Fucking with each other: Bachelor of Arts Honours thesis

fucking with each other Declaration of originality: I declare that this work is my own, except where acknowledged and has not been submitted for academic credit elsewhere, and acknowledge that the examiners may, for the purpose of assessing this item: a. Reproduce this work and provide a copy to another member of the University or an external examiner; and/or b. Communicate a copy of this work to a plagiarism checking service (which may then retain a copy of the work on its database for the purpose of future plagiarism checking). I certify that I have read and understood the University Rules in respect of the Student Academic Integrity Policy. Signed .............................................................. Date ...................... Declaration of originality: I hereby declare that I am not illegal, combustible or explosive. I am not currency, gemstones or anything else of value. If lost in transit or found to be undeliverable there will be no outcry of ‘Congratulations! You have won the Swiss National Lottery!’. Yet, if you forward me to at least ive people by the end of the day, you will get what you truly deserve. Prizes are drawn at random. Correspondence will be entered into. Signed .............................................................. Date ...................... 2013 online edition of thesis submitted for the degree of Bachelor of Arts Honours, Southern Cross University – Nollie Joy Nahrung, 2012. Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA). For more information, please see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/au/ e th on Cooke s y – ra n d a s Je yp on De s r e h d e ss ell and *G P W rs t o G ou d John Mc an m nd E ra ily and K e v i n a d Jules an dH ea e Burless nd em a uk ve – *Adel o rs e vis & ho n and Grayson* * e l an e d d A J to ve xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox o x o x o x o x o x o xitoh xthoaxnkosxaondx w oxoxoxoxoxo x o x o x o x o x o xWo x o x o x o x o x iothx o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o x RoW x o x o x o x o x o x o x olox o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o xaotexdo xtw o xoo: x o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o xico x o xcoo x o x L oxoxoxoxoxo s l u a x o x o x o x o x o x o x eoqux o x opxer o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o x oss wxitoh lxo o x o x o x o x o x o x o xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo x o x o x o xI am o not x ostrange, x o xI am o xjustonot x onormal x o –xSalvador o x o Dali xoxoxox n Preface 3 an excessive violation via page or screen?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIQdKjJWefo ‘ ... polite unacquainted persons should subtly determine whether the other wants a conversation before risking an attempt. One way this can be accomplished is through a violation of civil inattention’ (Cary 1978, p. 269). 1: an initial giving 2: withdrawal 3: excess ‘Gofman (1963) has proposed that civil inattention is the fundamental rule governing gaze among unacquainted persons, the rule being that persons owe one another an initial giving of visual attention followed by a withdrawal of attention to indicate that the other is of no special concern. By giving visual attention in excess of a irst look a person can indicate that an encounter is desired without actually speaking’ (Cary 1978, p. 269). the other wants a conversation / a conversation the other wants yours â ßours hence or 3 her openings  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WBZ4o-PbT0 1 Love Love LOVE (again! this delightful concussion) Food bores me. I can’t sleep. I live on cigarettes and coffee and kinetic wonderment ... I buy new clothes – I consume – I am consumed ... I am the empty breathy fullness of a Noosha Fox song. I feel aberrant, strange, odd. I feel deliriously and riotously ALIVE! Falling in love while already loving. Falling in love while being loved in return/while being loved in return. his state I’m in, this state of love (against the usual state of afairs). A form of respect: I don’t fantasise about him when I masturbate: I want him to be real. We have never even kissed. Does anyone else feel like this? I go online to ind out. I don’t know how to ask. “When you love two people.” Polyamory: many loves. Is two many? (hree has always been my lucky number.) Overwhelmed by RIGHTEOUSNESS (polyamory about love NOT sex, polyamory is NOT swinging) I have no hesitation telling Luke that I have fallen in love with John. {Love is all you need} I rather hoped he might be pleased, because I was. {he wasn't} 2 3 ‘I’m sick of talking about it. Let’s just go out and have fun together.’ We drive to Byron and sit on the headland, overlooking the beach. ‘I love you.’ ‘I love you.’ Nothing has really changed. Everything has really changed. What will become of us? In some of the poly books, they talk about your intellectual decision to reject monogamy. Alternatively, you might have given it a red-hot go, but your attempts were doomed from the start, because humans are naturally non-monogamous. I was raised on Enid Blyton. I admired her group of jolly friends who wore things called anoraks and had a dog that didn’t work. hese children (fuelled by lashings of ginger beer) adventured around thwarting smugglers (who were swarthy and foreign and thus inherently suspect). he Famous Five didn’t pick tomatoes or dip cattle [the soft little pricks]. It all seemed so seductive and yet so utterly strange. ‘It’s not an afair, I don’t just want to fuck him.’ ‘But that’s it. It’s called a love afair for a reason.’ I WON’T LISTEN. This is REALLY SPECIAL. I WON’T give this up. I WON’T DECIDE between you. I DON’T WANT TO. YOU CAN’T MAKE ME. Having questioned all kinds of things that were purportedly natural (including the inevitability of motherhood and the mysterious workings of God) I never thought about monogamy. I have been blindsided/I have been blind. I never really thought about being heterosexual either. You don’t have to when you just are. Much like whiteness. 4 5 Polyamory é Reader, do you know this word? ê Polyamory is a hybrid word comprised of Greek and Latin roots that literally translates to ‘many loves’. é This is the standard sentence I include in every presentation or paper about my project, followed by a deinition by Haritaworn, Lin and Klesse (2006, p. 515) that I say I ind both resonant and inclusive: ê ‘[a]t its most basic, the concept of polyamory stands for the assumption that it is possible, valid and worth-while to maintain intimate, sexual, and/or loving relationships with more than one person’. Polyamorous relationships require the knowledge and consent of all parties involved and are grounded in practices of open communication and ethical behaviour (Anapol 2010). 6 7 NN: So what’s your research question? NN Well, I started with a topic rather than a question. I wanted to explore the liminal position of polyamory in heteronormative discourses and how heterosexual polyamory might be seen as queer heterosexuality. NN: Heteronormative? NN: Heteronormativity refers to how institutions and discourses legitimate heterosexuality as “normal”, rendering other sexualities deviant. But anyway, a research question did emerge during my project, and that’s referenced in the thesis title. But I’d like you to discover the question for yourself when you read my thesis. deviant (Hockey et al. 2007). NN: I’m just asking questions, I’m not going to read your thesis. Can’t you just summarise the question now? NN: You’re not going to read my thesis? Well ... I just kind of assumed ... but that's ok, really. Now, the question. Davis and Shadle explain that although students are usually taught to follow a path of linear argument within a sequential structure, this isn’t the only way to produce research writing. hey argue that alternative ways, like building a mystery, produce research writing that is more complex and playful. So students position themselves in the midst of a search, debate or dialogue; casting themselves within a culture of seeking. NN: Isn’t this risky? How will your examiners know what you’re attempting? NN: Well, I’m outlining some things in the introduction. I was writing that when you arrived, actually. I’m explaining that I’m taking a polyamorous approach to my research practice, as well as having a polyamorous relationship with theory and my topic is polyamory. 8 Davis and Shadle (2000) explain 9 Speciically, my lived experience of polyamory as a heterosexual woman. I’ve just written a couple of introductory paragraphs: can I read them to you? NN: Yeah, ok. NN: “Gayle Rubin (1984) writes that a narrow range of heteronormative sexual practices, sanctioned and privileged by society, form the ‘charmed circle’ within a hierarchical structure of sex. As non-monogamy is outside this circle, polyamorous practitioners are positioned on the ‘outer limits’ of the sex hierarchy. hrough embodying attributes that are valorised (heterosexual, married) and marginalised (polyamorous, child-free) within heteronormative discourses, I simultaneously inhabit both the charmed circle and its outer limits, holding ‘multiple subject positions’ on the sex hierarchy (Ho 2006, p. 549). My research project explores identity, subjectivity and power through my lived experience of navigating these multiple subject positions. In doing so, I consider how heterosexual polyamory may be framed as queer, or non-normative, heterosexuality. As this suggests, my project is informed by queer theory, and additionally draws from feminist and anarchist perspectives. My research employs writing as a method of inquiry, facilitated through poststructuralist autoethnography, and deconstructive textual practices. My thesis is structured through three autoethnographic chapters, with a critical essay accompanying each to ‘historicize’ my lived experience within its social and cultural contexts (Scott 1991). My research is presented as an experimental open text that advances opportunity for an evolving conversation, or dialogue, with the reader.” NN: How does this dialogue occur? NN: he thesis is available in print and digital format with blank spaces for reader response. he print version has a pencil and scalpel attached to the cover. But readers don’t have to use these spaces or 10 11 tools. he text ofers an opportunity for dialogue, not a demand. If readers do want to respond, there are no rules about how this should happen. here are lots of diferent ways of knowing. Readers who would like to share a response to the thesis can get in touch via a WordPress site I’ve set up: http://fweo.wordpress.com/ and the digital version (pdf ) of the thesis is available there too. NN: A printed book or a pdf? You’re hardly pushing the boat out. Why not an online text with commenting and interactive features? NN: Well, you’re welcome to set this up if you like. I did what I could do in the time that I had. My approach might seem old school, but maybe there’s also merit in it. Must everything be immediate and online to be valuable or enjoyable? Do you like reading on a screen? I don't. NN: What about twitter? NN: he wise madness of a million bluebirds vomiting and masturbating in hypervision? NN: Um, ok. Back to the thesis. What content is covered in each of the chapters? NN: Deleuze and Guattari write that texts can be like rhizomes. Rather than having a start, a middle and an end, texts can show connections and lines of light, and sometimes they just stop. Again, it’s breaking from that linear and well-deined path that Davis and Shadle talk about, while also enabling the text to split and travel in multiple directions. In S/Z, Barthes, my favourite poststructuralist author, writes that some texts, readerly texts, bring pleasure, because you aren’t challenged as a reader in terms of your subject position. But then there are writerly texts, and they ofer the potential for bliss. Barthes calls that jouissance, and that can also mean orgasm in French, the cheeky lad! He goes into this in he Pleasure of the Text. Barthes suggests that jouissance might be located in gaps 12 Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write Davis and Shadle (2000) talk Barthes (1974), my favourite Pleasure of the Text (Barthes 1975). 13 that occur within readerly texts, or from trying to make writerly texts readable enough to enable their orgasmic potential to be provoked. So jouissance is to be found in the gap between culture and destruction. So, thinking about all this, I want to let the reader trace their own path through the thesis, which I have concieved as a writerly and rhizomatic text, rather than setting it all out neatly in advance. destruction (Martin & Ringham 2006). NN: I need to use the bathroom. NN: I’m thinking more about dialogue with the reader. Because I’m heterosexual, I have to be conscious of the limits of my experience. Keith Berry considered how audience members could talk back to autoethnographies, and why this might be valuable for both parties. So I ask for dialogue because there’s a desire to acknowledge that my subject position is informed by heterosexual privilege, shaping how I see things, and what I can know. hat’s also a factor because I’m white. Riggs says that queer white subjects might be recognised diferently because of their sexuality, but they still have this relationship to white hegemony, even if that’s just nominal. Berry (2008) considered Riggs (2006) says So this idea of dialogue is based in the desire to be ethical and accountable, and open to learning as well, through other people’s perspectives. NN: You’re out of toilet paper. Anyway, ethics. Did you have any trouble getting ethics approval? NN: Because I’m the research subject I didn’t have to apply to the University’s ethics committee. I worked with a concept of feminist ethics that I read about in Fiore, that centres on an ethic of responsibility. Here, relationships are seen as situated and particular, so there aren’t blanket rules set in advance. Instead, it’s an ongoing process of checking, discussion and negotiation with each person implicated in the research, according to your relationship. And that recognises power 14 Fiore (2003), that 15 elationships while also saying that the people involved have diferent connections to each other. r Luke and John didn’t want their identities concealed, so we discussed what to do if I wrote something they didn’t want published. We agreed that the text would show erasures if necessary by crossing out text to conceal it while drawing attention to the fact that something had been removed; making the absent present. hat felt right for them and for me. I got that idea from a journal article by Rappert. Rappert (2010). Concern with ethics lows throughout the thesis, it’s considered in relation to the reader, intimate others I write about, and my relationship to other people in society. his is discussed in the literature review, and is sometimes foregrounded in autoethnographic chapters. hat concept of relational ethics also links to anarchism. Heckert says we can think of anarchism as ‘an ongoing practice of an ethics of relationships’. So ethics are part of life, and they’re central to the theory, construction, production and circulation of my research. Heckert (2006) says NN: Anarchism is an interesting one. How does this inform in your work? NN: I conceptualise anarchism as a way of thinking about relationships. Landauer said that we destroy the state through having diferent kinds of relationships with each other, because the state is really a system of relationships. he goal of anarchism is to achieve anarchy: an orderly society that evidences freedom and equality without governmental rule or hierarchies. You can source lots of anarchist texts online, for free. And that’s why I licensed my thesis through Creative Commons. I think its important for research to escape irewalls and locked gates. Landauer wrote ‘I want art to be the process of imaginative and communal social transformation, rather than the expression of individual yearning’ and that quote really inspires me. 16 Landauer (2010, p. 214) said hierarchies (Kinna 2005). Landauer (2010, p. 65) wrote 17 Jeppesen says that anarchist literature can be a form of cultural preiguration, where anarchist values are used to produce a text as well as being present in the text's content. So producing anarchist literature is like a becoming-anarchist model, and that’s something I seek in my work. Jeppesen (2011) says NN: How important were your supervisors in this project? NN: We re-wrote the paperwork so Adele and Grayson were equal co-supervisors. hey didn’t hover over me, but they were always there to help. Although there seems to be this focus on the thesis, you’re really learning so much more during Honours. Your supervisors model things for you, and explain the system and inspire you through their own careers. And they understand when you’re clumsy and awkward and starting out. here are glimpses of this in the thesis too, because like Berry and Warren say, undertaking cultural studies scholarship is, in itself, a cultural experience through which subjects are constituted. Berry and Warren (2009) say NN: So, why did you choose this approach? How does it it with other research about polyamory? NN: Current research about polyamory predominantly uses interview and survey as research methods, so my project takes an alternative approach. hat’s informed by my research being positioned within the postmodern paradigm, where grand truth claims are viewed with suspicion, and there’s a place for a broader range of ways of knowing. A good discussion about this is in Cultural Studies and the New Humanities. I wanted to reject any perception of a split between mind and body, or inside and out in my project, so that’s why I didn't make a creative work with a separate exegesis. And the other reason I chose this project was because it was a challenge. You’re told to keep your project manageable: you do this and then work up to something bigger. 18 research methods (Barker & Langdridge 2010a), New Humanitites (Fuery & Mansield 1997). 19 It’s like Honours is a starter sex toy. But there’s also a joy in saying, hey, let’s go for it to see how far we can get. It’s like Grandma used to say, ‘if you can’t eat it or shove it up your arse its hardly a birthday present’. NN: Did our grandmother really say that? NN: No. I was checking to see if you were still listening. NN: Do you remember that name we invented for the lead dancer in a chorus line? NN: Belle Weather? NN: Yeah, I like that one the most, because it’s gender fucking as well, you know the castrated ram and everything. NN: Yeah, but I don’t think a chorus line has a lead dancer, that’s the point. But I guess its funny anyway. Look, I think we should end this here. I have to go to the loo anyway. NN: Yes, if you drag this kind of thing out it can start to shit people. Besides, I have to write the introduction anyway. NN: Well, thanks for your time. It can be a bit lonely sitting here writing. You need a conversation sometimes, you know? hanks for meeting me here. NN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhjSzjoU7OQ NN: Very funny. Yeah, I can be a twit. People communicate in diferent ways and I should remember to respect that. NN: I thought you’d appreciate a gentle reminder. And by the way, isn’t social media central to the Occupy movement? NN: OK, OK, I’m a double twit. I know, I know. NN: Anyway, good luck with that introduction. NN: hanks, you too. 20 21 22 23  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4tkiGvV_ek PLATEAU 3 c/s/lit review A PIECE OF WORK 25 26 I should reconsider my approach to this literature review. And so I do and so I did. Why? Perhaps moving back into a more familiar academic writing style is reassuring, comforting even. Maybe a range of approaches works best. Maybe there’s just too much to set it up with the review in the centre and a relection at the side. I can’t see how to cut it down, to achieve the right amount of words. Right now, I have to be practical and get it done: there is always time for revision, later. But of course there isn’t. These words are now ixed in print. You will not know what this used to look like, as you are only meant to be concerned with this, the inal product, not the drafts that were a series of fatal collisions between a bus full of ideas and a truckload of writing style (authorial voice stopped to help the victims but ended up starting a ire). Now there are fewer casualties, perhaps. But maybe you would have enjoyed watching the collision. What kind of person are you? If you will permit me an indulgence (as the Bishop said to the actress) I will not set out an introduction that summarises where we will travel in the c/s/ lit review and why. Instead, I hope that you might enjoy a plunge into the unknown (as the actress said to the Bishop). 27 28 ning Glory and Oberon Zell are credited with developing the term ‘polyamory’ in the late 1980s as an alternative descriptor for ‘responsible non-monogamy’ (Anapol 2010, p. 1). Encapsulating the values that inform the theory and practice of polyamory are the ‘twelve pillars’ by Haslam (2008), which are authenticity, choice, transparency, trust, gender equality, honesty, open communication, non-possessiveness, consent, acceptance of self-determination, sex-positivity and compersion (the feeling of pleasure a person experiences in another’s pleasure, even if they are not the source of that pleasure). As highlighted in an historical overview by Anapol (2010, pp. 45–63), polyamory has links to utopian communities, spiritual and religious groups (e.g. neo-paganism and Wicca), feminism, gay and lesbian liberation movements, radical politics (including anarchism) and, more recently, queer activism. As this indicates, polyamory has developed from ‘the conluence of a number of sexually emancipatory discourses’ (Haritaworn et al. 2006, p. 518), further including bisexuality, BDSM and ecological movements (Klesse 2011). M
