Quoi is what?
Written by the AUREA team
Word count: 2179 words
Estimated reading time: Approx. 11 minutes
A common sentiment expressed in aro spaces is: “what even is romance?” A response that often crops up is: “You’re asking a bunch of aros.” Either the conversation ends here because the question was fairly rhetorical and an affinity has been found, or people begin theorising from observations just what, logically, romance could be.
For some though, for quoiromantics, the question “what even is romance?” is often besides the point.
This month, we explore an identity that sometimes overlaps with aromantic: quoiromantic. We had the privilege of interviewing three individuals who have varying relationships with this term as well as with the aro community. Quoiromantic is pronounced ‘kwahromantic’. And its definition, it could be said, is something particular to each individual.
Defining Quoi
I guess I’d say, often aromantic people say “I don’t experience romantic attraction, so it doesn’t apply to me in that way”. Whereas quoiromantic folks say “Idk if I experience romantic attraction and honestly I don’t find the concept useful, so it doesn’t apply to me.”
— Cor, coiner of the term ‘quoi’, March 2015
Vesta is happy to be described as a budding activist. She is passionate about sustainability, animal welfare, and is an AUREA translator and representative. She is also quoiromantic.
“Most people explain it as aro-specs who can’t differentiate between romantic and platonic attraction. I think that’s the most common used definition. A lot of other people use quoi as not understanding romantic attraction, or the whole romantic orientation doesn’t apply to them, so non-applicable. And I feel I’m more of this definition, than the first one.”
Despite the term being coined in 2012, it has a long history of confusion surrounding it. There is some irony in that, as confusion is often found within quoi definitions. Given its multiple definitions it's unsurprising that quoi is often described as an umbrella. For example, Momo - the Australian aro little known for spearheading the saving of the Arocalypse forum- is nebularomantic.
“Generally nebularomantic is basically 'just' quoiromantic plus neurodivergence. Quoiromantic is an inability to understand, or confusion about what romance is, and nebularomantics place their neurodivergence near the center of that.”
It might seem ill defined to say both aromantic and quoi are umbrella terms, but that is in part the point - these labels are meant to be broad and overlap is to be expected. Wtfromantic can be similarly defined as quoi and was borne because there is an insistence that romantic attraction is intrinsic to everyone - which isn’t true. And that untruth can be proved in an infinite number of ways, in an infinite number of people.
The Coining of Quoi
It should be noted that quoi and wtfromantic were coined by autistic people. There’s something to be said about the evolution of language and during the research for this, we realised we couldn't write about quoi without talking to the person who coined the term.
Cor, a French Canadian, began their activism offline. They founded their University’s ace group, where they even hosted David Jay a time or two. Throughout and since then, they’ve been deeply entrenched in many a community’s language online.
“I was familiar with Sciatrix and zucchini and queerplatonic and wtfromantic. And at least one close friend and several internet friends identified with wtfro, or with category error, romantic orientation of cheese, divide by zero, or with disidentifying with romantic orientation - all of those lovely expressive ways of talking about experience. I also had done some queer studies and an independent study seminar on trans, the body, and technology in my senior year, so I had lots of feelings about queer as querying (or queerying) models.”
Wtfromantic was coined in 2011 by Sciatrix, mentioned above, who was struggling with her romantic orientation at the time. The term was something she created for herself and a whole community of people found use for it.
“I was sympathetic to the people who found ‘wtf’ unwieldy to say and who were uncomfortable with swearing, since I'd been raised fundamentalist and was still unpicking language conditioning like that,” Cor said. “Someone brought it up to me, and I did my typical brainstorming out loud in community, maybe whatromantic for the sentiment of ‘what is romantic attraction anyway.’ Maybe quoiromantic for the same sentiment but removed enough to appeal to the way Latin prefixes appealed to neologism coinage. French is also a romance language and evokes that same disconnect from preexisting connotations by being unfamiliar, but also invoking that semi-familiarity due to how entangled French (and Latin) are with English.”
Back then Cor said they approached this challenge from a linguistic standpoint, rather than a personal one. They understood wtfro rejected the ‘everyone feels romantic attraction’ model and hadn’t yet connected to the label.
“Quoi literally means ‘what?’ To me, it's about interrogation.” Cor said. “And to me, it's not a circular, constrained, back-and-forth existential arguing over two choices, or even three or five. It's about looking at the table the choices are on, the structural supports of the legs, and asking if this is the right table shape (should it be bigger, rounder, more of a column), and if we should be using a table at all.”
Questioning, A Queer Tradition
If quoi can mean ‘romance is not applicable’ then for that person there is potentially a whole slew of culture and practices that become pointless too.
“When it comes to my own personal experience with romance, I’m just so lost,” Vesta said. “It doesn’t feel like a real thing to me, ‘but this happens in books, I can’t apply this to my own life’. I can’t really imagine myself in romantic situations. I don’t know what counts as romantic. I really just want a clear manual, or guide, to dating and what counts as romantic and what isn’t.
“It’s really stressful when people say ‘oh, so have you started dating anyone yet?’ or when family members say: ‘when you meet that guy, when you get married.’ Personally the culture of romantic relationships and dating, it’s suffocating for me.”
There is often no clear way of knowing what a person wants without outright asking. This doesn’t change even knowing how they identify. Quoi can mean something beyond a personal experience.
