Call for Submissions January 2022: In-Between Spaces

For January 2022, I am hosting the Carnival of Aros, a monthly blogging carnival on themes related to aromanticism. You can find more information here. This month’s theme is “in-between spaces”.

In marginalized communities we spend a lot of time and effort differentiating between identities (e.g. aromanticism does not imply asexuality). And rightfully so! Different facets of our identities are not dependent on each other and do not imply universal experiences. But what this means is that we often don’t get the chance to talk about how our different identities do impact each other in our own individual lived experience. Aro-spec identities place many of us firmly outside of how society expects us to interact with others and how we center relationships, and this has ripple effects into other parts of our lives. For this Carnival of Aros, I want to hear about all of the squishy, nebulous, bits between your identities.

Feel free to take this in any direction that resonates with you, but here are some ideas to get you started.

• How does your aro-spec experience shape your other identities?
• Are there parts of your identity you have a hard time differentiating between?
• How do your romantic orientation, sexuality, and gender play off of each other?
• How do these interact with other facets of your identity, such as neurodivergence, disability, race, ethnicity or body size?
• Have you had a hard time understanding or accepting one element of your identity because of another?

You can send me your submission via email (aspecofstardust@gmail.com) or by commenting on this post. I will try to respond within a few days of receiving your submission, so if you don’t hear back from me I haven’t gotten it. You can host it on any platform, it just needs to be public so I can link back to it. If you would rather, I can also put your piece on my blog as a submission – just let me know.

I will release whatever submissions I have as of February 1^st in a round-up, but will accept late submissions.