A review by bisexualbookshelf
Ending the Pursuit: Asexuality, Aromanticism, and Agender Identity by Michael Paramo

informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Michael Paramo’s Ending the Pursuit: Asexuality, Aromanticism, and Agender Identity is a poetic and searing interrogation of the colonial forces that shape our understandings of attraction, gender, and relationality. With incisive critique and lyrical prose, Paramo unravels the structures that have taught us to see separability as inevitable—to believe that identities must be fixed, that attraction must be sexual, that romance must be the pinnacle of intimacy.

At the heart of Ending the Pursuit is the concept of "azeness," a term Paramo uses to describe the shared experiences of asexual, aromantic, and agender people navigating a world that renders their existence impossible. Through a decolonial lens, they expose how cisheteropatriarchy has dictated the terms of identity and desire, pathologizing any deviation from its norms. Paramo demonstrates how colonialism is not just a system of domination but a force that meticulously sorted, categorized, and policed the most intimate aspects of being—constructing gender, sexuality, and attraction as rigid and hierarchical. In resisting this, Ending the Pursuit refuses the idea that ace, aro, and agender people are lacking something. Instead, it celebrates interconnectedness, rejecting the imposed loneliness of nonconformity.

Throughout the book, Paramo deconstructs the ways in which asexuality, aromanticism, and gender nonconformity have been medicalized, sexualized, and made unintelligible. They challenge the assumptions that tie asexuality to disability, unravel the racialized myths that deem certain bodies incapable of desirelessness, and reveal how sexology has long sought to define and constrain attraction. The book skillfully articulates how bi and pan identities, much like ace and aro identities, disrupt binary thinking, and how dismantling rigid concepts of attraction allows for a more expansive and liberatory way of relating to others.

Perhaps one of the most powerful threads of Ending the Pursuit is its critique of romantic supremacy—the deeply ingrained belief that fulfillment hinges on romantic partnership. Paramo argues that this hierarchy fuels the pathologization of aromanticism, enforcing the notion that a life without romance is a life incomplete. In rejecting these narratives, the book insists on the legitimacy of chosen kinship, platonic devotion, and the infinite ways we can structure our relationships outside of colonial expectations.

Paramo’s writing is both intellectually rigorous and emotionally resonant, weaving together historical analysis, personal reflection, and radical imagination. They call for a world beyond rigid labels, beyond imposed desires, beyond the necessity of proving one’s existence to systems that refuse to see it. Ending the Pursuit is a vital text for anyone seeking to unlearn the colonial logics embedded in their understanding of relationality and to embrace a future defined by liberation, not legibility.

📖 Read this if you love: decolonial critiques of gender and sexuality, radical reimaginings of identity beyond colonial binaries, and the works of Sherronda J. Brown and Angela Chen. 

🔑 Key Themes: Colonialism and the Construction of Identity, The Politics of Attraction, Gender and Desire as Social Constructs, Medicalization and Pathologization of Asexuality, Queer Liberation Beyond the Binary.
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