Ace and aro lesbian art and theory with Agnes Martin and Yayoi Kusama

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.