 ‘Alternative lifestyles’ (including swinging, group marriages and communal living) attracted heightened academic research during the 1960s and 1970s, relecting a broad re-examination of sexual relationships and family structures within a time of signiicant social change (Rubin 2001). Popular iction, such Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein 1961) and he Harrad Experiment (Rimmer 1966), also helped introduce the concept of non-monogamy to a wider public audience during this period (Rubin 2001, Anapol 2010). Although academic research into alternative lifestyles peaked in the mid-1970s and subsequently declined (Rubin 2001), non-monogamies, including polyamory, have experienced a resurgence in academic research interest in the new millennium (Barker and Langdridge 2010a). Providing an overview of contemporary research, Barker and Langdridge (2010a) identify that three strands of non-monogamous practice (polyamory, gay open relationships, and the lifestyle (“swinging”)) have attracted the most interest, usually as topics of discrete or comparative study. he authors identify that texts about polyamory predominantly fall into two groups: popular texts (such as “self-help” or autobiographical works) that are largely celebratory, and critical works that engage with political and intersectional issues. Prior to the mid-1990s, academic writing about polyamory predominantly took the form of irstperson accounts, small research studies, concise theoretical contributions and writings by activists (Haritaworn et al. 2006). his output was additional to instructional or “how to” texts produced about polyamory, which have been used as objects of textual analysis by researchers (such as Noël 2006), in addition to providing advice for general readers. Such overlap between academic, popular and activist works is frequent, evidencing a ‘multi-faceted discourse on polyamory’ that covers a ‘broad and diversiied cultural terrain’ (Klesse 2011, pp. 6–7). In Australia, websites such as Polyamory Australia and PolyOz ofer online discussion forums and a range of resources about polyamory, while social and discussion groups dedicated to polyamory meet throughout Australia, ofering opportunities for community interaction. As evidenced by newspaper articles and opinion pieces (Higgins 2011, 2012, Maley 2012, Antalfy 2012, Fox 2011), radio and television programs (Hack 2011, Q&A 2011) and the inclusion of a ‘poly’ loat in the 2011 and 2012 Sydney Mardis Gras, 29 30 y is becoming increasingly visible in contemporary Australian society. Such visibility mirrors a broader trend of increasing representations of non-monogamous relationships within mainstream ilm and television texts in Western societies (Freydkin 2010). In an analysis of media texts from Australia, the UK, the USA and Canada, Australian researcher Nikó Antalfy (2011) has identiied both positive and negative representations of polyamory. In addition, some texts from Antalfy's analysis represented polyamory as titillating. In these instances, polyamory is realigned within the dominant monogamy/inidelity binary that underpins mononormative societies, rather than being conceptualised as an alternative to monogamy. py Mononormativity is addressed in Sex at Dawn (Ryan & Jethá 2010), which discusses the non-monogamous history of hunter-gatherer societies. he authors argue that the shift to agriculture created an imperative for monogamy in order to manage private property and inheritance requirements, challenging scientiic narratives that represent monogamous pair bonds between humans as natural. Engaging with this divide between social constructionism and biological determinism, Willey (2010) examines how both compulsory monogamy and feminist polyamory can be read through the naturalising discourse of science. Willey argues that feminist challenges to the compulsory status of monogamy have frequently employed forms of naturalising logic that mirror those used to support scientiic claims for monogamy's natural status. Demonstrating how other factors, such as race, inform assumptions about “natural diferences”, Willey contends that feminist theorists should work to challenge beliefs that either monogamy or non-monogamy are “natural”. As this brief discussion demonstrates, it is not possible to use a singular or closed discourse to theorise polyamory (Klesse 2011). However, particular themes have emerged in how polyamory is discursively addressed. In academic research, this has largely focused on interpersonal boundaries and relational models to explore how people in non-monogamous relationships manage their lives (Barker & Langdridge 2010a). As interview and survey have been the predominant research methods used in these works, Barker and Langdridge identify a need for more experiential and creative works to complement the existing literature. Here, poststructuralism, queer theory, anarchism, Buddhism and existentialism have been suggested as possible informing perspectives for such research (Barker & Langdridge 2010a). Barker and Langdridge (2010b) are also the editors of Understanding Non-Monogamies, which provides an inclusive collection of contemporary writing about a range of non-monogamies, providing an excellent sample of central themes and issues. his book’s twenty-six chapters evidence topics and approaches that relect the diversity of the volume’s thirty contributing authors, who include researchers, activists and therapists. In the critical essays which accompany the autoethnographic chapters of my thesis, I have drawn from a range of chapters from this collection, including those that present perspectives on the lifestyle (McDonald 2010, Phillips 2010), anarchism (Heckert 2010) and the political potential of polyamory (Wilkinson 2010). An earlier collection of polyamory research (noted in the literature survey by Barker and Langdridge (2010a)) was a special edition of the Journal of Bisexuality, co-published simultaneously as Plural Loves: Designs for Bi and 31 32 Poly Living (Anderlini-D’Onofrio 2004). his collection spans insights into the bridges and divides between polyamorous and bisexual subjects and communities, evidencing a range of writing that includes short story narratives, testimonial forms and political analyses. his volume ofers an eclectic and engaging range of works, including writings about the dynamics of “cheating”, masturbation, and perspectives on spirituality. Another important collection of polyamory research is the 2006 special edition of the journal Sexualities, also noted in Barker and Langdridge's (2010a) literature survey. Taking an explicitly intersectional approach, this collection critically examines issues of race, ethnicity and class in addition to gender and sexuality as they relate to polyamory. Of special relevance to my project is an article from this edition by Ho (2006) which will be discussed later in this review. In addition, I have signiicantly drawn from a number of other articles from this edition in the critical essays accompanying autoethnographic chapters within this thesis. Within an Australian research context, Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli has contributed to both Plural Loves (Anderlini-D'Onofrio 2004) and Understanding Non-Monogamies (PallottaChiarolli 2010a). In Plural Loves, Pallotta-Chiarolli (2004) reviews three “classic” popular texts about polyamory (Love Without Limits, he Ethical Slut, and Loving More), pointing to the important role that the sexually diverse female authors of these texts have played in making information about polyamory available to others. As Noël (2006) identiies, Pallotta-Chiarolli’s work also demonstrates an engagement with issues of intersectionality, to examine the multiple, marginal positions that polyamorous subjects occupy. Recently, Pallotta-Chiarolli (2011) has provided a perspective on ‘slippery slope’ arguments about multiple-partner marriage in relation to same-sex couple marriage in Australia, investigating constructions of marriage and family beyond insider/outsider boundaries. Pallotta-Chiarolli (2010b) is also the author of Border Sexualities, Border Families in Schools, which investigates educational issues concerning students and families who do not it neatly into categories of “gay” or “straight”, including polyfamilies. Since Pallotta-Chiarolli’s (2004) review of three classic popular texts about polyamory, additional “how to” books about polyamory have been published, including What does polyamory look like? (Chapman, 2010) and Polyamory in the 21st Century (Anapol 2010), while he Ethical Slut (Easton & Hardy 2009) has been republished as an updated and expanded second edition. Other recent works about non-monogamies include Open (Block 2008), which uses a irst-person account to discuss the diiculties and pleasures of opening an existing marriage to other partners, and Love Times hree (Darger et al. 2011) which provides an biographical account of a polygamous marriage as enacted by an Independent Fundamentalist Mormon family. Whilst these examples are published in the US, the release of new works about non-monogamies, including polyamory, evidence the continued presence of popular culture texts that help to maintain visibility of non-monogamies across mononormative Western cultures. As previously noted, such texts circulate in a media climate that evidences a growing fascination with non-monogamies (Barker & Langdridge 2010a). In this climate, polyamory is ‘a growing sexual story’, but the dominant narrative being told in mainstream media culture focuses on the centrality of love in polyamorous relationships, which can 33 34 e to de-emphasise the role of sexuality (Ritchie 2010, p. 50). Further, as some popular texts about polyamory make distinctions between polyamory and the lifestyle (Anapol 1992, Chapman 2010), polyamory can be represented as more “ethical” than other forms of non-monogamy which are conventionally seen as sex- or pleasure-based. Such representations have been criticised by Klesse (2007), who argues that they can construct polyamory as superior to other non-monogamies, and align polyamory within conservative heteronormative discourses that privilege romantic love. In contrast to Anapol (1992) and Chapman (2010), Easton and Hardy (2009) discuss a broader range of relational styles and sexual modes, arguably advancing a more sex positive mode of polyamory. As this indicates, polyamory is not a uniied discourse and it can be constructed in diferent, sometimes contradictory, ways, depending on context (Klesse 2011). s v Considering this, Wilkinson (2010, p. 253) argues that any single notion of a true polyamory must be continually challenged to reject the validation of any particular story about polyamory over another. In a social climate where polyamory is growing in visibility, proponents such as Wagner (2008) argue that ‘putting a less radical face on polyamory’ will help it become more acceptable and accessible in mainstream society. Based in the desire (or perceived necessity) of working within existing frameworks of privilege and hierarchies, a less radical looking polyamory may also help achieve social and legal recognition for polyamorous practitioners of diverse sexualities. Yet, a less radical face may also serve to close down diverse accounts of polyamorous experience through seeking to represent polyamory in uniied ways that seem most palatable within existing sociocultural systems. My research seeks to counter this potential, providing a irst-person account of lived experience in order to contribute to the range of stories about polyamory that may circulate. hrough employing autoethnography, my project also evidences an alternative methodological approach that complements and extends the existing body of knowledge, addressing a research gap identiied by Barker and Langdridge (2010a). Further, through the use of poststructuralist, queer and anarchist perspectives (as will be discussed later), my research explicitly engages with the politics of polyamory and pleasure in heterosexual experience, seeking to locate solidarity and community outside sexual identity boundaries. To facilitate this goal, my research project employs an autoethnographic approach. Ellis and Bochner (2000) summarise that autoethnography is a form of autobiographical writing that connects the personal to the cultural, evidencing multiple layers of consciousness. he openness of this deinition has led to a suggestion that autoethnography can be understood more as a broad approach to scholarship rather than a pre-determined set of methods (Gingrich-Philbrook 2005). Indeed, Charmaz (2006) has drawn attention to the relationship between naming and power, asking whether attempts to deine or bracket discrete modes of practice (e.g. as analytic or evocative autoethnography) may actually foreclose growth in such endeavours. Due to the diversity of autoethnographic research projects, they are often discussed within the literature under broadly inclusive terms, including ‘Creative Analytic Practice (CAP) Ethnography’ (Richardson 2000, p. 929) and ‘Performative Writing’ (Pelias 2005). Within this ield, a diverse range of autoethnographic scholarship and practices are evident (Denzin 2006). 35 36 Founded in what has been described as the seventh moment (the future (2000–)) of research inquiry, a diverse range of projects using the researcher as subject have lourished within the contemporary landscape of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln 2000). his can be seen as a response to the crisis of representation (see Cliford 1986) informed by postmodern suspicion of claims to objectivity and truth and a commitment to facilitating the participation of previously under-represented groups and individuals in ields of research inquiry (Smith 1993). he place of autoethnographic research within the academy has attracted debate, particularly in relation to academic rigour and how such works may be evaluated (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). In particular, criticism has been levelled at ‘evocative’ forms of autoethnography that primarily seek to achieve an emotional connection between author and reader (see Clough 1997). Here, critics have argued that such works are more therapeutic than scholarly, raising concern about their merit as academic research (see Parks 1998). In relation to this, Antonio (1991) writes that norms of truth seeking in academic endeavour demand openness to opposing points of view and engaging with uncertainty and debate, illustrating that both realist and postmodernist research approaches require an engagement with issues of alterity and plurality, although they respond to this requirement in diferent ways. In understanding why the validity of autoethnographic research has been a source of contention in the academy, Pelias (2005) suggests that legitimising practices can make it diicult for alternative forms of research to become accepted, as the validity of modes of inquiry are established partly through virtue of historical use. herefore, as autoethnography is still a relatively new approach to research enquiry, and because it can be enacted through a wide range of modes, it may take time for ways of understanding and assessing its contribution to knowledge to develop within academic spheres. In relation to my thesis, two central criticisms of autoethnography advanced by Shields (2000) are of particular importance. Firstly, Shields argues that by privileging the individual voice of the academic researcher, autoethnography largely fails to meaningfully include the voices of the marginalised or oppressed peoples it seeks to represent. Secondly, Shields argues that autoethnography does not ofer a constructive path to countering oppressive power. In response to the irst criticism, a text that has centrally informed my research is Scott’s (1991) ‘he Evidence of Experience’. Scott warns that experience in scholarship should not be used in a manner that promotes it as unassailable truth closed to questioning and analysis. Rather, she argues that experience must be ‘historicised’ or located within its speciic social and cultural contexts, in order to open it out for exploration and discovery. Scott argues that such historicising foregrounds the subjectivity of the author and encourages relexivity; showing how having an experience and recounting that experience are interwoven, discursive and embodied through language. Considering this, Berry and Warren (2009) investigate how cultural studies scholarship might heed Scott's warning and argue for increased relexivity in autoethnographic projects to show how experiences of the author/researcher are mediated and constructed by cultural environments. Similarly, Jackson and Mazzei (2008) also reject an unquestioning belief in the transparency of the self, which they ind evident in examples of autoethnographic writing by Carolyn Ellis, a well-known proponent of autoethnography. Jackson and 37 38 Mazzei argue that when the experience of the author is given to occupy the same value position traditionally granted to the “objective” researcher, one centre of privilege is simply replaced with another. Unlike Berry and Warren (2009), Jackson and Mazzei believe that increased relexivity is not suicient, and argue for the use of poststructuralist theories in autoethnographic scholarship to counter notions of self-evident transparent meanings shared between author and reader. his enables experience to be continually questioned and opened to multiple, conlicting interpretations: constructing a discursive, performative autoethnographic “I”. his facilitates autoethnographic practices that explore how the author’s own history and ways of knowing shape and constrain what they can know, what they choose to tell and how they represent this in their telling. hus, through a poststructuralist approach, relationships of power may be explored to develop complex, performative stories about experience ( Jackson & Mazzei 2008). Further supporting a poststructuralist approach, Richardson (2000) argues that the postmodern environment provides fertile ground for works that acknowledge the central role of language in constructing subjectivity, arguing that such writing can construct engaging texts that potentially make research accessible to a wider audience. Richardson advances the idea of writing as a method of inquiry, in which writing is undertaken throughout all stages of a research project as a method for the researcher to discover what is known and unknown. hrough using this method, my project undertakes a ‘rhetorical enterprise’ (Woods 2000) that seeks to reveal the process of writing as a way of becoming in modes that traverse ields of knowledge and practice, such as cultural studies, writing and graphic design. In considering how poststructuralist insights can inform autoethnography, Gannon (2006) argues for deconstructive textual practices that continually call attention to how the self is both represented and constructed. Gannon agrees with Jackson and Mazzei’s (2008) contention that many autoethnographic accounts neglect to address critical theories of subject formation and argues that autoethnographic texts must show the instability of speaking positions, destabilising the author's authority within the text. To illustrate how this may be achieved, Gannon explores the autobiographical work of key French poststructuralists (Foucault, Barthes, Derrida and Cixous) to locate techniques for consideration by contemporary autoethnographers. hese include estrangement and displacement strategies for authorial voice, the use of non-realist photography and the visual presentation of written text. his examination supports Richardson’s (2000) argument that the content of a work and its form are intimately linked, and that autoethnographic practitioners should consider how elements such as page layout and typeface inluence how texts are understood and read. In discussing such techniques, Gannon shows how autoethnographers may simultaneously write and destabilise the self to develop multidimensional accounts that produce both knowledge and a way of thinking about the complexities of writing the self (both past and present) within social and cultural contexts. Further explaining this approach, Lupton (2004) provides a theoretical overview of deconstruction, as introduced in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and traces the historical impact of deconstruction in various realms of design. Lupton identiies the tension between 39 40 aphic design as a system of formal structures which make content intelligible to readers, and graphic design as a means of representation that calls attention to, and challenges, the conventions of written text and meaning making. Lupton discusses how graphic design elements, including typography and graphemes (e.g. spacing, punctuation) can work interpretively to call attention to, and break, binaries between speech/writing, writer/reader and inside/outside. By using a range of techniques that rupture the conventional linear low of writing, graphic design enables the visual to “intrude” upon the written, providing a strategy to look at the conditions of reading, writing and meaning making. hus, design critically engages with, and can even remake, ‘the grammar of communication’ (Lupton 2004, n.p). g In addressing the role of graphic design in postmodern culture, Poynor (2003) argues that although graphic designers have constructed some of the most challenging yet accessible work in the visual arts arena, most commentators have viewed postmodern graphic design as predominantly stylistic, an understanding that neglects the fundamental intersection of theory and practice in such projects. Like Lupton, Poynor highlights the tension between graphic design as a ield in which foundational rules dictate good practice, and postmodern graphic design projects which seek to reject and break the conventions of this practice. Here, ideologies of graphic design as a commercial craft and graphic design as a ield of inquiry and visual artistry both conlict with and inform each other. Within my thesis, this interaction between inquiry and design occurs within a project that evidences what McCarthy and de Almeida (2002) call ‘self-authored graphic design’, in which the artistic vision and communication goals of the graphic designer, rather than an external client, inform the work. McCarthy and de Almeida argue that design can, in itself, be an authorship form, while also pointing to projects in which the designer is also the author of the work’s written content. As both AUTHOR and DESIGNER of this work, I have the capacity to PLAY WITH MYSELF on every page, 41 42 design ? as a method of inquiry thinking through and with and against the form a fixation, of words: a style an ARGUMENT , a vision of fragments and w(holes) the client satisfied, obeyed, WHO MUST BE delicious freedom from danced with, listened to . delicious freedom from BILLING and COOING { interpreted } to say this is worth nothing, but there might be a charge | a spark? | a connection? | 43 44 In thinking about the role of design in this project, I considered the conventions of book layout and how elements such as headers/footers, page numbers, chapter titles and body text are normally styled in identical ways to make these elements recede into the background, focusing the reader on the written content presented. In rejecting these conventions, I seek to amplify the impact of the typographic modes employed within the thesis content, exploring how a lack of overall unity in the design of the text might support the partial and fragmented nature of poststructuralist autoethnography. With regard to the print edition of this thesis, this is also intended to help rupture the sense of linear order promoted by the structural form of the book, which necessarily binds written content in a particular page sequence. Here, I have been intrigued by how subjectivity as a process bound to structural forces outside the “self ” may be referenced in the material production of a text about lived experience. Considering this relationship between self, others and dynamics of power, the request for dialogue advanced by this text expresses a desire to move away from being ‘… a irst-person scholarly narrator who is self-referential but unavailable to criticism or revision’ (Adams & Holman Jones 2011, p. 110). In considering the potential relationship between text, author and reader, recognition is central to my approach. As an ethical concept, recognition requires a response to others based upon the terms of their own self-conception, ‘rather than treating them according to one’s own favoured way of seeing them’ (Spelman 1977, cited in Fiore 2003, p. ix). In acknowledging the right of others to be dealt with according to their own conception of themselves, the text seeks to avoid misrecognition by acknowledging that just as the author’s subjectivity is in a state of lux and luidity, so is the reader’s (Heyes 2003). hus, if the reader decides to engage with the text, they may have minimal or extensive interaction with it, and any interactions may remain private or be shared. Indeed, reader engagement may culminate in the erasure or removal of all that has been explored; an experiential working through that leaves only traces or memories of the path taken. his potential ofers the text as a site of engagement in which ‘the speaking subject, the reader and the discursive traces themselves remain linked but porous, interdependent and open to change’ (Hufer 2001, p. 21). his openness demonstrates a desire to be accountable to the reader while recognising them on the terms they set, inviting each reader to work with the text presented as they choose, welcoming responses of diverse haptic or intellectual modes that respect diferent readers’ ways of knowing. As this illustrates, I believe that poststructuralism and deconstruction can ofer approaches to address Shield’s (2000) concern about the privileged voice of the researcher in autoethnographic texts, providing strategies through which the dominance and authority of the authorial voice can be disavowed in ways that seek to be both ethical and inclusive. In doing so, a deconstructive approach can also facilitate the construction of a text in which ‘each layer, through the use of language and image, is an intentional performer in a deliberately playful game wherein the viewer can discover and experience the hidden complexities of language’ (Byrne & Witt cited in Poynor 2003, pp. 49–50). 