This dissertation redresses aneroticism’s absence from literary, historical, and queer theoretical accounts of the emergence of sexuality at the end of the 19th century. During this period, sexuality rapidly became the prototypical human drive, inescapable and uncontrollable. Uncoincidentally, late-19th-century print culture was populated with celibate figures (e.g. the spinster, the odd woman, the bachelor, the neuter) who problematically failed to embody sexuality’s emerging compulsoriness. In chapters 1 and 2 especially, I argue that these archetypes mediated entwined anxieties of depopulation, reproductive labor shortages, underconsumption, and white racial vitiation, all of which fueled the period’s sexual biopolitics. The celibate, and the affective logic of libidinal indifference it embodied, was thus a complex cultural figure bearing a contradictory temporality: a uniquely late-19th-century problem, registering as a social and biological crisis, she was simultaneously rendered a residual social form, a holdover of outdated repressiveness from which fin-de-siècle culture was revolting. I consider the celibates of this dissertation queer figures in part because of their negativity: their aneroticism was explicitly framed as at odds with modernity, antithetical to racial futurity (chapter 1), but in America, also as the modern consumer’s negative image (chapter 2). More positively, they are occasions for writers to explore intimate modes and narrative trajectories freed from romantic/erotic drives. They figured centrally in late-19th-century formal innovations around the short story as their authors searched for a form less obligated than the novel to narrative drive. Methodologically, I approach the historical problem of aneroticism through its literary politics, by which I mean its intervention in debates around the disappearance of “reticence in literature” (Hubert Crackanthorpe, Arthur Waugh) at the end of realism’s aesthetic dominance. Literary histories often narrate this transitional period as a fairly homogeneous ramping up of libidinal currents, in content, genre, and form. The celibate texts I examine recalcitrantly dig their heels in against the juiced-up intensity of decadence, naturalism, impressionism, and other early modernist movements. The anerotic affective and intimate tendencies of these texts’ celibate subjects functioned as a prism through which to develop literary modes running contretemps to a transition into modernist aesthetics (emphasizing affect, the unconscious, and stylistic and formal fluidity). If love and sex monopolized the novel at the turn of the 20th century, it makes sense that celibate texts adopted alternative forms to render non-libidinal life and sociality, e.g. unfashionably long novels (chapter 1), short stories (chapter 2), and short story collections (chapter 3). I explicate these marginal forms’ affordances to rendering celibate life in an age of sexuality, providing an architecture to explore ambient, distanciated, and driveless relationality to which the novel’s emphasis on narrative drive and formal unity was less amenable. This dissertation’s title, “Insignificant Others,” designates the celibate lives and their aesthetic forms which were at once immiscible with, yet oddly central to, sexual modernity. They trouble sexuality’s new indispensability to worldmaking projects (intimately, in sexual identity’s structuring of attachment; racially, in the development of eugenics; and politically, in the sexual utopianism of feminist and early homophile cultural production). Taking the neglected queerness of these texts’ aneroticism seriously, I further consider how contemporary queer studies has rendered aneroticism desire’s repressed other.