“Oh, gosh. I could sound like a very annoying queer theorist here, if I haven't already,” Cor said. “I use quoi as a verb, these days. Quoi the system. With one partner, we would do a sort of raised questioning palm gesture we called quoi hand, as a shorthand for something like ‘maybe the premises of this thing are imperfect and need to be broken down for a better conversation?’”
Quoi can be a stance, a concept, a social commentary. Following romantic partnering practices in life is an understandable and expected move. Veering from that social norm can be where aro-spec* and quoi folks feel most true to themselves.
“I broke up with my then-girlfriend, but we kept living together and we're still really close, which has been great!” Momo said. “I talked to her about [my identity] after the fact and she told me that she had been worried I didn't actually care because I never really quite engaged with her in a way that she would describe as romantic. And in hindsight, I can definitely see all that.
“But neither of us could articulate what romance meant, despite an obvious lack of it, and I've since tried reaching out to other allo people to see if they could try to explain romance to me and more and more it seems like something that you know when it happens, ie. a feeling, but I can't explain it in any way other than as an intention, ie. something logical.”
Dismantling What We Know
The life we’re expected to lead - whatever it is your culture told you is the done thing - is being brought publicly into question more and more these days. And quoi gives people a space to figure out what matters.
“I think it has a lot to do with amatonormativity,” Vesta said. “In the way a lot of people believe that everyone is still looking for that one person for a romantic life partner. And then to have children with, like ‘Everyone wants this sort of relationship, this is endgame for them.’
“I think it would be great to have a readily-known term that says, ‘I'm opting out of this whole model.’” Cor said.
Doing so would allow for people to do whatever they want, regardless of their exact feelings. Dating, watching romantic movies, one of those, or neither. Opting out of queering the typical model of ‘romantic’ is something aros already do and that quoi is particularly suited for.
“There are issues in specifying which parts - as someone exobinary, who was drawn in by neutrois but then frustrated by it and left,” Cor said. “And who is always looking for better gender words for not masculine, not feminine, not androgynous, not neutral, not any in-between or combination or void but something else altogether. I think we are always in need of more words and space within our consciousnesses for the more options that do already exist but get squeezed out of possibility because of our ways of thinking.”
How We Communicate
If you’re reading this then you’re someone who uses labels as communication. We use identity to identify ourselves to others. We say: ‘This is who I am, abbreviated.’ There’s a question, always a question, of how useful certain identities are if they aren’t well known.
“It can take some time to explain. I often just tell a few close friends. Most other people, I feel they don’t need to know. I do try to talk about it if they’re interested, because I do want more visibility for aros,” Vesta said.
“Most people aren’t familiar with aro-spec so I try to avoid miscommunications because I myself misunderstood the identity aro. It really felt very comforting to identify as quoi and aro-spec. Just knowing ‘yes, I fit under this aro umbrella term.’ There was a really strong sense of belonging that I really appreciated.”
How we relate and how we connect to other people is a concern everyone has. Am I doing this right? Do I belong here? What direction are we taking? Quoi argues that the model we use - the one that centres romantic attraction as a universal experience - is what is flawed, not us.
“There are definitely certain pulls that some people feel towards other people. What do they mean?” Cor said. “Sometimes the pull is towards an end, like intimacy, or commitment, or sex, or discussing a common interest. Sometimes such an end is unclear. Sometimes we understand the pull's end in terms of marriage, or a relationship like such-and-such story we resonated with, or a pieced-together relationship anarchy-style Lego structure we've identified through experimentation and analysis.
“To me, I've felt pulls that I haven't known what to do with at all, and even after rejecting a fundamentalist Christian upbringing and embracing a genderqueer and queer relationship anarchy, I was wrestling with amatonormativity and not wanting to appropriate identities I wasn't certain of and not having skill with the tools I suddenly had. And words are tools. For me, grey was a resting place where I no longer had to hyperexamine myself and be confident of the meaning of a pull. It also acknowledged that sometimes, I felt like I hadn't been pulled to anyone in any way that anyone else talked about. Quoi was an outgrowth of that, and I think it offers something similar. To me it'll always be more political (not that grey isn't), but that's my own history and relationship with it.”
“Emotions are nebulous things,” Momo said. “One post I wrote up on Tumblr was about my conception of love. I have an attraction that when listened to and followed leads me into relationships with people I love. These are the words I was taught, reflected into the life I've lived. At its core, I suspect that's how most people work. But what those emotions and attachments look like for each individual is so disparate that the words themselves almost lose meaning except in relationship with each other.”
Quoi -romantic, -sexual, -genic, all are recognition that while there are systems in place to define us, we can take things further.
“That breaking down, of neurotypical, of cisgender, of binary gender, of sexuality, of romantic attraction/orientation, that's what I want quoi to be in the tradition of, that's what wtfromantic was in the tradition of, that is what I think so many of us are struggling to articulate,” Cor said. “When we stick to androgyny, to ‘confused about attraction but that's okay,’ that is progress but it is in no way an endpoint. Maybe the word quoi has gotten stuck at that level like the word androgyny has, in places -- even genderqueer did. I want us to have words like altersex that go beyond our binary spectra thinking, beyond bell curves with outliers, that enable us to sail starships not only out of Venus/Mars/Earth but out of the solar system. It's so much less about the individual word than about finding each other to build new modalities of thought with much more space for us all to exist.”
Further reading:
The informal Romantic Ambivalence Survey - WTF/Quoi subgroup
* EDIT as of 23/12/2020: previously this line used the term aro-spec alone, implying that all people who identify as quoi also identity as being an the aromantic spectrum. This is not true, quoi is not inherently an aromantic identity.