45 46 In addressing Shield’s (2000) second concern, that autoethnography does not ofer a means to constructively overcome oppressive power relations, the political potential of autoethnography is relevant. Denzin (2003) writes that acts of performative scholarship, such as autoethnography, can act as political tools. hese tools help to counter neoliberalist ideals and restore diversity and debate in civil life, both within and outside the academy. In this work, Denzin analyses the work of Friere, positioning performative autoethnography as a pedagogy of hope and freedom and arguing for the necessity of seeing the cultural and the political in pedagogical and political terms. He argues that such a model works outward, using the academy as a site of resistance that encourages critical thought and public debate, positioning autoethnographic researchers as ‘citizen-scholars’ who act morally, and politically, within the world. Inspired by Denzin’s arguments, I decided to make this thesis available for others to re-circulate and re-work if they wish by releasing the thesis (in both print and digital form) under a Creative Commons licence. In doing so, I seek to make my research available beyond academic spheres, potentially making it accessible to a wider range of readers. In considering the political intent of my research, both autoethnography and queer theory seek to challenge normative thinking, and are thus politically compatible (Adams & Holman Jones 2008). his challenge occurs within the academy by facilitating ways of knowing beyond the scientiic paradigm and outside the academy thorough the sharing of scholarship motivated by a desire to promote understanding about diference. By ‘hinging’ autoethnography and queer theory, scholarship that is relexive, situated and draws attention to subjectivity while also acting for political change, can be advanced (Adams & Holman Jones 2008, p. 374). Queer theory has grown from feminist and gay and lesbian studies in the academy, and in this environment ‘queer’ has predominantly been used in relation to gay and lesbian subjects, although it is not always viewed as ‘an acceptable elaboration of or shorthand for’ these categories ( Jagose 1996, p. 3). While a comprehensive examination of the historical development of queer theory is beyond the scope of this review, a valuable overview is provided by Marcus (2005). Broadly, queer theory is informed by Lacan’s promotion of an unstable, decentred identity, Derrida’s critical deconstruction of language in Western thought and Foucault’s insights into discourse and power (Spargo 1999). Within this context, ‘queer’ is an open and luid term oppositional to containment and closure. Queer theory rejects static and stable sexual identities, understanding both sex and gender as social constructs. In doing so, it provides a theoretical framework to productively challenge binary oppositions such as male/female or heterosexual/ homosexual, celebrating the ‘open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlays, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality, aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’ (Sedgwick 1994, p. 8). Central to queer theory is a belief that sexuality is socially constructed, rejecting the idea of a stable or essential sexual identity. In understanding this, Foucault’s History of Sexuality is critical. In volume one, Foucault (1981) rejects the ‘repressive hypothesis’ that there was a silence about sexuality in the nineteenth century, followed by its “liberation” 47 48 in the twentieth. Instead, through an investigation of how discourses produce and regulate sexuality, Foucault advances that sexuality is socially and culturally constructed, and historically speciic. Situating the identity category of homosexual as a recent construction, Foucault argues that the “discovery” of the homosexual was part of a range of discourses informed by power, which sought to regulate sexuality in order to meet the procreative needs of a capitalist system. his discovery, and the discourses which sought to problematise and control homosexual subjects, also enabled their resistance, illustrating that the social construction of sexuality is complex and not a simple binary of power and resistance. In he Use of Pleasure, Foucault (1984a) uses ancient Greek texts to contrast Christian and contemporary Western approaches to sexuality against alternative social and ethical forms of erotic and sexual life, drawing out both commonalities and diferences. Following this, he Care of the Self (Foucault 1984b) examines the Roman Empire to discuss the development of ethics as an individual relationship with the self, and discipline as a form of self-knowledge that sought to achieve individual freedom. Foucault does not point to Greek or Roman society and culture as superior to contemporary Western systems, rather he situates and illustrates the complex web of connections between the self and the state with recognition of the inequality of individuals and diferent systemic forms of power. Demonstrating the central place of Foucault’s work in social constructivist accounts of human sexuality, Katz (1995) discusses several historical examples of non-heterosexual societies to illustrate heterosexuality as both historically speciic and socially constructed, reviewing key discourses that facilitated the construction of ‘heterosexual’and ‘homosexual’. Katz also provides an overview of critiques of heterosexuality from the early years of the 1960s and beyond, including gay and lesbian studies in the academy and feminist critiques of heterosexuality by key scholars such as Millett, Rubin and Rich. Notably, Katz argues that as heterosexuality and homosexuality are socially constructed, they can be deconstructed, and calls for modes of sociality and a politics of pleasure that would enable new systems of sexual pleasure. Similarly, Seidman (2010) examines the social development of sexuality in relation to identity politics within the USA, noting that not all cultures are similarly invested in the idea of sexual identity. Drawing on feminist and Marxist theoretical approaches, Seidman analyses the politics that inform sexuality and shows how sociocultural forces shape and control both normative and non-normative sexual identities and expressions within speciic historical locations and conditions. Alongside Foucault, the writings of Judith Butler provide an important theoretical foundation to queer theory’s social construction of sexuality. In Gender Trouble, Butler (1990) argues that feminism’s distinction between gender and sex is untenable because both are socially constructed. hrough analytical engagement with the works of Foucault, Irigaray and others, Butler argues that gender and sex naturalise hegemonic binaries that conceal the cultural construction, regulation and control of sex, gender and sexuality. Butler asserts that gender is not expressive: it requires constant ‘performance’ to appear “natural”. Gender Trouble is considered one of queer theory’s founding texts, as it presents important theories concerning identity luidity and gender performance “mismatches” between sex, gender and sexuality. 49 50 Rubin’s (1984) ‘hinking Sex’ is another important queer theory text. Critiquing feminist theory, Rubin argues that sex and gender are distinct areas of social practice, necessitating a theory of sex separate from gender. his radical theory of sexuality analyses the power mechanisms of sexual oppression using a constructionist framework. Rubin discusses how a narrow range of attributes form the ‘charmed circle’ within a hierarchical sex value system, while “deviant” sexualities outside this range (on the ‘outer limits’) are oppressed through psychiatric, religious, legal and social discourses. Rubin’s analysis includes an examination of extra-legal sexual regulation modes and the domino theory of sexual peril, which are highly relevant to both mono- and hetero- normativity. Revisiting Rubin's sexual value hierarchy, Ho (2006) interviewed eight polyamorous practitioners in Hong Kong to examine how agency and intent enable transgressive, transformative or conformist responses to social boundaries. his research demonstrates that individuals can hold multiple subject positions on the sex hierarchy (e.g. being “out” or “closeted” in diferent social contexts), occupying both the charmed circle and the outer limits. Here, subjects who are polyamorous may operate within mononormative societies in diferent ways, at diferent times, and their ability to do so is impacted by intersectional factors such as race, class and gender as well as sexual identity position. Such ability to inhabit multiple subject positions is complicated for heterosexual practitioners of polyamory, as they can experience marginalisation due to their non-monogamous practice while also beneiting from heterosexual privilege. his complexity will be discussed in relation to non-normative, or queer, modes of heterosexual subjectivity, covered later in this review. he work of Rubin and Butler calls attention to a split between feminist theory and queer theory, which is explored in detail in Feminism meets Queer heory (Weed & Schor, 1997). Marinucci (2010) also provides an historical overview of the development of studies of gender and sexuality in the academy, explaining the rise of queer and its strained relationship with feminism while situating itself at the juncture of both ields of inquiry. Her inal chapter argues for a queer feminism that aligns the concerns of queer theory and feminism in equal measure, arguing that queer theory and anti-essentialist third-wave feminism can mutually inform each other to enable a nuanced examination of the interaction between gender, sex and sexuality in sociocultural contexts. his belief in the value of employing the insights of queer and feminist thought is harnessed in my work, promoting ‘theoretical polyamory’, where scholars and activists draw from a variety of thought systems rather than claiming a single or static theoretical framework or political identity (Shannon & Willis 2010). heoretical polyamory enables a range of complementary perspectives to be brought to an issue in order to enrich and extend modes available to conceptualise, and achieve, radical social change. In considering this, the authors question whether one of the outcomes of theoretical polyamory might be the development of a political anti-identity which embraces the non-normative inclusiveness of ‘queer’. his inclusiveness is enabled by queer's deinitional openness as ‘whatever is at odds with the normal’ (Halperin cited in Yep 2003, p. 36). While always including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and questioning subjects, the openness of queer also 51 52 provides scope for anti-homophobic heterosexual subjects, including those whose sexual expression is non-normative, to participate in anti-normative knowledge projects as ‘queer heterosexuals’ and/or write about ‘queer heterosexuality’ (Seidman 2010, p. 91). As Hockey et al. (2007) outline, heterosexuality operates as a silent and unmarked category that constructs a social as well as a sexual identity. From the sheer dominance of representations of heterosexuality in popular cultural texts to the ability to marry, heteronormativity is relentlessly enshrined in sociocultural systems. Within this framework, non-heterosexuals must disclose themselves, either “coming out” or remaining “closeted”, while heterosexuals enjoy the luxury of seldom being required to announce, think about, justify, or explain their sexuality (homas 2002). As identiied by Rich (1980), heterosexuality is imposed, proselytised, and maintained as a social institution in ‘compulsory’ ways that disavow other sexualities, particularly lesbianism. As Rich (1980) illustrates, heterosexuality (like whiteness) is a socially dominant category. his category is traditionally under-examined due to its assumed status as “default” or “natural”, enabling heterosexuality as an institution, identity and practice to historically evade critique (Hockey et al. 2007). Yet, a lack of investigation into this status serves to construct heterosexuality as a ‘monolithic, unitary entity’ rather than acknowledging its normative status as speciic and conditional ( Jackson 1999, p. 164). As polyamory rejects the necessity of lifelong (or serial) sexually and romantically exclusive couple relationships, it does not comply to the dominant norm of monogamy that underpins default understandings of heterosexuality (Ritchie & Barker 2006). hus, through actively challenging the mononormative assumption implicit within hegemonic heterosexuality, polyamory can be ‘ ... rendered invisible or pathological in mainstream representations’ that hinge upon a monogamy/cheating binary (Ritchie & Barker 2006, p. 587). his illustrates that some expressions of heterosexuality, such as polyamorous practice, fall outside the conditional bounds of normative heterosexuality, and can be marginalised or excluded within heteronormative discourses, in addition to non-heterosexual expressions (Ritchie & Barker 2006). As this indicates, individuals can ‘perform straightness in various ways’ (Schlichter 2004, p. 550). In showing enactments of such non-normative or queer performances of heterosexuality, autoethnographic writings can play a political role in destabilising the heterosexual/homosexual binary to encourage antinormative modes of sociality and community beyond the borders of identity categories, an aim that is central to my research project. Although there is little existent writing about the lived experience of queer heterosexuality (heory-Q 2009, Kitzinger & Wilkinson 1994a), My Husband Betty: Love, Sex and Life with a Crossdresser (Boyd 2003) is a recent text that explores non-normative gender and sex roles between a heterosexual, married couple in the United States. Overall however, the best-known irst-person account of queer heterosexuality is arguably Clyde Smith’s (1997) ‘How I became a queer heterosexual’. Here, Smith outlines how artistic and interpersonal connections facilitated his immersion within gay and bisexual spaces and queer cultures in the US that led to his questioning of rigid sexual identities and 53 54 ender binaries. For Smith, such experiences developed into a self-identiication as a queer heterosexual who located a sense of belonging with diverse others in queer spaces and communities. Smith’s paper was reprinted in Straight with a Twist: Queer heory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (homas 2000). his anthology uses the insights of queer theory to undertake an anti-homophobic exploration of queer heterosexual subjectivity. To do so, contributors explore a range of ground, including analyses of queer heterosexuality in ilm, television and literary texts. Chapters within the ‘theory’ section examine the limitation and constraints of heterosexuals seeking to negotiate and engage with queer theory, including issues of appropriation, normativity, and the possibilities and limitations of participation in anti-normative knowledge projects by “straight” subjects. While evidencing engagement with the writings of key queer theorists, chapters within the ‘theory’ section also contain personal perspectives and experiences by diferent authors, with Smith’s account being the most directly experiential in approach. Complementing this collection, Straight Writ Queer (Fantina 2006) is a more recent anthology that explores queer heterosexuality through an analysis of literary texts from medieval to contemporary times. Covering a wide range of genres and historical periods, this work explores disconnects between gender performance and sexuality, seeking to ‘identify and out’ the literary igure of the queer heterosexual (Fantina 2006, p. 10). Media representations of queer heterosexuality are seen in two Village Voice articles. he irst, by Powers (1993), is an early journalistic exploration of queer heterosexuality in the United States, at a time when US popular culture evidenced increasing engagement with gay, lesbian and bisexual identities, supported by engagement with queer theory at universities and public visibility of gay and lesbian political movements. In this climate, Powers witnesses the emergence of ‘queer straights’: heterosexual subjects who participate in queer environments in ways that pass as queer. While identifying that some queer straights simply enjoy the more open and luid range of engagements and environments that queer spaces and performances ofer, Powers writes that others are politically and personally drawn to the insights of queer theory as a means to self-identify an opposition to compulsory heterosexuality and patriarchy. In a later Village Voice article Tristan Taormino (2003) discusses, and celebrates, the igure of the queer heterosexual. Taormino argues that the openness of queer has increased dialogue and diversity among members of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, while also facilitating dialogue between queer and heterosexual subjects and communities. She identiies those who do not follow traditional gender roles, and/or people who engage in alternative lifestyles such as polyamory and/or BDSM as examples of queer heterosexuals. Taormino argues that resources and establishments authored or run by queer people, including books, DVDs, and adult shops, increase knowledge about sexual pleasure and make “queer sex” accessible to heterosexual subjects. In considering queer heterosexuality, homas (2002) asks whether it is possible for heterosexuals, who enjoy extensive social privileges based upon heterosexuality’s institutional status as ‘normal’ within mainstream western societies, to critically examine heterosexuality. He suggests that being willing to reject the idea of heterosexuality as 55 56 natural’, can be, in itself, an act of queering as it rejects the assumptive logic upon which straightness is based. homas argues that such examinations denaturalise heterosexuality, thereby enabling investigations into how it is socially and culturally constructed in historically speciic ways. herefore, while heterosexual subjects might not be able to meaningfully escape or surrender their privilege, their examination of this privilege, and a refusal to accept its ‘naturalness’, can form part of a broader project to challenge and overthrow the superordinate social position of heterosexuality (homas 2002). ‘ In contrast, radical feminist scholars including Walters (1996) and Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1994a) have critically rejected queer heterosexuality. Kitzinger and Wilkinson argue that heterosexuality is a power relationship that inscribes diference between men and women, positioning women as subordinate. hey reject the concept of queer heterosexuality, arguing that there is no clear range of methods as to how heterosexuality might be enacted queerly, thus rendering it a largely theoretical possibility. Secondly, they argue that queer theory’s promotion of ambiguity and performativity serves to obscure the politics of sexual oppression and resistance. hirdly, the authors argue that the promotion of such lexible sexualities enable heterosexual women to ignore, or fail to analyse, their heterosexuality. Like Walters (1996), Kitzinger and Wilkinson point to the historical incompatibility between radical feminism and queer theory, arguing that queer theory is largely antagonistic to what it sees as radical feminism’s moralistic analysis of pleasure, fails to engage with radical feminist political critiques of power, and is often critical of the presentation of lesbianism as the means of resistance to heterosex power relationships. hus, the authors reject queer heterosexuality as a fruitless endeavour to ‘rehabilitate’ it, arguing that it remains a possibility only for those with socio-economic privilege and fails to provide a meaningful analysis of heterosexuality as an oppressive site of power. In examining critiques of heterosexuality as normative and hegemonic by