Coming of ace: Visualizing asexual adulthood in teen TV

This article uses affect theory to understand visual representations of asexual coming-of-age in teen television. Asexuality, the lack of sexual attraction to others, has gained traction as an identity in recent years, especially among Millennials and Generation Z. I analyze coming-of-age storylines in three recent streaming television series, Netflix’s BoJack Horseman, Heartstopper, and Sex Education, as presenting varying models of asexual adulthood for young adult audiences. Building on Sara Ahmed’s theory of “happy objects,” I argue that representation often reclaims pleasure by positioning asexual characters alongside objects associated with joy and normalizing the orientation. At the same time, representation can politicize shame by depicting asexual and non-asexuals as sharing common alienation from normatively positive objects like sex and monogamous couplehood. These two tactics, which sometimes operate simultaneously, often situate asexual coming-of-age as a reckoning with difference and ambivalent journey into pride.