This article examines the representation of demisexuality in Ali Hazelwood’s STEMinist series, particularly in The Love Hypothesis (2021) and Love, Theoretically (2023). The main focus of the analysis is on how these two novels' demisexual protagonists navigate self-discovery, romantic relationships to determine whether there is a subversion genre expectations in contemporary romance. While demisexuality remains an underrepresented identity in literature, Hazelwood’s works offer valuable insight into the challenges demisexual people face, including negotiating their emotional and sexual boundaries. The analysis explores how Hazelwood's protagonists—Olive Smith and Elsie Hannaway—embody different aspects of the asexual spectrum, particularly in their conditional approach to sexual attraction and emotional bonding. The paper first addresses Olive Smith in The Love Hypothesis, highlighting how her emotional connection with her romantic partner gradually evolves into sexual attraction, aligning with the demisexual experience. Olive’s journey illustrates her internal struggle between social expectations of romantic and sexual relationships and her personal pace of developing attraction. The analysis then shifts to Elsie Hannaway in Love, Theoretically, focusing on themes of unwilling consent, compulsory sexuality, and the tension between social norms and demisexuality. Elsie’s complex relationship with intimacy and her orientation reflects broader issues of erotonormativity and challenges the traditional narrative of physical desire in romance. The conclusion synthesizes these findings, questioning whether Hazelwood’s portrayal effectively normalizes demisexuality or whether it is constrained by the romance genre’s conventions, particularly regarding erotonormativity. Ultimately, this study contributes to discussions on asexual representation in popular fiction and the evolving depiction of lesser-known identities within mainstream genres.
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Over the past decade, demisexuality has gained increasing recognition in both media and academic discussions, and nowadays, demisexuality is considered part of the range of identities within the asexual spectrum, and it is defined as a person “who can only experience sexual attraction or desire after an emotional bond has been formed . . . [which] is different from the choice to abstain from sex until certain criteria are met” (AVEN 2024). In other words, demisexuality refers to a specific orientation within the asexual spectrum.
However, like many nuanced sexual identities, its understanding and acceptance tends to vary. Many demisexuals still have to explain what this orientation is and defend its validity, on top of dealing with confusions and misconceptions, such as the idea that demisexuality is ‘normal’ because everyone desires emotional connection before intimacy: for demisexuals, emotional connection is a necessary condition for sexual attraction, not a preference. (53)
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Fanfiction authors explicitly name, label and explore asexuality in ways that traditional publishers have not yet embraced. Therefore, it does not seem illogical that Ali Hazelwood’s debut novel, The Love Hypothesis (2021), stems from a Star Wars, Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015) fanfiction piece that the author originally posted on AO3. This work, which features a demisexual protagonist, paved the way for a series of works by Hazelwood that shares themes, plot structure, and demisexual representation. (55)
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Combining light-hearted romance with themes of gender dynamics in STEM, and featuring relatable characters, witty dialogue, and strong female protagonists, Hazelwood’s novels have become bestsellers. And yet, despite their popularity, the fact that most of their protagonists are demisexual is seldom mentioned.
Therefore, this article seeks to examine how the main characters in Hazelwood’s works portray different aspects of the asexual spectrum with a clear emphasis on demisexuality in order to explore how they subvert expectations for the contemporary romance genre and, in a broader sense, how demisexuality challenges the traditional notions of physical desire and romantic relationships. The first section focuses on The Love Hypothesis and the conventions of the contemporary romance genre, analyzing Olive’s emotional bonding to her romantic interest, her process of self-discovery, and her decision to either communicate her orientation or keep that to herself. The second section follows this up with an analysis of Love, Theoretically with a specific focus on the concepts of unwilling consent, compulsory sexuality, and amatonormativity. Finally, the conclusion brings all these points together to argue whether these works provide an effective general picture of demisexuality or whether demisexuality is an excuse to preserve genre conventions and erotonormativity. (56)
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For practical purposes, it is necessary to clarify that this article employs the term ‘queer’ to refer to gender identities and sexual orientations that are not ‘straight’ and ‘cis-gender’. As the article problematizes, many readers may not fully interpret Olive and/or Elsie as queer heroines, given that they are cis women and their romantic interests are cis men. However, Hazelwood explicitly describes them as demisexual and their exploration of their attraction is key to the novels’ plots. Therefore, I understand them as queer characters who are the protagonists of queer novels. (57)
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Despite Olive’s eventual sexual attraction to Adam, her discomfort with social expectations surrounding sex and romance is problematized throughout the novel, thus highlighting the pressure of conforming to heteronormative scripts of fulfillment through sexual activity that asexuals feel. (61)
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Even though these novels provide a positive–or, following Allen, ‘helpful’–representation of asexuality and demisexuality with characters whose path to intimacy and love is shaped not by conventional passion but by the slow building of trust and emotional connection, demisexuality operates as an excuse to ultimately fit within genre conventions and include the currently popular sex scenes of the contemporary romance market. (66)
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