feminist, lesbian and gay scholars since the 1960s, Schlichter (2004) outlines how such critical analyses have attracted both defensive and (more recently) ‘queer’ responses from heterosexual scholars. Although heterosexuality and heteronormativity cannot be neatly separated, Schlichter argues that it is possible for heterosexuals, whilst being enmeshed within systems of privilege, to analyse their identity position through a focus on the sociocultural system that supports heterosexuality as a hegemonic identity position. his is supported by queer theory’s contention (based in the work of Judith Butler) that heterosexuality, like all sexual identities, is an unstable and performative identity category. hus, the possibility exists for performances of failed rather than ideal imitations of heterosexuality, enabling examinations of how heterosexuality may be performed in diferent ways (Schlichter 2004). Like Walters (1996) and Powers (1993), Schlichter (2004) highlights concerns that those who hold privileged sexual identity positions may co-opt or dominate endeavours to challenge heteronormativity, rendering sexual minorities invisible and failing to address the workings of power. She argues that attempts to participate in the re-theorisation of heterosexuality by heterosexual subjects are therefore complex. Schlichter contends that testimonial forms of writing about queer heterosexuality (such as the work of Powers and Smith) can help to challenge the binary divide between straight and queer that dominates much queer writing. In doing so, such works examine heterosexuality as a diverse site and hold potential for 57 58 anti-normative modes of ailiation. Yet, she also believes that testimonial forms are largely personal stories that reassert the privileged, private self. Compounding this is the authors’ refusal to discuss the role of sexuality in their lives, enacting the heteronormative ‘privilege to privacy’ that inadvertently reinstates heterosexuality as normal, cohesive and unexamined (Schlichter 2004, p. 551). Drawing parallels to the participation of white subjects in anti-racist projects, Schlichter (2004) argues that self-identiication as queer by heterosexual subjects must transcend presentations of ‘voluntary’ positioning to explore and deconstruct the formative and regulatory power structures which enable such a position to be held. To achieve this, the contexts in which heterosexuality becomes intelligible and meaningful must be examined. In this endeavour, the structures that work to support heterosexuality from within must be identiied, to investigate how heteronormativity works to deine heterosexual as well as non-heterosexual subjects and enable critique of alternative constructions of heterosexuality. In such projects, Schlichter reminds aspiring queer straight scholars that the perspectives of others are vital in acknowledging the limitations and privileges present in critiques of heterosexuality and heteronormativity by heterosexual subjects. Extending this, Riggs (2010) argues that attention to race and class privilege are important for white middle-class queer subjects in order to acknowledge and account for their privileged speaking positions, especially considering the dominance of such subjects in writings about queer sexualities. In being attentive to racial and class resonances, Riggs argues that white middle-class queer writers can identify and examine how their relationship to white hegemony informs and locates their experiences of sexuality and subjectivity. In considering these issues, I have sought to acknowledge my speaking position as a privileged white heterosexual subject throughout the thesis chapters, and engage with intersectional forms of analysis in considering my lived experience. In constructing a text that seeks dialogue with readers, I have also endeavoured to open my work to critique by diverse readers, in a desire to produce accountable scholarship. In relation to this, I have been inspired by the work of anarchist scholar, Jamie Heckert. Like Shannon and Willis (2010), Heckert (2006) asserts that the anti-authoritarian heritage of queer theory is compatible with the politics of anarchism, as both work to examine policing and exclusion and ask how relationships might be reconigured without replicating the negative efects of power. Heckert believes it is critical to employ anarchist insights to fully exploit the theoretical and political potential of queer in developing preigurative egalitarian relationships within a non-hierarchical social structure. In examining the relationship between feminism and anarchism, Heckert summarises that it is diverse and variable, as not all schools of feminist thought work to reject policing and hierarchies. Here, he identiies Rubin’s (1984) ‘hinking Sex’ as a developmental point for an anti-authoritarian ethic that sought to avoid the production of new modes of normativity and policing in sexual relationships. Heckert also advances poststructuralism as a theoretical and ethical endeavour to examine how subjectivities and bodies may be reconceptualised in ways that reject the necessity of the state and provide a supportive politics in which individuals speak for themselves. 59 60 As Heckert (2006) identiies, some critiques of queer perceive it to be focused upon forms of individual transgression compatible with capitalism. In response, he highlights queer’s preigurative potential, suggesting that ‘transgressive’ sexual acts might provide insight into alternative relationship ethics and disrupt hierarchies across all kinds of relationships, including, but not conined to, sexual ones. Identifying queer theory’s refusal of set boundaries around the examination of gender and sexuality as one of its strengths, Heckert argues that such openness enables explorations across both queer theory and feminism that overlow binaries such as gender/sex and mind/body. Yet, he also identiies the danger of seeing queer’s luid and transgressive nature as superior to or surpassing feminism, and thereby constructing a new knowledge hierarchy where sexuality becomes the “proper” domain of queer theory. Heckert (2006) believes that an anarchist approach helps to avoid this, as anarchism aims to eliminate all forms of domination, and thus necessarily rejects hierarchies of knowledge, which enables a range of informing perspectives. In addition, he calls attention to the interconnection between forms of oppression, arguing that diverse approaches are needed to resolve them in ways that respect their complexity. Further, he argues against ‘homocentrism’ in queer, contending that a queer politics enacted only by homosexual subjects limits its potential and constructs it as a more critical form of gay and lesbian studies. Echoing Heckert’s inal point, Segal (1994) argues that heterosexual women have an important role to play in the ‘queering’ of traditional understandings of sexuality and gender, to address the role of agency and desire in women’s lives and experiences. his is necessary because studies of women in heterosexual relationships have primarily been focused on experiences of abuse, leading to a dearth of knowledge ‘about how women in non-abusive heterosexual relationships are negotiating their sexuality’ (Smart 1996, p. 176). In examining the potential for generating such knowledge, Jackson and Scott (2004 ) argue that non-monogamy, as theory and practice, was a shared political strategy used by lesbian and heterosexual feminists in the 1970s to counter oppressive heterosexual relationships. he authors argue that since the 1980s critiques of monogamy, and discussions of how non-monogamous relationships can challenge institutionalised heterosexuality, have become practically non-existent. While this argument is now perhaps somewhat muted by the range of texts about non-monogamies which have been produced in recent years, as summarised by Barker and Langdridge (2010a), this article still provides thoughtprovoking linkages between feminism and non-monogamy, a theme that is evidenced within my work. Jackson and Scott (2004) argue that were the primacy of the couple relationship to be successfully challenged, the privileges that accrue to heterosexuality would be diicult to maintain. hus, if non-monogamies worked to de-prioritise sexual contact as the most meaningful social relationship form, sexual object choice would also become less important, challenging the privileged position of both heterosexuality and monogamy. his argument is also put forward by Wilkinson (2010), who asserts the political potential of polyamory in forming new modes of personal and social relationships not based in hierarchies. As Smart (1996, p. 176) suggests, it is possible to locate ‘a politics and pleasure in more fragmented heterosexualities’. In seeking to write about this politics and pleasure, 61 62 I have attempted to heed the warnings of Schlichter (2004) and homas (2002) about the limitations of heterosexual subjectivity, to try and avoid reinscribing heterosexuality as ‘natural’, or oppositional, to other sexual identity positions. This c/s/lit review has travelled through the journey of thought I have undertaken across and between polyamory, autoethnography, poststructuralism, deconstruction, queer theory, queer heterosexuality, feminism and anarchism. In doing so, I have sought to communicate appreciative engagement with the writings of scholars who have challenged and inspired me during the process of questioning and discovery that has led to my arrival here. 63 ACT 3: Fluid exchanges  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDjzLH8FYR4 65 Middle of the night ind a towel down the hallway too close to the right straight into that FUCKING RIB-BREAKINGBASTARD of a bookshelf edge close the door softly wait for the lush to stop quietly now don’t wake them up. Possums in the roof ! Do they really chew the wires or just piss everywhere? hrough the kitchen light switch on the left (your other left) into the laundry sharp slice from that bastard of a cheap plastic washing basket through the door leave it open seat down: fuck my toe is stinging! Diferent hairbrushes, plates, keys, mealtimes, couches, visitors. Son-like people, unmet daughter, housemate, ive cats, one dog, two sets of dead parents, one stepfather (unseen), two stepmothers (neither evil), two anniversaries, two September birthdays, two electricity bills, bag full of books and clothes too heavy to walk “home” with. Where are the tissues? Do we have any tissues? here are three {3} boxes at Dalley Street. I picked up some milk. I will call you tonight. Is there any chocolate left? Hello darling. Honey, I’m home. Living with one partner in each home suggests a contained, compartmentalised neatness – a simple doubling of the {heterosexual} couple relationship. A FIFO arrangement for love. [Am I the miner or the resource?] But is that just a cover for all the DELICIOUSLY FILTHY ILLICIT SEX? 66 his ongoing disorientation when I wake in the middle of the night, feeling momentarily uncertain about exactly where I am. When people ask ‘where do you live?’ I pause for a moment to decide what (or how much) to tell. Some stories are not being told. Reader, perhaps we might develop an omissions trading scheme? Living in two places, the movement between home and home, seems to relect the twilight zone of under- and postgraduate study. I live in the halfway house of honours which anticipates that you’ll be better than you were but not as good as you might eventually prove to be. So is it cultural studies or creative writing or an artists’ book? p LIMINAL! (And I think to myself, what a wonderful word). 67 My mother says no such thing. Grayson's printer says my mother says. As we are talking Grayson puts a pen mark against (!"#$%&!"%'$#()*+'$) I ask him can I have that and he says yes. I scan it at a low res, and don't straighten it. I leave the pen mark in. Signs. Codes. Messages. Recievers. here is a pleasure in showing it like this. Digital renderings of the mind. Digital translations of the heart. Digits in my mouth and I say yes, yes, yes, one zero zero one zero zero one zero zero one two three: this explosion of numbers, the avalanche, the fall, the ruin. Human. Machine. [show, stack, command, error] 68 69 A phone call with my mother. She says any chance you’re coming home soon? Home means the farm; the place I learned to ride a horse (Barney), the place where Gran made rice pudding in a blue and white enamel dish and Pa sat on the back steps, smoking [later in the story, he develops emphysema. A dog howls at the moment of his death. A watch stops]. I was never stolen from my family. Nobody ever put me in ‘a home’. I have no experience of dispossession or exile or migration. We lived in town but helped Dad on weekends. I always thought the farm was the real home, where we would live when Gran and Pa retired and moved to a house in town. My father says the listing is on the website: can I look at it for them? hey don’t have the internet. Once at an automatic teller machine he said to me do you know how to work these things? and I laughed before I remembered that they have accounts and pay for things by cheque. When I think about the farm being sold I think about home as a place (the place) you can always go back to. hey have to welcome you, or at least begrudgingly accept you back. blood is thicker than water My frame of reference for home is a noun. Jackson (cited in Mallett 2004, p. 73) suggests that nomadic people have a focus that does not centre on an idea of home as a ‘private place’ distinct from the ‘outside’ world. Inside out: that time I went to the doctor for a pap smear and she looked away and then suggested other tests. I said husband and I said partner. But unless sexually transmitted diseases are now spreading via miasma, I’m ine: it’s a waste of time and resources. ‘Let’s just do them anyway’. 70 losing the farm sounds too melodramatic yet even now when I think those are the words 71 he uncomfortable indignity of being treated as someone you don’t recognise. I was ifteen when the irst “grim reaper” ad, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U219eUIZ7Qo] produced under the auspices of the National Advisory Committee on AIDS, appeared on television. his told me it was no longer ‘just gays and IV drug users’ who were being killed by AIDS: now ‘every one of us’ [this meant (heterosexual) ‘men’ and ‘women’ and their (innocent) children] was at risk. Looking for ways of structuring autoethnography, I read Troubling the Angels, about the experiences of women in the USA living with HIV/AIDS. Encountering these words: ‘In the early 1990s, under considerable pressure by clinicians, activists and researchers the Centre for Diseases Control began to investigate transmissions in lesbians, a task complicated by the range and diversity of sexualities that do not it neat categories of heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual’. he classiication ‘heterosexual’ included ‘any woman who has had sex with a man since 1978’ (Lather & Smithies 1997, p. 108). People were hijacked and stufed into little boxes to die. Who can be seen? Who can be understood? On the shelves of the pharmacy or the supermarket I can buy an assortment of condoms to put on my partners’ penises. I can get these condoms free of charge from a bowl in the waiting room of the doctor’s surgery at the university. If I want a Femidom, they cost about four dollars each, not including postage. he diagram inside the pack shows how to arrange your ingers in the shadow puppet position necessary to insert the small inner ring into your vagina. Stuing this miracle of polyurethane origami inside myself, I think of the pack’s claim that my partner and I will enjoy ‘comfortable, sensitive lovemaking’. hen again, Femidoms are also supposed to be ‘simple and easy to insert’. It kind of hangs outside my body a little. I think this is what they mean by ‘gently lines the vagina’. It makes a rustling noise. I can use one if I have to and I feel good about this. I have the means (money and knowledge) to protect myself. 72 he heteronormative privilege to privacy: heterosexuality assumes the position of being “normal” and thus unremarkable. hrough the power of being on the left of the (heterosexual/ homosexual) binary, heterosexuality is allowed to be private because there is no need to explain it. (Spell checker does not recognise ‘heteronormative’, perhaps proving something. Spell checker suggests heteromorphosis – it knows of queer regenerations.) He’d had a vasectomy so I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant and we’d talked about histories and he was out of practice with condoms and it just sort of happened. And I had to say sorry, I have been unsafe, but since you and I are using condoms it should be ok although I have broken my promise. And then I had to wait and when everything was clear I felt so relieved, like I had been given a lucky break and what would I do if there was a next time? 73 Home as plural: a feeling of being free range, rejecting ‘ ... modernity’s traditional discourses [that] genders the home feminine and deines the housewife’s role as the creation and preservation of its moral and physical homeliness and cleanliness’ (Pink 2004, p. 83). Shef (2005, p. 278) notes that ‘women with greater class and race privilege reported feeling greater freedom in relationship style’. Tuesday 9 August, 2011: Question 3 asks ‘Is the person male or female?’ here isn’t a space to write ‘no’. You are instructed to mark one box per person. My television hails me as the purchaser of hand sanitiser, antibacterial spray and disinfectant wipes. Its about keeping clean. Failure to deal with dirt and contagion is to jeopardise the family. You can never just wash your hands of it, woman. People are secretly judging your toilet, (you ilthy slut). Organisation Intersex International Australia (2011) urged intersex people to write ‘intersex’ in the space provided to answer Question 19: ‘What is the person’s religion?’ Having previously put a check in the ‘female’ box I was spared the necessity of declaring myself intersex as a matter of (optional) faith. ‘he Census is a snapshot of the nation and accurately measures the number of people in Australia on Census night, their key characteristics, and the places in which they live’ (ABS 2011a). [People in Australia are male or female.] After successful lobbying by Australian Marriage Equality (AME) (Lahoud 2011), the 2011 Census recognised the marital status of same-sex couples who had married overseas. For the irst time, the 2011 Census counted both married and defacto same- and opposite-sex couple partnerships in Australia. Same-sex couples still cannot legally marry in Australia. I go to the Lismore launch of Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage. I’m married to Luke, so I can’t marry John, but its not a big deal (for me, anyway). John tells Victor, the book’s editor, about our family. Victor has included a chapter in Speak Now by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli that talks about polyamory. 74 ‘he way Australians are organising their lives is often in advance of what business and government are doing in the way of policy’ (Shorten in AAP 2011). 75 I think this is a brave move, considering the campaign for same-sex marriage equality is gaining mainstream support, and polygamy is something the far right hold up as a “slippery slope” argument against it. he book launch is wonderful. We are in Luke’s workplace; at the university where all three of us work and/or study. his feels like a safe space and a gatecrashing all in one. Kentlyn (2008, p. 335) writes that ‘ ... it seems the further from urban areas that people live, the more important geographic localities rather than communities of interest may be for social participation’. I feel that I live in a place where diversity is more than a word. Nimbin is just down the road. Lismore has Tropical Fruits and the University: I am glad to live in this place, where Aunty helma welcomes me to country. I live on Widjabul land. Home as a verb (a ‘doing word’) ... Luke ixes the wall at Ballina Road and then, together, we paint the new bedroom that John and I will move into. Jules helps us paint while Kel goes out and gets the ingredients for lunch. We are making a new space together. Perhaps this is more than just a repainted bedroom. Maybe in a grander vision it could exemplify how domestic activities can be ‘intentional and creative strategies of airmation or resistance to percieved conventions, norms or discourses’ (Pink 2004, p. 42). After all, why should Luke care about or devote time to this “other home”? A home where I live with the other man? Mallett (2004, p. 77) suggests that home can be ‘a constellation of relationships’. If family moves beyond the nuclear, beyond kin, you can add more people without irst having to make them: a water family! 76 Regional television advertising hails me as a potential buyer of cattle dip, Aglime (those poor sods!), chainsaws and tractors. I am at least as interested in such things as I am in products that kill the germs you can’t see. [Perhaps we can only fear the invisible?] 77 he Census form asks me where I usually live, and I select ‘the address shown on the front of this form’. At Dalley Street, Luke is illing out the Census too. He answers yes to Question 52; ‘a person who usually lives at this address was absent on Census night’. Relationship to Person 1: spouse. A mononormative reading of these forms would be that I have moved in with John (my ‘defacto partner’) while Luke (my ‘spouse’) stays in Dalley Street, completing the Census alone in the misguided belief that I will come back (returning to the residence, to the household, to my usual place). Under the heading ‘Some basic facts’, the Australian Institute of Family Studies (2010) explains that ‘ ... members of families who live in diferent households are not treated as part of the same family unit’, for ‘statistical purposes’. [Some families are not.] Everyone on the Census form can only be shown to have a relationship to Person 1 (the one, the one, the one, the one, the one, the one, the one) so you can’t show that you are the partner of Person 1 and Person 3 (for example). his makes polygamous relationship models (where only one person has multiple spouses or partners) the only kind of multiple-partner relationship structure that could be represented on the form. When we visit the farm, Luke and I work in the dairy beside my parents. hey like Luke because he works hard and doesn’t talk a lot. ‘He’s strong’, says my father admiringly. He is surprised because Luke is very lean. In many ways, they cannot fathom our life together. hat we live in an old house furnished with things we ind at op shops. hat Luke cooks and I don’t. hat we scavenge bits of rusted metal and broken glass from around the farm for Luke to make into jewellery. ‘Wear boots and take a shovel’, my father says. he shovel is to deal with snakes. Moving respectfully out of their path hasn't really caught on in this part of regional Queensland. 