Asexuality in Young Adult Fiction

The Asexual Exile trope positions asexual characters outside of society by portraying them as loners, inhuman, or adjacent to death. This research identifies trends in these portrayals by considering a corpus of 42 traditionally published novels of Young Adult fiction featuring asexual protagonists. A distant reading of this corpus finds that the Asexual Exile trope is employed in approximately two-thirds of cases. The author analyses how this trope permutates across genres, and the frequen...