the article concludes by advocating for two modes of asexual praxis: breaking linear sexual trajectories and centering nonsexual intimacies.