78 he Australian Bureau of Statistics (2009) notes that couple relationships ‘ ... provide people with love, companionship, support, and opportunities for having children and raising families. As such, couples are a fundamental building block of society’. I raised a family from people I found laying around. 79 On my birthday card my father writes you are very special. My mother writes I miss you. Luke is all they expect to hear about. Not speaking about John is possible because I can easily condense and edit my life. [Please remember that, dear reader.] I feel concerned that has now turned into a therapeutic exercise. Do I somehow hope for healing? Perhaps a little scabbing-over would be nice. I wonder about telling them about John. What would be the outcome? he surprising acceptance (When will we meet him?), the unexpected reveal (Oh, we were into the Lifestyle in the ’70s!), or the more anticipated pain of rejection. Slut without ethical in front of it. Perhaps confusion and fear: is there something wrong with Luke? Should I tell them so they might know the real me? And what of Luke and John in all this? And Jem and Jules? What is really to be achieved? Would I be engineering this confession just so I could write about it? Do I want to shed blood? Do I want to mix blood and water? 80 81 Subversion of the past, emergence of the future; two sides of the same undertaking. (Audinet 2004 in Pallotta-Chiarolli 2011, p. 178) I promised that I would show whatever I wrote to whomever I wrote about: this seemed like the ethical thing to do. But I feel conlicted about showing this to my parents. hey don’t ask what I’m doing in this bout of study, possibly because they don’t really get what “Honours” is. And I feel sad that they don’t know and angry that they don’t ask and then I hate myself for feeling such things. I have opportunities they never had. I am nearly forty and should not expect this level of interest in my work (my life?) from them. [I feel horriied that they will want to come to my graduation.] I want to delete this section. Maybe I should. Or may I just leave it here with you? At the supermarket: milk costs one dollar per litre. It is perhaps better to say that is the price. For most things a price must be paid: what’s the damage? Sometimes, the cost of things really comes home to you. Home Brand: I can aford not to buy it. 82 83 thus follows a reckoning an exposition a binding thread a magpie nest a kiss on a fevered brow there there a toast here's looking up your address! but first a word from our sponsor:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC-KCiLCDv4 84 85 Information gathered from the Census forms part of the avalanche of numbers through which the state regulates life. Subjects under the law are categorised to produce citizens and identities (Foucault 1981). his asserts what may be measured, spoken of, understood, seen and aspired to. Such power is constructive, as well as censorious. In the picture: present, yet blurred? he active construction of categories to produce identities by the state is evidenced by historical changes in the terminology used to classify Torres Strait Islanders – ‘Polynesians’ in 1947, ‘Paciic Islanders’ in 1954 and 1961 – in the Australian Census (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2011b, p. 4). It was not until 1996 that people who self-identiied as having both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage were accurately acknowledged in the data generated from census form responses (ABS 2011b, p. 5). he power to name. 86 87 As Appadurai (1993, p. 796) writes, nations are ‘fragile abstractions’. hey need to be brought into being again and again by numbers and categories that construct the real. he responses of individuals make up the group inside the picture; a snapshot of a nation, carefully framed. We all have a part to play. he Census is a legal instrument. You are expected to be complicit, to comply, in recording yourself according to the terms set by the state. Giving false information is a punishable ofence. here are penalties for not playing your part in this ongoing project to inscribe the Australian national identity. he state needs you. 88 89 Although the House of Representatives has recently voted against proposed legislation to enable same-sex couples to marry in Australia (Cullen 2012), it can be argued that such marriages would readily translate into existing mechanisms of the state, since marriage, as a relationship between two people, is already entrenched in socioeconomic frameworks. In Australia, an amendment to the Marriage Act to remove speciic reference to ‘a man and a woman’ (an addition made in 2004 under the Howard government) would provide same-sex couples with an opportunity to marry within the same conditions that currently govern marriages between opposite-sex couples under federal law (Schubert 2012). In addition to achieving the same legal rights as heterosexual married couples, same-sex couple marriage has been identiied as symbolically important in recognising and respecting lesbian and gay couples and families within Australian society, asserting their equal validity to heterosexual couples and family units (Morgan 2011). In contemporary Australia, the right for same-sex couples to legally marry is an issue of national signiicance, attracting considerable media coverage and even a national day of action. To have and to hold. he charmed circle as two gold rings to be grasped? Equality: to be seen among those who are already made to count. 90 Within this movement, AME, a national membershipbased organisation, is a central advocate. he AME website claims that this organisation is ‘ ... working for equal marriage rights for all Australians regardless of their gender or sexuality’ (AME 2012a). Yet, the AME Constitution states that the objective of this organisation is to ‘... achieve equal marriage rights under Australian law for same sex couples’ (AME 2009a). Importantly, this demonstrates that the notion of marriage equality currently being advanced by AME is highly speciic. As Fox (2011) identiies, marriage equality (between consenting adults) would require an ability for individuals to marry regardless of sex or gender, including intersex people, or those who identify as not having a sex or gender identity. Further, marriage equality would include an ability to be concurrently married to more than one person. Fox suggests that such an expansion of marriage equality could encourage a broader acknowledgement of committed relationships, to recognise people in caring, supportive 91 and interdependent relationships, similar to the Tasmanian relationship register. In doing so, perhaps the hierarchical nature of marriage (‘forsaking all others’) could be challenged, to value, acknowledge and respect people in many diferent kinds of relationships, beyond a partnership with “the one”. Despite this potential, the rules for registering civil relationships at a state or territory level in Australia do not currently enable a signiicantly broader acknowledgement of relationship diversity. he Australian Capital Territory (ACT Government 2012) and Queensland (Queensland Government 2012) enable only two people over the age of 18 years, regardless of sex, to enter into a civil partnership, one of whom must be a resident of the state or territory where the relationship is registered and neither of whom may be married or already in a registered civil partnership. Further, a relationship cannot be registered if it is ‘prohibited’ (i.e. between linear descendants or lineal ancestors, siblings or half-siblings). In addition to the same rules for registering relationships that apply in the ACT and Qld, information about the NSW partnership register speciically notes that individuals who are ‘in a relationship as a couple with another person’ cannot register their relationship (New South Wales Government n.d). Only one person is signiicant. You can only care for one person. Mono not stereo. In Victoria, which enables registration of both ‘domestic’ and ‘caring relationships’, both parties must usually reside within the state and only one relationship between two people may be registered. hus, an individual who is married, in a registered relationship or in ‘another relationship that could be registered’ , is unable to register as part of more than one domestic or caring relationship (State Government Victoria n.d.). In Tasmania, which also enables both ‘caring’ and ‘signiicant’ relationships to be registered, the same conditions apply (Tasmanian Government 2009). Considering this, perhaps a disavowal of formal relationships registered with the state is the solution to oppose such construction and reinforcement of relational hierarchies and classiications. Yet, marriage or relationship registration in contemporary Australia guarantees access to relevant federal and state entitlements, as it proves the existence of a relationship. 92 93 Luke and I decide to stop being married to each other. I go online to ind out about getting a divorce. here seems to be no option that covers married people rethinking the institution of marriage and deciding to reject it on philosophical grounds (Family Law Courts, n.d). I was hoping for a ‘voluntary disassociation from marriage’ option. Luke and I want to continue living with and loving with and sharing with each other. I take of my wedding ring. Luke ends up losing his somewhere in the backyard. We still retain all the rights and privileges of a heterosexual married couple. I feel like a fraud, but now perhaps I look slightly less like one. he state can be hard to escape from. 'Til death us do part? 94 In relation to this, AME (2009b) argue that same-sex civil unions in Australia are a ‘failed experiment’ as they do not ofer the legal equality, practical beneits or social acceptance that marriage does. In seeking to gain the right for same-sex couples to marry, an acceptance that rights should be aforded to people based on their relationship status is conirmed by default. Such an approach focuses on achieving equality within existing legal frameworks, rather than critiquing institutional power itself. his has been a source of sustained critique by queer groups such as Against Equality who are becoming increasingly active in Australia (Nair 2012). Against Equality (2011) argues that same-sex couple marriage is an inherently conservative position which ‘apes hetero privilege’ and ‘increases economic inequality by perpetuating a system which deems married beings more worthy of the basics like health care and economic rights’. Similarly, in a recent opinion piece, Poole (2012) points to the exclusionary nature of marriage, writing that it discriminates against ‘sexual minorities within our community, or outside it’ and facilitates ‘bigotry against multi-partner relationships, non-standard families and the celibate’. Polyamory is not a sexual identity, although some advocate for it to be recognised as such, so that laws could be developed to protect against discrimination, an issue of particular relevance for those raising children (Tweedy 2010). In addition, polyamorous practitioners can be subject to more subtle forms of disadvantage, for example, when trying to access family leave from an employer to care for an ill family member who does not reside in the same home. Such policies, which conceptualise caregiving arrangements solely within nuclear family models, can disadvantage people who live within a diverse range of extended family and kin structures, including Indigenous Australians (McGrath 2008). Discrimination is an important issue, as evidenced by a consultation process on the proposed extension of federal anti-discrimination laws in Australia in 2010 by the Australian Human Rights Commission. During the consultation period, a number of religious groups, including the Catholic Church, presented submissions 95 God almighty. arguing that they should be able to legally discriminate as employers by requiring Church employees to possess attributes compatible with their religious teachings. Importantly, this right to discriminate would apply to all employees of a religious body, such as administrative or groundskeeping staf, in addition to those whose work speciically required religious duties. Depending on the beliefs of the employer, some potential grounds for legal discrimination could include homosexuality or single parent status. he Catholic Church is one of the largest employers in Australia (Marr 2011). People who identify as Catholic are the largest group of people who currently hold a religious faith in this country (Zwartz 2012). In December 2010, AME began a written exchange with George Pell, Australian Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church and Archbishop of Sydney. AME (2012b) released a fact sheet on marriage equality and religion advising ‘that it is possible to oppose marriage equality without hating homosexuals’ and agreeing that churches should have the right not to perform religious marriages between same-sex couples if such unions are prohibited by the religious faith. Body and blood turned to ashes and dust? Purgatory or hell? Degrees of separation? Communication between AME and religious leaders such as Cardinal Pell sought to locate ‘common ground and shared values’, according to Alex Greenwich, AME national convenor (Karvelas 2011). Greenwich stated that both AME and the Christian lobby believed in ‘the importance of marriage, protecting families and religious freedom’ (ibid.). Yet, as Courage, an apostolate of the Catholic Church, has chapters in Australia that advance a program of prayer and chastity for people experiencing same-sex desire, it could be argued that ‘common ground’ seems like unstable territory (Courage n.d.). GetUp, an activist group, paid $31 000 for three same-sex couples to have dinner with the Australian Prime Minister in February 2012. he couples attending this dinner used the opportunity to highlight the pain caused by laws preventing their legal marriage (ABC News 2012a). Two children of one of the couples who attended also met the Prime Minister before dinner. A photo accompanying a news article about this event (ibid.) shows one couple and children group in the centre, lanked by one couple on each side. Same-sex, but 96 97 the right amount of people. he right kind of people (men and women and children). A vision of ‘respectable queerness’ ( Joshi 2012) or images that would add new pages to the photo album of our national identity? Perhaps it might be both. Pallotta-Chiarolli (2011, p. 178) writes that ‘polyamorous and mixed-orientation individuals, relationships and communities ... are increasingly asking why their sexualities and families are being problematised and ignored in the marriage rights movement’. Perhaps partly answering this question, Greenwich argues that polygamy would undermine marriage as an institution in Australia (Higgins 2012). Also advancing this position, AttorneyGeneral Robert McClelland has stated that polygamous marriage is ‘entirely inconsistent’ with Australian law and culture (he Age 2008). In understanding McClelland's position, religion plays an important role, as his comment related speciically to polygamous marriages between Muslim Australians. As Willey (2006) outlines, non-monogamy is seen as a characteristic of the ‘uncivilised’, who do not belong to ‘Christian nations’. In contrast, monogamy operates as an unmarked norm which appears without racial signiicance, making it, by default, white. Opposition to polygamous marriage may therefore be understood as part of the ‘hysteria’ surrounding Islam in contemporary Australia, as identiied by Jupp (Powell and O'Brien 2008) and further evidenced in rhetoric by Nick Folkes from the Australian Protectionist Party (Hasham 2012). Further, although polygamous marriages between Indigenous Australians are acknowledged in order to give access to some government beneits and entitlements, these marriages are not recognised under Australian law ( Jupp in Powell and O'Brien 2008). hus, the ongoing disavowal of multiple-partner unions in the current debate about “marriage equality” arguably illustrates the deeply embedded racial and religious foundations that shape and inform Australian law and culture, privileging whiteness and Christianity. If viewed within this framework, the current marriage equality debate focusing on same-sex couple rights may serve to render other modes of inequality embedded within the institution of marriage less visible. 98 99 In terms of this, adults in consanguineous relationships, including ‘whole blood or half-blood siblings’, are among those who currently have no right to legally marry in Australia (Australian Government, Attorney-General's Department n.d.). his includes adopted siblings, who may share no genetic ties to each other, and extends to adoptive relationships that have been ‘annulled, cancelled, discharged or cease to be efective for any reason’. People who are related to each other should not be able to marry, because of the children. But what if those involved did not want to, or could not, biologically reproduce? Should they be allowed to adopt or foster children? Should they be oicially supported in forming a family of their choosing in ways that might not be “normal”? In ways that might not involve children at all? As this indicates, laws do not usually advance the concept of a pluralistic sexual ethics (Rubin 1984). hey are largely designed to control those who must never be given access to the centre; a place that stands for certain values and is suspicious of diference. A suspicion informed by concern that sexual variation is not, as Rubin suggests, benign, that such variation is a threat, a danger, a reason to panic. Or something to be disavowed wholesale, just in case. Such caution protects the nation, making sure the people carefully framed in the snapshots are kept safe. Like our national borders must be guarded to keep us safe from those who would come in from outside, the others who are illegal. 100 101 I am within the centre and on the margins: I am heterosexual and married, yet also polyamorous and non-reproductive. In this liminal position, I experience the pull of belonging and receive advantage from the centre’s narrow rules for inclusion, yet feel estrangement within this location. Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli (2011) writes eloquently about the liminal border zone that polyamorous individuals and queerly mixed families inhabit. Here, the border zone is understood as Nepantla, a site of questioning and conlict that ofers the potential for creativity, transformation and resistance (Anzaldua & Keating 2002 in Pallotta-Chiarolli 2011). In this location, it is possible for subjects such as myself to confront the fact that I have the choice to be privileged or marginalised, depending on what I say, and how I act and what I choose to reveal. I can it myself into census forms, if I just say what is expected. If I leave things partly unwritten in order to produce the desired result: if I just agree to tick all the right boxes. Perhaps I am a little bit queer but not so queer as to threaten: palatable. If so, I might use this space to speak about the centre and the margins, being acknowledged as a speaker by virtue of my privileges, including white skin, heterosexuality, a cisgendered, able body. Nepantla is not Narnia, but it might ofer a space in which to think about trying to go somewhere else. To look around in order to along the way. see others who might want to hold hands together To talk about paths that might be taken. To respect those who want to take diferent paths. To think about what we and equality could mean, and how these meanings might be enacted. 102 103 the rabbit is broken 3  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l48aOXWKx4E 105 [the body remembers] I enter the boxing tent full of piss and vinegar, knowing I will leave with nothing beyond the certainty of a violent beating and a sense that the crowd was w a i t i n g waiting, waiting , for the inal blow that knocks me out cold ... when I regain consciousness a big hand there is for being brave enough to try [and you know how much I like a big hand!] 106 107 Questions posed largely without words: you answered in parts and in kind. I felt treasured by the immense grace of your careful consideration. YOU were MY safekeeping UNTIL, UNTIL, UNTIL and then and then and then 108 109 details details details details details details details of how it all came to pass are sadly lacking {lacking} 110 111 but [  as time skips, p a s s e s , collides, conflates, implodes  ] “I” will say think/ write/ believe this: 112 113 You don’t have to worry about me was something I remembered meant a diferent thing [and who is anyone else to say what or who (whom? whomever!) I should or should not worry about?] [the body remembers] Liberation is something for which there are words and feelings and several movements, including a total revolution. here are songs. More than one voice is needed. Yes, yes, my dear Emma! here is to be dancing. [I want roses too. But I also have diamonds. Perhaps now is the time to choose?] [he body learns.] I believe in free love [but not the kind that assumes interest and availability without question. Not the kind that reinforces the hateful heterosexist binary of male/female = take/give.] You and I never did make it into the hammock. Perhaps that particular motion does not accord with me, though many say they enjoy it. Polyamory is a broad church. I cannot be heartbroken: partnership ends yet our family endures. But there is a skip, an arrhythmia, when I remember our bed that no longer exists. It is now yours to lay in with or without a comforter (or many layers) without consideration of my blood heat. Have you seen the video with the spiders and the diferent webs they spin depending on the drugs they have been given? [hat implies that the spiders have willingly taken drugs, but I believe they did not give informed, nor any other kind, of consent.] Will we build a web that looks a bit diferent but does the job, or will ours descend into a tangle of sticky threads that are no use to anyone? Let’s test the hypothesis together, in a group experiment. One that transpires in multiple atriums, with informed consent. I miss you. I believe you are intensely wonderful [but remember, this is not an objective account]. 114 ;-) ‘ ... sexual satisfaction is not just a question of pleasure as such, but speciically of that pleasure that springs from real encounter and recognition, the union of desires and bodies, and the harmony, pleasure and ecstasy that comes from this. In this light, it is clear that we need to pursue our sexual encounters as we do all of our relationships, in total opposition to this society.’ (Bonnano et al. 2003, p. 26) I guess when partnerships end there is usually bitterness and blaming, but I thought we might try a different model. Let’s not go at this like two bogans at an ugg boot sale. Nollie x 115 It’s a last minute thing. I said please can I come too? My beautiful woman [the one who always wears a bikini to go swimming, not the one who always wears red lipstick] said that’s ine you can share the double bed with me. And John jokingly said I can tell my friends that we split up and a couple of nights later you slept with a woman. She holds out her hand to me and I take it. We say goodnight. I love her. She is precious to me. I sleep on the side near the wall. he next night we alternate but I can’t sleep so I take a pillow and a towel and lie down on the loor near the window. Other people in the house (the couples) are coupling. It’s soothing rather than arousing [from my auditory perspective anyway]. I am here with her, and her, and her. With Ladies (and Kevin). I love them; I miss him; I love him. I think about love and loves and lovers, imagining outside the boundaries of who is: a friend just a friend a close friend something more my best friend my partner my lover my spouse my soulmate  usually only said at {heterosexual couple} weddings, and often combined with my lover and my best friend to voice the fragile beauty and romance and hope of only you and I think about what these words mean and what they are worth: My, my; ‘... if we redeine it to include not just many lovers, but many kinds of love: maybe then polyamory could become truly inclusive, and potentially revolutionary.’  (Wilkinson 2010, p. 253) agapē eros philia Something just; A(+-) You are loved. XXX J 116 117  West End, Brisbane. The pushing escalation of voices: You NEVER You ALWAYS how could you do this to me? you DO you ARE YOU CUNT YOU FUCKING  CUNT! I look away when I see him in his yard; frightened he thinks we called the police. [Never get involved] I lock our doors and windows. It’s not safe here, although we have displaced the others. Where did they go? The people with intellectual disabilities from the group home. The people who drink and sleep in the park. The men from the boarding houses (their places were demolished and replaced with units). The man (a vagrant) who lived in the bus shelter outside the church has been moved on, re-homed. They took away his shopping trolley full of rubbish and dreams. It was unhygienic. The Valley is upwardly mobile too: inhaling vibrant young professionals hooked on inner city living and expelling the old and the lost and the wasted. I tell Luke we have to go. Nobody ever smiles on the bus. I don’t want to live like this. Mobility is (for)getting away 118  119 “My role is to be love’s executioner”, says the counsellor. What a wanker, I think. I’ve read Yalom too. This is nothing like that. I hope the counsellor will tell us that polyamorous relationships can work, that they are successful for lots of people. [That never happens] “So tell me Nollie, what does John give you that Luke doesn’t?” “I’m not a ledger. I don’t take bits of them to balance myself out. They are whole people. I love each of them and both of them.” I think it’s a compelling speech, but the counsellor seems unimpressed. [I am the lack] Always this pull between what is meant to be and what is and what could be: the standard melodrama that informs keeping everything as normal as possible. Swings and roundabouts. Falling of the horse to realise it was just a merrygo-round and wondering if you want to get back on again (whilst knowing that your multiple privileges facilitate such wonderment). And the merry go round exists because your horse is pink and the horse beside it is blue and that is supposed to explain everything. 120 Most people, I hope, have had the experience of discovering deep pleasure in something they would not have said previously that they wanted. Yet the prevalent wisdom, oddly enough, seems to be that variant desires are legitimate only if they can be shown to be immutable, natural and innate.’ (Warner 1999, p. 9) 121 122 123  ‘Politics emerges when we begin to see our individual and personal lives as sites of resistance from which we can challenge broader hierarchies of power’ (Wilkinson 2010, p. 252). 124 125 In the bookshop, I pick up he Body Language of Love by Allan Pease and Barbara Pease. he cover has a red love heart with stylised human igures. I know they represent a man and a woman because one is wearing pants and the other is wearing a skirt. he book contains advice about lirting and dating (they call it the mating game). It is about increasing your chances of inding a long-term mate, based upon body language. he Body Language of Love is speciic to bodies that are male and female and seeking each other, although this is not stated. It is just meant to be understood (YOU ARE HETEROSEXUAL). Other bodies, other languages of love, are absent. When I lick through it, I have some chance of making connection, as I am a woman who is attracted to men. Yet I ind it alienating. I put it back on the shelf. his language uses a limited vocabulary (Where is the hotel room?, My biological clock is ticking!). What if you want to say diferent things, in a diferent way? What if you want a plurality of voices and languages; not this repetitive hetero-monologue? At a social gathering. I say ‘that's a lovely shirt, it really suits you’. She looks at me and says ‘I'm heterosexual’. Oh God, she thinks I'm hitting on her. I'm disturbed that she thinks this would be my come-on line. I am variously more creative, charming or hopelessly clumsy than that. I was hoping to talk about clothing: I have just read To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing out the World? by Lucy Siegele. In her eyes, I perceive traces of my own defensiveness. At a party interstate. We sit on the arms of the couch, facing each other. We talk for some time. He leans in to kiss me, and I move back, shaking my head. I say ‘no’. ‘It’s ok, she's not looking’, he says. I wonder if he's really gotten a grip on this whole poly thing. I take his face in my hands and look into his eyes. I don't want to hurt his feelings, I am just not interested. I don't feel threatened this time. He falls forward, partly onto me, before hitting the loor. ‘Are you ok?’ I say. A lot of alcohol has been consumed. Someone is lying on the deck near the barbeque. I help their partner get them to their feet again. his feels like looking out for each other. I meet a tall man who wears glasses and is smart and funny. We stand talking in the kitchen. He is polyamorous. He is bisexual. His partner leaves to go to work. His lover sends him a text while we talk. 126 127 He tells me about his recent visit to a bathhouse. We lirt, gently. I mention the A word and he responds. I do not feel a surge of sexual desire: his body type does not immediately appeal to me. But I would like to hold him and to be held by him (a private cuddle party?). Later, a neighbour comes over. I sense there might be a spark, so I say goodnight. He envelops me in a bearhug and makes an appreciative growling sound while rubbing my back. I return the embrace. We kiss. I hope he gets lucky with the neighbour, if that is what they both want. Perhaps in the future we might meet again. John saw a piece of graiti that said be amorous. I feel like I am starting to know what that might mean. I felt comfort in experiencing some kind of shared understanding that made me less guarded, less wary. An expectation there would be diferences in this encounter with this man. Pleasure in inding a space where there were blanks to write in, rather than checkboxes to tick. Pleasure in learning about queer experience. Pleasure in talking about politics. He said that he often faced an expectation from men at the bathhouse that he would be available to receive anal sex. I think this man understands what it is like to be seen as nothing beyond a fucking predetermined hole. I would have liked to talk more about how he negotiated this expectation. I would have liked to have learnt more about the bathhouse, a space outside my experience. Pleasure in diference, pleasure in sharing, pleasure in being found attractive: as human, as woman, with him, as human, as man. Such categories seemed to ofer scope, rather than barriers, for what could transpire. Perhaps individual acts of resistance are not enough on their own. But perhaps they become more when we share them with each other, tell of how we did what we did and why. Sharing ideas, suggestions, thoughts, experiences, plans, visions: knowledge. Enacting diferent kinds of relationships, (perhaps more open ones?) with each other. I think about how much this interaction meant to me, although I might never see him again. 128 129 I meet V, who is also doing an Honours project. I hear V read poetry, dressed in another woman's clothes. V and I talk about queer, and writing, and from this talking I know that I would like to talk more. I feel that I am learning to make connections. Friendships? Community? Solidarity? Love? At home, doing some washing. Bras and men’s briefs. he bras are mine, the men’s briefs are Luke’s. Queer? Straight? Somewhere in the middle? Perhaps I am still que(e)rying. 130 131 thus transpires an e xpurgation of prideful bile, a flight to the moon, a fall to earth, a blunt force trauma, a glimpse of ankle A CRUCIBLE, A CUP, A CUNT: A CURE FOR THE COMMON COLD? but first something transcendent or is it transcendental? [Are you there God? It's me, Immanuel ... ] [π]  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiVDzTT4CbE&feature=related 132 133 He says that I am wearing a nightdress. I look down at my jeans and the white kaftan top I’m wearing. This is how I usually dress. I look pretty unremarkable in Lismore, so his comment stops me short. I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto. What kind of feminist are you he says. I think he wants to know how strident I am, but perhaps I am being defensive, making assumptions. Perhaps I don’t really know how to explain what kind of feminist I am. Someone has brought along James Squire Four Wives Pilsener. I think it is a joke. Later, I discover that John purchased it. Po o y is promoted as a woman-centred practice, and strongly linked to a range of sexually emancipatory discourses (Haritaworn et al. 2006). he practice of consensual and disclosed non-monogamy as a feminist strategy and practice is evident in the development of lesbian separatist communities, such as examples from the United States discussed by Valentine (1997). Here, non-monogamy was employed as a political stance against the ideological basis of monogamy, namely that an exclusive dyadic relationship is the only “possible” or “appropriate” model to contain expressions of love and sex (Rosa 1994). Primarily, feminist critiques of monogamy have centred around three main arguments. Firstly, that state-sanctioned monogamy, privileged through heterosexual marriage, is highly compatible with patriarchal and capitalist principles of ownership and control, granting men exclusive access rights to women’s sexual, reproductive and domestic labour. Secondly, through privileging the monogamous dyadic unit, other relational forms become invisible to women. hrough such invisibility, ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ is constructed and reinforced by expectations that women should be inancially and emotionally dependant on men (Rich 1980). his dependency naturalises an inequitable gender power dynamic that may ultimately support conditions under which women and/or children are abused. In a related third point, through a hierarchical elevation of the monogamous couple unit above other relational forms, women become privatised and isolated from each other, removing the supportive conditions necessary for feminist solidarity (Ritchie & Barker 2007). Based on such critiques, the enactment of non-monogamy as a political strategy has been identiied as an important historical point of mutual understanding and shared practice between lesbian and heterosexual feminists ( Jackson & Scott 2004). 134 135 Another shows us a video on YouTube, the Guinness ad about sharing with friends (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP2Pp9SawRg). This is not really the time and place to critique this advertisement, or perhaps it is the perfect opportunity, but I don’t want to seem like someone who can’t take a joke. Strident. I should stop thinking so damn much, analysing every little thing. I switch to drinking water. I feel a vague sense of unease. I feel happiness at the thought there might be new lovers in my life, in a one-on-one context. I also feel an increasing desire to engage in some kind of non-couple-centric encounter, a desire I have voiced to Luke and to John. Yet, I am struggling to identify how this would occur without separating “love” from “sex”. I don’t think “love” necessarily means “romantic love”. I don’t think “sex” necessarily means “penetration”. I feel a lack of language. What I want to express is still so nebulous I fear I would be lost in my own translation. Although polyamory holds the potential to be employed as a feminist political strategy, a content analysis of twelve popular texts about polyamory revealed that these works lacked engagement with the structures of privilege that support its enactment, therefore promoting a largely apolitical view (Noël 2006). hus, some popular texts about polyamory reduce it to largely a matter of individual choice; actively replacing ‘the political with the personal’ (Wilkinson 2010, p. 245). In doing so, a short-sighted identity politics can be facilitated that addresses the concerns of ‘the polyamorist’, rather than seeking to locate and build political coalitions with other groups who are also disadvantaged by compulsory heterosexuality and mononormativity (Noël 2006). In considering the potential for such activist coalitions, polyamorous and bisexual communities are ideally compatible in forming alliances and learning from each other, as polyamorous communities commonly evidence a high level of participation by individuals identifying as bisexual (Mint 2004). In such alliances, polyamorous activists can draw from the insights of bisexual discourses to explain a multiplicity of desire, while bisexual activists can draw from polyamorous discourses to explore the feasibility of relationship dynamics and modes to counter the monogamy/cheating binary (Mint 2004). 136 137 Later, I talk to another about relationships. He looks into my eyes as we talk. He respects my personal space. I experience intimacy without the precursor of sexual intent. I experience the pleasure of listening and talking, locating each other. I desire ocular disorder: men who require corrective lenses to see the world as it is told to be. When Luke and John remove their glasses, I imagine they hold a visionary position less secured in clear edges, less absolute. To me, they embody the gift of seeing differently. A gift they enact by being differently. I do not clean our houses or cook our meals. I work in my study. This project is respected, given space and time. I am supported with love and care and trust. There is talking about feelings, desires, sex, people we love and everything else including the bills, work, the state of the world, an interesting show on Radio National, bouts of dizziness and sinus infections. In Australia, contemporary evidence of such cross-ailiation is evident in a message posted on September 15, 2012 to the Polyamory Australia Google Groups mailing list. his message called for bisexual people to tell their stories on a radio program, 3CR’s Out of the pan, as part of Celebrate Bisexuality Day (September 23). 3CR is a community radio station located in Melbourne that seeks to provide a voice for those discriminated against by and in the mass media, including working class and Indigenous peoples (3CR n.d.). Programs on this radio station, such as Out of the pan, engage with members of the polyamorous community as part of an explicitly activist philosophy. his evidences how broader political alliances which acknowledge the speciicity of individual location and privilege can be made between communities to mutually inform and support each other and facilitate the circulation of diverse narratives. Without this drive to build coalitions of mutual interest, the ‘identity politics’ of polyamory can work to deine it in opposition, rather than in relation, to other forms of non-monogamy. his is seen in popular polyamorous texts (Anapol 1992; Chapman 2010) that draw distinctions between polyamory and the lifestyle based upon a perceived separation of love and sex. Here, it is understood that the lifestyle preserves emotional commitment exclusively for the heterosexual couple relationship, while allowing sexual contact with others. In contrast, Chapman (2010, p. 4) contends that polyamory ofers the freedom to develop multiple relationships of emotional intimacy where sex is ‘a possible outcome, but not the primary goal’. Addressing this, Anapol (1992, p. xii) uses the term ‘sexualove’ to describe integration between sex and love in polyamorous practice. 138 139 We talk about books we have read and violently disagree with, and books we pass on to each other. When I can take no more reading about queer theory and autoethnography, Luke gives me The Hare with Amber Eyes, and says, I think you will like this. Later, he brings me The Origin of the World: Science and the Fiction of the Vagina. John presents me with The Sexual Revolution by Wilhelm Reich, and The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone. These are his books. They sat alongside the volumes about sport and gambling, two areas of his research interest. Luke makes jewellery in the shed, cooks incredible meals, collects vinyl records and saves up to buy handmade shoes. He likes things that are not instant, things that can be repaired, and things that can be refashioned into something new and perhaps completely unexpected, instead of being thrown away. When John became part of my life, Luke took a job that required him to travel for nearly eighteen months. He wanted time away from me, to consider his options, to think about what was right for him, about what he needed and wanted in his life. I felt terrified that he would leave me, but happy that he took this time to consider. I always want to be a choice, never the default option. Everybody is free to leave at any time, although talking about it is expected. As sexual expressions are potentially, but not necessarily, part of polyamorous practice, sex in polyamory arguably occupies a liminal discursive space, ampliied by the centrality of “love” in polyamorous discourses. his focus on love can serve to elevate polyamory above the lifestyle, which is conventionally represented as sex or pleasure focused (Klesse 2006). hrough this elevation, polyamory can be represented in ways compatible with mainstream discourses that privilege romantic love and commitment, facilitating media treatments of polyamory that are more positive and respectful than those of the lifestyle, which is usually represented in demonising and/or titillating ways (Ince 2005). A irst-person account by Wagner (2009) illustrates how the lifestyle can prove cathartic for female subjects in facilitating non-monogamous sexual pleasures, including voyeurism and bisexuality, and in deconstructing gendered norms that inform internalised rules about conditions of intimacy and appropriate sexual behaviour for women. As Frank (2008, p. 444) argues, the ‘[s]exual double-standards that are so central to many incarnations of heterosexual practice and erotics have a drastically limited place in the lifestyle’, further arguing that women’s engagement with multiple sexual partners also challenges traditional understandings of masculinity and femininity. 140 141 Thinking about bodily difference. I most acutely desire deep acne scars on the face, many lines around the eyes, fur, narrow hips and veins that pop like weasels. I desire pared down men who are stretched, lean, essential: the body as a double-spaced synopsis. I have (so far) failed to desire bodily differences evident between the women I like and myself. My continued heterosexuality, persistent as a rash, confounds me. Perhaps heterosexuality is this taste for difference: I like the smell of men, the feel of their facial stubble against my skin, the flatness of their chests, their penises of different shapes and sizes and inclinations, the peculiar vulnerability of testicles. I fondle and celebrate his perfectly formed arse: any more than a handful is a waste. I enjoy the diverse particularity and similarity of men in the moment of undress when the body is revealed. The moment when he similarly holds me in his gaze, when the unknown comes into view, into plain sight. A discrete geographic location formed at every intersection, both situated and local. As identiied by Phillips (2010), although the lifestyle challenges the stability of monogamy as a construct, it does not reject it. Indeed, participation in the lifestyle can actively reiterate the primacy of the couple bond by using sex with others outside the couple unit as a way to reinvigorate and cement that bond (McDonald 2010). herefore, the lifestyle does not necessarily seek to more broadly challenge the structural form of intimate relationships, nor does it necessarily seek social change beyond using sexual practice to challenge the mononormative assumptions upon which couple relationships are based. However, as swinging does ‘discursive damage’ to monogamy by demonstrating its malleable nature (Phillips 2010, p. 85) it can be argued that an increased dialogue between lifestyle and polyamorous communities would be valuable, not only to counter the historical ‘privileging’ of polyamory over the lifestyle, but to seek productive points of connection while also respecting diferences. In considering the value of such a dialogue, clear understandings of diference between the role of love and sex in the lifestyle and polyamory have been challenged by Marovitch (2004), who identiies a level of crossover between polyamorous and swinger communities in the United States. Marovitch argues that polyamorous practitioners may undertake sexual relationships that mirror the conditions of separation between love and sex traditionally made in swinging, while people who participate in the lifestyle may form long-term, multi-dimensional relationships with ‘swinging friends’ that appear to relect the concept of sexualoving. Further, lifestyle communities can vary in modes of engagement and practice according to geographic location and demographics (Frank 2008). hus, just as polyamory is not a uniied discourse, it would appear that neither is the lifestyle. 