Carnival of Aces Call For Submissions: May 2021: Words and Conceptualizations

April’s Carnival was hosted by Demisexual and Proud. You can see the round-up right here.

A lot of ace words are neologisms (honestly, depending on how much you’re counting the whole “asexual as in the type of reproduction you learned about in biology” thing for, you could argue that all of ace words are neologisms). I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve always been fascinated by the words that people use to describe themselves and how those words vary from person to person.

The theme this month is about the actual labels you identify with, but it’s also about what you mean when you say those words and how you use those words. I’m going at this from a labels are tools viewpoint, so mainly this prompt is about what you’re using those tools to describe and how those tools work for you.

Some possible prompts:

• When you say you’re ace, what do you mean? What experiences are you describing?
• How did you decide which the specific words/labels to use? What do they do for you?
• Are there labels that you “count” as by strict definition that you don’t actually identify with? Why don’t you use those words? What don’t they do for you?
• If you were going to write a definition of the label(s) you use that only had to work for you (and no one else), what would the definition be? Does it differ from the “official” definition of that term?
• Do you incorporate things that aren’t technically asexuality (example: lack of libido) into your personal understanding of your own asexuality? Why or why not?
• Do you label both a romantic orientation and a sexual orientation? Why or why not?
• If you identify with both a romantic orientation and a sexual orientation, do you experience them as inherently different? Why or why not?
• Do you or have you ever identified with microlabels? What do these words do for you that more well-known labels don’t?
• Do you have various levels of labels (ex: labels you use when talking to allo people vs labels you use when talking to other aces)? How do you decide when to use one set of labels and when to use another?
• Have you ever coined terminology or been part of a community that coined terminology? Do you think you have a different relationship to that terminology than you do terminology you had no hand in coining?
• Have you ever interacted with aces who were obviously using a different conceptualization scheme than you were? How did you deal with this?

You can submit responses either through the comments below or through my contact box. If you’d like to submit something anonymously you can email it to me at theacelinkreservoir@gmail.com and I’ll post it for you.

Good luck and I hope you all have a nice month!