“A Hundred Different Ways of Being in Love”: Emma, Queer Austen, and Asexuality Studies

Abstract

In ACE: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (2020), Angela Chen writes, “Aces draw attention to sexual assumptions and sexual scripts—around definition, feeling, action—that are often hidden and interrogate the ways that these norms make our lives smaller. Aces have developed a new lens that prioritizes what is just over what is supposedly natural.” This cowritten essay argues that asexuality studies offers a helpful framework for scholars of Jane Austen. In particular, with our reading of Austen’s Emma (1815), we suggest that asexuality studies dials us into Austen’s metacritical moments about the genre of romance and the expectations generated by the marriage plot. This essay aims to start a discussion on what it would mean to read novels with a kind of attention and reading practice that asexuality studies has begun to carve out.