142 143 Talking amplifies the pleasure and excitement I feel in such locations: before and during and after. Talking is the process by which his desirability becomes apparent to me. Such talking can take different amounts of time, and vary in levels of intensity. It is both a universal and unique ongoing conversation: exchanging ideas and beliefs and how our positions in the world came to be held, future directions for shifts and changes, and identifying possibilities of travel into the unknown, together. Later, another sits beside me on the couch. He puts his arm around me. I move forward, away from his touch. I feel uncomfortable, although there is no coercion or threat: just an expectation that this would be ok, that checking was not necessary. I feel he has a particular purpose in this engagement that I do not share. I don’t want to be rude, but I do want to be clear. I feel disengaged, disenchanted. He says you have beautiful eyes and I think all the better to see you with. I wonder why I hoped for anything else. nsidering such overlaps, perhaps a key point of connection between polyamorous and lifestyle communities is ‘sex positivity’, which forms one of the twelve pillars of polyamory identiied by Haslam (2008). Coined in the late 1960s, sex positivity takes an ‘… optimistic, open-minded, non-judgemental attitude’ to all forms of consensual sexual activity (Easton & Hardy 2009, p. 279). For non-monogamous women, sex-positivity can be a powerful source of positive airmation, countering dominant narratives that have historically derided female promiscuity in particularly punitive and shaming ways (Schwartz & Rutter 2000). As Wagner’s (2009) account reveals, sex-positive environments provide an important source of support and opportunity for safe experimentation by women who wish to enact non-monogamous sexual relationships, demonstrating that the lifestyle operates as both ‘a system of erotic relationships and a cultural experience’ (Frank 2008, p. 435). C 144 145 She sits down next to me: she knows I feel uncomfortable. I smile at her: this beautiful woman. Looking out for each other is part of being in community. I wonder if I do a good job of looking out for others. I try to. I wonder why I feel I have to. I have an uncomfortable awareness that I watch and judge. In silence, I police others according to my own beliefs. Later, when it starts to unfold, I say goodnight and go to bed. I overhear conversations that make me feel sadness and petty vindication. I feel sick of being polyamorous, of being heterosexual, if this is how it is done. I feel like I don’t belong. Maybe I am prudish or moralistic or sexually repressed? Maybe I just need to let go. But I don’t want letting go to feel like giving up. I lie in bed feeling damaged and non-spontaneous. In relation to this, polyamory, like the lifestyle, can be seen to simultaneously resist and be shaped by the language available to understand it, including the language of sex, sexuality and emotions (Ritchie & Barker 2006). As polyamorous discourses resist mononormativity while being enmeshed within the language of monogamy, discursive possibilities both construct and constrain meaning and experience (Ritchie & Barker 2006). his tension is evident in the division made between sexual and non-sexual relationships in popular texts about polyamory, which arguably evidences parity to the hierarchical division between “partners” and “friends” in mononormative discourses. As Wilkinson (2010, p. 245) argues, such a hierarchy reinforces the societal norm ‘that our primary emotional connections have to be with people we fuck’. Further, the structure of polyamorous relational models may suggest the privileging of a “primary” relationship because it includes inancial commitments not shared across “secondary” or “tertiary” relationships, mirroring the privileged position given to the heterosexual dyad in mainstream discourses. Here, an anarchist perspective suggests that narratives focusing on structural models within polyamory reduce it to a question of ‘relational mechanics’ so as to ‘avoid the question of the quality of these relationships’ (Bonnano et al. 2003, p. 22). In terms of ‘quality’, polyamorous relational practices can evidence ‘lingering reliance on or reproduction of traditional patterns of gendered interaction’ (Shef 2006, p. 625). In this context, beliefs about women being better communicators than men, more able to multi-task and organise, and being more skilled in performing high levels of emotional work can lead to the assignment of women to speciic roles in polyamorous relationships (Ritchie & Barker 2007). his accords to dominant discourses representing women as ‘not only being more nurturant and expressive but also as more deeply expressive human beings’ ( Jackson 1999, p. 108). 146 147 There is no privacy in this space, the walls are fashioned from matchstick blinds: inside/out, public/private. How innocent I am. This has been a gentle introduction, yet I am bruised and wounded: compounding injuries that were sustained before I arrived. I am over-reacting. This is just one night. It’s a party, a celebration, a letting down of hair. Maybe I just need a good fuck, but my idea of a good fuck is something different to anything that feels like sharing with friends. I realise that people do polyamory in different ways, seek different things from it, think about it in different terms. I have felt uncomfortable and alarmed in seeing this difference, and I feel ashamed. Why should all “poly people” want the same as me? Why don’t they all want the same as me? Why am I so positive that I understand their motivations? I am seeing others through my own lens, which is heavily distorted. As outlined in a US study by Shef (2006, p. 625), male subjects who engage in polyamorous practice can demonstrate ‘poly hegemonic masculinity’, in which the ‘most blatant’ forms of hegemonic masculinity, such as patriarchal control of women’s sexual autonomy, are rejected, yet patterns of emotion management and sexuality evidence retain conformity to dominant ideals of masculinity within mainstream culture. One aspect of this was the identiication of the female-female-male (FFM) triad as the ideal relational form promoted by some of Shef 's male research participants. Such idealisation can be seen to conform to hegemonic masculinist ideals of hypersexuality (being able to please multiple women) and competition (being able to attract multiple women, at the “expense” of other men) with polyamory providing the potential, at least symbolically, to achieve these ideals (Shef 2006). In relation to this, Shef argues that the idealisation of the FFM triad can be related to the popularity of depictions of sex between women in pornography produced for heterosexual male consumers, and thus female bisexuality may be celebrated in polyamory because sex between women is seen as entertaining to men. If this is the case, female bisexuality in such triadic encounters is coded as heterosexual, using women’s sexual luidity as a mechanism to expand the range of sexual pleasures available to heterosexual men. As Shef ’s study shows, expressions of masculinity within polyamorous relationships are impacted by race and class, in addition to sexual identity position. 148 149 Why can’t I take joy in the connections I do find instead of obsessively looking out for MISOGYNISTIC PREDATORY MEN around every corner? John did not disrespect any person; he wasn’t even flirtatious. I felt angry that he seemed to feel safe and I did not, like we were in two completely different locations. I think we were. Male privilege is not something that is announced on banners, it is a subtle condition of engagement, just how things are. I dealt with my tightly woven strands of fear and alienation by transferring responsibility for them wordlessly into John’s hands. Testing him, silently, unfairly. I expected he would know how I felt, how uncomfortable I was, although we have experienced very different lives. John is no stranger to a communal spirit, perhaps he was less of a stranger in this strange land. For many heterosexual subjects, sex is an arena of experience that is constructed as uniquely “personal” and “private”: a privilege achieved through heterosexuality’s normative status ( Jackson 1999). In conventional heterosexual encounters, a lack of appropriate communication skills to discuss sex has been identiied as potentially serving to reassert and amplify gendered power relationships (Schwartz & Rutter). With regard to sexual expressions, such a lack of appropriate communication skills can lead to the initiation and unfolding of sexual acts characterised by ‘innuendo and gesture rather than open talk’ ( Jackson 1999, p. 42). hus, conventional sexual encounters between heterosexuals can evidence ‘a degree of confusion and doubt about the intentions and interpretations of the other’ not evident in other forms of interpersonal interaction between such subjects (ibid.). As Albury (2002, p. 39) summarises, ‘being sex-positive requires acceptance of shaky ground’. his may include an acknowledgement that ‘[l]iberal discourses and practices by themselves do not dissolve the traditional gendered meanings attaching to sexual experience’ (Segal 1994, p. 261). In heterosexual polyamorous practice, as in the lifestyle, equal opportunities in seeking sexual contact are aforded to both men and women. Yet, although ofering equality in opportunity for sexual contact, determining what sex might mean, or the purpose with which it might be enacted can conform to the ‘classic heterosexual guessing game’ in which sex ‘just happens’ after consent is granted, without a prior explicit identiication of intent, boundaries or sensitivities (Albury 2002, p. 177). 150 151 John is a man. I realise I don’t find that construct very useful for much of the time. John takes care of the house in Ballina Road and the cats and people who live within it. Dispensing meals and clean laundry and kindness and offering wild enthusiasm for a whole range of creative endeavours. There is a graffiti wall under the house. Dirty plates sit piled on the kitchen benches, waiting to be washed at a time when there are less interesting things going on. When I get paid, we do the grocery shopping together. I buy the food that John will cook. After dinner I say thank you darling that was lovely. And he says to me, thank you. If Jules and Alistair are eating with us, John will say Nollie bought the ingredients and when they say thanks for dinner, they also say thank you to me. As a counter to this guessing game, alternative communication models from queer and/or kink communities can prove valuable. Communities of sexual practice, such as BDSM, ofer spaces in which processes of sexual negotiation are modelled and practiced (Albury 2002). In such spaces, mutual agreement predetermines what sexual acts are desirable and acceptable to each individual involved in an encounter in order to understand and safeguard emotional and physical boundaries. A feature of such negotiations is agreement upon safewords, which enable participants to clearly communicate when they wish to stop some aspect, or all aspects, of sexual activity. In BDSM, safewords acknowledge the centrality of language in constructing sexual encounters, especially in instances where ‘no’ can be a request to continue sexual activity, rather than a withdrawal of consent, if resistance is part of role-play (ibid.). Considering this, Heckert (2006) asks what workplaces would be like if the safeword concept was introduced into such environments. his demonstrates how alternative modes of sexual communication and ethics could inform innovation across a broader ield of relationships and power structures. In doing so, perhaps a desire to harness the potential of an ‘everyday erotics’ can be asserted. Here, rather than conceptualising sex as a private and segregated aspect of experience, an everyday erotics opens consideration of how the erotic might be more broadly dispersed across all aspects of life, including work. Such an erotics harnesses political intent, working to counter capitalist notions that sex (and the acquisition of consumer goods through which individuals achieve conformity to dominant notions of sexual desirability) is the source of pleasure (Heckert forthcoming). 152 153 Luke’s brother comes to stay with us each Christmas. They hold hands sometimes, while walking down the street, or at the beach. John meets Luke’s brother. This is a big deal, the first time a member of our broader family has been introduced. John is liked, perhaps partly due to his gift of a book about sharks and a Christmas record. John’s name is remembered, an honour not frequently bestowed. John falls asleep beside me in bed, his arm flung partly across my body. Protection? Comfort? Ownership? I stay awake, vigilant and full of incoherent rage. I have drunk so much water I have to keep entering shared space in order to reach the toilet. Stumbling around in the dark. Should I cough to make my presence known? I am unsure of protocol. I choose not to look. Slipping past in the shadows, clinging to the edges of defined boundaries: pissing it all away. In removing sex from the restriction of the private sphere, perhaps the hierarchical distinction between sexual and non-sexual relationships may also undergo erosion. Rather than conforming to a belief that the most important relationships in our lives are with people we engage in sex with, relational anarchy rejects a valuebased distinction between sexual and non-sexual relationships, equally valuing and celebrating all forms of intimacy and love (Nordgren 2006). In polyamorous practice, the application of relational/relationship anarchy could both disavow the usefulness of relational models such as ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’, in addition to erasing hierarchies between ‘sexual’ and ‘non-sexual’ relationships, removing the ‘structural mechanics’ that may obscure questions about relationship quality. In terms of coalition building, relational anarchy could arguably increase the potential for participation by asexual individuals in polyamorous communities, through advancing the value of relationships that do not inherently require an implicit ‘sexual assumption’ that everyone has “a sexuality” and feels sexual desire of some kind (Carrigan 2012). Further, if non-sexual relationships became more central to polyamorous discourses, such relationships could provide sources of inspiration in learning to relate to others in more equitable ways, which may be stunted by ‘our participation in ixed hierarchies’ (Heckert 2010, p. 261). 154 155 I end our partnership the next day, speaking to John in code: You were not there for me. I cannot count on you. You know I have safety issues. It is a full human gestation period before I am able to look again at this experience, to examine my thoughts and actions. It is a painful and humbling process that entails defiance, despondency and a certain amount of picking at old scars. The past in the present tense. A degree of letting go. A letting go that does not feel like giving up. Something long lost returns to me again, yet differently. The turning of pages has changed what is mine: written in the middle and scribbled in the margins. There are many blank pages for what is yet to be written, for what might be amended and done again, over, differently. And a new knowledge that some things must be spoken, not only thought about, or read, or written down; to breathe possibility into visions and hopes, to speak them into being. Arguably, this would also realign polyamorous practice more closely to feminist critiques of monogamy, and rather than demonstrating allegiance to the gendered division of emotional labour, heterosexual female subjects could speak against such roles within their polyamorous relationships and communities. However, in situations which ofer such potential, individuals may silence themselves instead of speaking in ways that seem inappropriate or alien to our ‘imagined or actual signiicant others’, through a desire to be accepted (Benjamin 2003, p. 12). In such silence, feelings of anger are particularly important as this emotion expresses ‘a reluctance to be positioned by others’, and the desire to enact alternative meaning structures, including those constructed through political beliefs (ibid.). Being willing to speak thus requires ‘unsilencing’, a process that can require a crossing of boundaries and a struggle to move beyond what seems easy or even possible to talk about in heterosexual encounters (Benjamin 2003). If desire to belong advances selfmonitoring in order to conform to perceived rules or beliefs of a group or community, unsilencing requires an acceptance that speaking may lead to exclusion. Yet, within any ‘whole’ there are a myriad range of subclasses informed by sexuality, class and race, further shaped by the ‘acculturated meanings’ individuals bring to sex (Albury 2002, p. 40). hus, being willing to speak from a situated position, while not expecting this position to be universally understood or held, may be productive in opening diverse discussions within a group context. 156 157 I say to John, I am sorry. In heterosexual polyamorous relationships, perhaps male privilege, like heterosexual privilege, may not be able to be meaningfully surrendered. However, an investigation of the conditions and enactment of such privilege could arguably provide productive pathways to travelling somewhere new. In doing so, the gendered power dynamics of polyamorous relationships, of a broad range, could potentially be explored. Such conversations might discuss the purpose of diferences between “men” and “women” and discuss sex beyond ‘the standard contemporary markers’ of erections, penetration, and orgasm (Albury 2002, p. 188). Perhaps in this communicative space, an expanded appreciation of the erotic might help overlow reductionist understandings of heterosex to locate pleasure in shared performances of active and passive roles that do not blindly accept the binary division between men and women promoted by hegemonic heterosexuality. In this space, rather then representing a ‘particularly feminine ainity’ (Anapol 2010, p. 166), sexual luidity could potentially be more expansively examined. Such discussions, as previously noted, might be informed by alternative sexual ethics and relationships present within queer culture. Yet, for heterosexual subjects such as myself, an ainity with this culture can also feel parasitic. As Rambukkana (2004, p. 151) writes, ‘I believe that though my sexual orientation is straight, my ideological and political orientation towards sex is queer’, creating a tension between queer and straight discourses of desire. I believe in the value of being sex positive, while also refusing to separate sex from politics in my polyamorous practice. I seek to participate in a project to fracture hegemonic heterosexuality and erode heterosexual privilege in order to extend the ield of relationships and alliances that are valued, respected and supported. In seeking to do so, theories of sex and sexuality are productive, yet ultimately ‘no substitute for irsthand experience and personal, ethical decision-making’ (Durbin cited in Albury 2002, p. 191). As my lived experience demonstrates, trying to ind harmony between ‘how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others’ can be a thought-provoking and sometimes uncomfortable journey (Goldman 1917, pp. 213–214). 158 159  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufoO5rvD88k 161 ‘You mean Luke doesn’t have other … partners?’ ‘No, he chooses to be monogamous.’ ‘But don’t you feel guilty, seeing other people when he doesn’t?’ ‘But if he doesn’t want to, why would I try and make him?’ ‘But John has, sees … other ... women?’ ‘No. He probably will, but he hasn’t met anyone yet.’ ‘Wow. So John and Luke, do they, I mean, they’re not …’ ‘Lovers? No, they’re more like metamours. hat’s like the partner of your partner. So they have a relationship that’s separate to me. I guess its like friends, or maybe in-laws?’ We practice mutuality, not equality. Mutuality enables you to ask for what you want, instead of demanding the equivalent of what another has, or restricting your asking to what you’re willing to agree to in return. People can want diferent things, in diferent measure. Mutuality advances the right to ask without whipping out a set of scales and a blindfold. Often, people pose problems. It gets frustrating, this ‘what if ’ game. It’s like I’m trying to get them to join a cult but they’ve seen through my schemes and have come to protect the more gullible villagers. Polyamory is not neat or tidy. When people ask questions, I feel like some kind of oicial spokesperson, so I try to say that there are lots of diferent ways, and its not just for straight people and yes, some people raise children together, this is just how it works for us, at this point in time. I tend not to speak of my increasing shift towards relational anarchy, because it’s even more of a foreign language, for me as well. I will not become luent overnight. here is so much in language that makes things intelligible through asserting distinctions. It is hard to talk in other ways and be understood. here is also this legacy of thinking about relationships in particular ways, but now I try to catch myself doing it. To try and think and do things diferently. An ongoing linguistic hangover. Read two Heckerts and call me in the morning. ‘But what if you fell in love, like really fell in love and he said you had to stop doing this or he’d end it?’ Yes, what if indeed. 162 163 My sexual practice with others is time and person speciic. With new lovers others, I establish parameters (boundaries? barriers?) in advance. I seek oral (fellatio and cunnilingus: what great words) and vaginal sex in this instance. Maybe I'm letting the side down with my failure to largely think outside the box. Why do I desire a penis in my vagina or a penis in my mouth or a tongue inside my vagina in this encounter but not other acts or practices (except, perhaps, a bit of ingering; to employ a term common to subjects from Gympie and Tumbarumba)? Most of my experiences of vaginal and oral sex have been supremely pleasurable, although some have been boring or frightening or even hilarious. Perhaps I think oral and vaginal sex are what he is most likely to enjoy (expect?). For me, vaginal and oral sex represents sex [heterosex] at its most basic or usual or normal; requiring the least amount of discussion. How have I established this? Movies, novels, advice from women's magazines that I mock, talking with friends, personal experience, guessing, feedback. How have I have learnt what sex is supposed to mean? How have I have learned what sex is supposed to be? First learnings: the farm. There was one bull and many cows. The bull was a boy. The cows were girls. Cows gave milk. Cows had calves. I wasn't sure for a while exactly what the bull did but it was somehow related to the thing that was not an udder. [Farm life may give you completely unrealistic expectations or provoke lifelong celibacy]. Sometimes the cows mounted each other: they did this because there wasn't a bull around. Television shows with footage of women dancing: bright necklaces and naked black breasts. This was a documentary to help us learn about how other people in different parts of the world lived. But it was still somehow related to something that didn't really have a name. Pointing to an ad for sanitary pads in Woman's Day, I say to my mother, what's that? And she says you'll ind out when you're older. I wait to grow up, knowing that something is going on that I am not being told. Other people know things I do not. Older people. The man in the shop says to the woman who walked in front of me, I'll just serve this little boy irst. Pleasure: I've done it! Horror: I should tell him I'm a girl! I had decided to be a boy, instead, and did my best to look like one. My parents seemed to know I would grow out of it. They bought me a demolition derby set for Christmas, during my tomboy phase. In grade eight we were made to watch a video about the life cycle of the red kangaroo. There was a mating scene and a boy in my class got a stiffy. He was teased relentlessly. He was from a family that didn't have television. 164 165 Sex education class: a presentation with line drawings explaining that you’d experience a growth spurt and get outcrops of hair in new places. The boy’s voices would deepen and the girls would grow breasts and menstruate. You’d experience urges or feelings or attractions related to the opposite sex. It was pretty much all about babies and how that happened with the penis and the vagina and the sperm and the egg. Bulls and cows. This was sex [heterosex]. My older sister had already shared all this with me, but neither of us knew the important stuff: what did it feel like when he put his thing inside you? Did it hurt? How much did you bleed the irst time? Could you really use a Crunchie wrapper instead of a condom or did that scratch you up, inside? Did she know anyone who’d actually done it yet? One year in high school, the girls did a short course called Mothercraft. There was a doll you had to put nappies on. You bathed baby after you’d tested the water temperature with your elbow. I felt angry. Babies were boring and you had to take them with you everywhere, all the time. They screamed and drooled. They were always teething or snotty or covered in bits of food or rashes and their nappies smelt disgusting. Why did they think we should all know this stuff, just because we were girls? Nobody seemed to share my hostility and outrage. I was deeply shocked to realise that some girls in my class actually liked babies and wanted to know how to look after them. Others seemed to think that they might be grateful for this knowledge some time in the future. I felt like knowing this stuff somehow meant I’d have to act upon it. That I couldn’t plead ignorance and be excused. I thought they were all insane, although I knew I was really the strange one. A young child lived at Dalley Street with us for about eighteen months. Sometimes, I gave him a bath. I fed him, but largely managed to avoid nappy changes. I sang Run Rabbit Run and tried to substitute Johnny Cash for The Wiggles, with partial success. He had a mark on his hand, so I taught him “stigmata”. The people at daycare heard “tomato”. One day, as I scraped play-doh off the vintage rug, I realised I am so happy I decided never to have children, although I love this child. I have never wanted kids of my own. Luke and I got married because this ceremony seemed to represent a formal bond instead of having a child. People used to smile and say, plenty of time, or one day you’ll feel differently. Plenty of time and one day have now passed, so when people say do you have kids? it’s not really a question. It’s a conversational opening, a chance to talk about what they think will be common ground, if they believe that you are heterosexually coupled too. Now I say, I’ve never wanted kids. I usually follow up with, I have lots of nieces and nephews, I love being an auntie, because that’s true, and it seems to makes them more comfortable. Perhaps I also experience a desire to say something that might make me seem less strange. I feel anxious and edgy around babies, but like some kids. I enjoy it when they are old enough to start to talk and sing with you, or draw pictures together, or make things out of sticks and leaves and imagination. I like knowing them as they grow up, becoming themselves. People are different. 166 167 Back in bed, with this man for the irst time. There are no Crunchie wrappers. I do not anticipate pain or bleeding. It feels like it feels when you feel it, depending on how you feel at the time, and any surrounding feelings. What has he learnt that sex is supposed to mean and be? If he enjoys pornography, what kind does he like? I have experienced a manner of bodily relating that I link to particular understandings, and watch for this in irst encounters. I am hopeful, but also wary. Parameters. Boundaries. Barriers. In ongoing collaborative relationships, I like developing layouts that are too complex for Word. I have no desire to Excel: I don’t enjoy having my igure conined to columns, being placed in cells nor displayed on grids. Sexual practice can employ a Creative Suite: InDesign – frequent individual and collaborative use has streamlined my worklow. I have learned tool tips and shortcuts and established favourite styles. My design ethos is lexible, adapting to suit the content I’m working with. Content is dynamic. Photoshop – a shared application. Often we work together, focusing on a different layer. Illustrator – time is necessary to set up my artboard (no bleed) and doublecheck preferences concerning units and increments. Sometimes, I provide creative digital input to other artboards. Plug-ins might be sought. Dreamweaver – possible if a content expert has advanced hand-coding skills. I am immensely cautious with this application, as crashes can be terminal. Flash – forms of self-authoring with an appreciative audience. Premiere – for sophisticated narratives employing voiceover. Assets developed in other applications are frequently imported. Some modes of practice seem outside industry standard, requiring opensource solutions. The import of assets is not necessarily a required feature. As collaborative relationships develop over time, a shared design ethos emerges and evolves. We select applications that best suit our project aims, while remaining committed to professional development and creative innovation. Lifelong learning. 168 169 He moves above me, and I open my legs wider, pushing up to welcome his cock inside my quim. He says, I penetrate you with love and I think 170 171 FUCKING HELL! Kitzinger and Wilkinson have followed me to bed! 172 173 PENIS gi a v 174 na 175 Now THAT has to go in the thesis! But it would look like I was making it up and he does not know my context for that word. And isn’t that just fucking great: now I’m thinking about my thesis instead of/because of experiencing pleasure with this beautiful man. Cunning linguists: Ramazanoglu suggested ‘enclosure’, Hite said ‘penile covering’ (Kitzinger & Wilkinson 1994b, p. 79). I think sorption. ds are like sheets. hey can be changed, but erasing seminal issues W may require signiicant elbow grease. Ways of seeing, ways of thinking, ways of talking about the body: bodies are brought into being, into truth by culture. Power is productive. Language and meaning interpret the genitals. he clitoris as an inferior penis: my body as an imperfect replica of his. What if I am not seeking what I am supposed to envy or lack or have lost? What if I possess a map that shows where common ground may be located between our diferent geographies? What is called the female clitoris is really just the tip. Inside the penis, behind the glans, is the male clitoris. hese areas share the same name: Lowndes's Crown, after the researcher who advanced (discovered?) this, Josephine Lowndes Severly (1987). A Crowning glory: the irst anatomical term named after a female scientist (Drenth 2005). Textual healing? 176 177 ag a ne n i s i p v 178 179 I am bisexual according to the original psychoanalytic meaning of the term: A woman who has the choice between a clitoral (“male”) and a vaginal (“female”) sexuality (Drenth 2005). I am heterosexual according to the original scientiic and medical meaning of the term: A person whose sexual desire for the “opposite sex” is not based in a reproductive drive (Katz 2007). hese terms were used to label that which was seen as perverse. Once, at a particular point in time, in a particular location, heterosexuals were, it seems, quite queer. Words change over time. Times change over words. 180 181 In Lismore, released from my cage of thought. Karaoke is performed; a group of women sing These Boots are Made for Walking. My beautiful woman, the one who always wears red lipstick, comes to find me. Oh my God, what happened? she says Are you alright? [When regurgitated, some food and alcohol combinations look like blood.] She takes me to the bathroom. I am beyond the saving graces of toilet paper and water. She gets me out of there, swiftly and gracefully. In the ensuite, she helps me shed my filthy clothes. There is vomit inside my coat. I have no idea how I managed to achieve that. Soon I experience the wishing I was dead part of the evening. Months later, I find the clothes she lent me in the washing basket. I return them while she is away, handing them over to my beautiful woman, the one who always wears a bikini to go swimming. I say to her, these are Adele's. 182 183 The University's Personal Relationships Policy explains that ‘[p]ersonal relationships between students and staff may involve serious difficulties arising from the unequal power of the parties concerned, as well as the difficulties in maintaining appropriate boundaries between professional and personal life’ (Southern Cross University 2012). I wonder at how these boundaries are determined. Appropriateness is not an objective fact. What if a mutual desire to negotiate fluidity between ‘professional’ and ‘personal’ life exists? This policy concerns itself with relationships that include SEX or MONEY or FAMILY. Thank God LOVE Isn't one of the ‘serious difficulties’ listed. If it was, I'd be screwed. I wonder what would happen if policies served to facilitate discussion about the dynamics of power in interpersonal relationships, instead of seeking to keep the personal and professional removed from each other. 184 185 Kinsey believed his research team’s ‘personal’ lives were a condition of their ability to undertake their ‘professional’ roles. He collected detailed information about their sexual histories and practices. They were both subjects and researchers: participants. I think about Kinsey’s research, and how the personal, the political and the professional writhed and entwined orgiastic complexity in an that would make any contemporary ETHICS COMMITTEE spontaneously combust. Kinsey kept some things hidden and secret in his quest to learn what was desired (what he desired?). Was the benefit worth the cost? Who suffered and who gained? These are serious questions about researching with others. My ethical challenges pale into comparison, although sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. The Kinsey Institute holds the Kenneth R Haslam Collection on Polyamory, one of the most significant research holdings about this topic in the world. Should rules be ignored, broken or re-cast? Perhaps, with careful cultivation, they might be 186 overgrown. 187 my intimate others. my intimate others? 188 189 I'm sitting in the foyer, waiting, waiting waiting. John's in a local production of Fawlty Towers. On a board is a photo of John and his wife. Its his second wife this theatre season [insert joke here]. Joe walks in and we smile at each other. We kiss hello. He asks if I want a glass of wine but I say no, I'm driving. We talk about what we've done that day (thesis, packing) and then it’s time to go in and watch the play. During intermission he says to me, I had an interesting conversation with John the other day and I say yes, I know. I say to him, thank you for being so gracious about it, I didn't know how you'd respond and later I say I really like you and I ind you very attractive. I miss innuendo and gesture I want alcohol illicit drugs and and a dimly-lit room. PLAIN SPEECH and SOBRIETY and DAYLIGHT are vastly over-rated. I keep thinking how quickly will this play end? He's sitting beside me and I feel completely aware of him. John is great in the play. 190 191 I kiss one and then the other. I say, dinner with two beautiful men, I’m the luckiest girl in the world. I would like to hold hands with both of them, but we’re in public where that kind of thing makes people look at you. Back in the warmth of home, with alcohol, and other things of substance. We talk. Stories from their shared past, adventures in far-lung places. Joe massages my hands and neck, he says you’re nervous. He seems surprised. John says why don’t you spend some time together in the bedroom? While Joe showers I light some candles. Beeswax votives in beeswax lanterns, made in the Northern Rivers, by hand. John and I bought them at the market. One is purple. We picked it for Joe, it seemed to be his colour. I wore nice underwear this evening. I even shaved my legs and armpits and bikini line in a rare it of normativity. Lying in bed, the underwire in my bra pokes into me, so I take it of. he room spins, gently, and I start to smile. I close my eyes. A gift from a flower to a garden. Joe gets into bed, wearing pants. John is in the living room, watching the Olympics on TV. Joe and I kiss, and embrace. I feel his body against mine. He mentions his weight, like it might be a bad thing, and I say, trust me, that’s really not a problem. He says to me, your skin is soft and I think we are discovering each other and it all seems good. He mentions my shoulders and I say yeah, I’m not petite. Like maybe he hadn’t noticed that already. 192 193 He asks about my tattoos, and I tell him there was this Shaker sister who was like really sick and so she couldn’t do manual work, but everybody in the community was thought to have been put there to do something and so she ended up making these drawings, these botanical illustrations of all the plants around where they lived, like to document them? Because everybody has a purpose, you know, and you just have to ind what yours is because what turns out to be valuable can be diferent to what you think at the beginning and so you might not know when you start something like you just might not know why you’re doing it, but then, and so anyway, her illustrations, these drawings, they ended up being really important and so, yeah, how amazing is that? hen I realise that I’m whispering in a really intense way and not making much sense and oh yeah, I’ve had a smoke. I say to him hedge bindweed and he says hedge ...? and I say hedge bindweed like I’m sharing the cure for cancer. He seems unfazed and kisses me, gently. I touch his body, enjoying this newness. He touches me in return. He is beautiful. I have desired him for a long time. When another man said that all the books he had to read in class that session were written by women I said gee, that’s terrible and Joe looked across at me and smiled and I liked that he understood what I meant and why. I’m worried that he thinks he’s just here because of my thesis, although he seems ine with me writing about him as long as I use a pseudonym [practicing safe autoethnography]. I wonder what “sex” will be like. Will we work together? Will he comment on my lips? Being healed to a single crease looks neater and pleases the censors but my body is not just for looking at it is for pleasure and I have come to love this excess of me. It has its beneits. 194 195 [...] his sounds like a revisionist history: ignoring the losses to highlight the gains. My gains. his upsets him even more. Later, we talk about it. I say to him, you can’t rush me, it takes as much time as I need it to take. I have to be sure with someone new. [Someone old, someone borrowed, someone blue?] he second night that we were together again it felt a bit like taking turns. his was perhaps more inclusive, but still not the holistic experience I had imagined, with three bodies moving in a shared unison of pleasure. Why did I still think it would all just naturally work out without talking about the arrangement of bodies and who likes what where when and how? I didn’t think enough about how to discuss such things or communicate questions through movement. I was worried that it would seem like I was directing traic. But I should have stepped up, spoken up, because what I wanted was understood as being central to the project. I was fearful of self-authoring with other people’s software: acting like a client and not a collaborator. I said can you use a condom? and he said, I guess so, and I should have mentioned this in the living room before it was tongues and throats and ingers and hands and cocks and quim and kissing and passion and desire and pleasure and connection ALL NIGHT LONG. For me, anyway. I try not to be orgasm focused with others, but I ended up coming over and over again. I felt like the centre of the universe: powerful and strong and totally, totally up for it. It was like the diference between running up three lights of stairs and inishing a marathon. he happiest endurance event in the world. 196 197 I guess double penetration (DP) is probably considered the usual reason for doing this (MMF: Aphrodite Trio), but porn is not real. Every encounter is contextual, and particular. And besides, gentlemen never tell [they just get written about]. When we fell asleep together I felt utterly fucked but not taken or taken for a ride and the pleasure seemed mutual, if not equitable. And hell yes, I would do it again but not together with John and Joe since the dynamics didn't seem right. But that was probably my lack of facilitation skills. I think I would like to be with men who desire each other, as well as me. I think I would like ... I think I would like ... Sharing with friends? Sharing, with friends. Friends, with sharing. With sharing friends. Sharing. 198 199 ‘So there could be a roster of people for each day. Maybe each group can have a day they organise people for?’ ‘They might send the workers back if there are only a couple of people here.’ ‘We need numbers. If there aren’t enough of us there could be an emergency call for people if we need them.’ ‘And we need people who’ve done the training for police liasion. And a media spokesperson. We need people to do these things each day.’ ‘We need some background information. To keep here.’ ‘Is it a vigil or a blockade?’ ‘It’s a vigil until it becomes a blockade.’ [words are important.] 200 201 Metgasco are running out of space to store the water. Progress on the pond/dam [words are important] has stopped. People stand and sit outside the worksite, their cars parked across the gate, blocking access to the hole in the ground and the mounds of earth beside it. A different farmer owns the land surrounding the worksite. Protesters can camp on his property: there’s even a portaloo now. Davey Bob was arrested on Wednesday, after the Police Rescue came and cut him off the bulldozer. There is a camera in the tree. There are signs warning against trespass. There is a notice on the fence that reads this toxic pond is closed under the authority of the community and people have signed their names beneath it. There are women knitting yellow triangles. Hand-painted banners and signs are attached to the barbed wire fence. Lock the Gate signs are attached to the cars. Everyone has brought mandarines to share. Will the rosters and plans work out? Will people be as bountiful as mandarines, arriving in bucket loads? Maybe (if the time comes when push comes to shove) it will be just a handful of people doing the best they can. Maybe they (we?) will have to make decisions based on what they (we?) individually and collectively think is right. They (we?) with salt in their eyes, might call it a day. They (we?) might refuse to leave, hoping a magistrate might take it all with a grain of salt. Things don’t always work out how you think they will. I listen to the plans and ideas but try to prepare for the possibility of something a bit less structured. Because what is unknown and unfamiliar might be valuable, and beautiful. A chance to journey somewhere new: both inside and out. 202 203 And she lived happily ever after. 204 205 But of course she didn’t. Have you ever been part of a community-based protest movement? Some people are obsessive and some people have communication problems and some people waste lots of your time on minor things and some people have interpersonal disputes and sometimes (especially during long meetings) you seriously reconsider your commitment to pacifism. And the absolute worst are people finishing off an honours thesis. You can’t count on them at all. They forget to shower, they’re late, they can’t stop yawning. When you ask how they are they just go on and on and on about the thesis and its like they just invented sex for fuck’s sake. But I’ve heard that people like that usually get over themselves, and return to the group to make a decent contribution. (Even if they are a bit obsessive and occasionally have communication problems.) ‘ ... the chief argument of fascism and reactionary thinking has always been that cooperation and autonomy are mutually exclusive, that people must be ordered and controlled or else they will be lazy and/or kill each other. The more we demonstrate this to be untrue, the less appeal their claims will have’ (Crimethink 2008, p. 158). www.csgfreenorthernrivers.org 206 207 a love song to wiser sisters a smut in the eye of the beholder a provocation a defence a rich wet dream of feathers and eggs feathers and eggs feathers and eggs feathers and eggs feathers and eggs feathers and eggs feathers and eggs feathers and eggs feathers and eggs feathers and eggs feathers and eggs feathers and eggs feathers and eggs: A COCK CROWS the end is nigh [unrepentance]  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YO9DpEDh3E 208 209 In my lived experience, being childfree, as well as non-monogamous, complicates my enactment of heterosexuality outside normative bounds. As Harding (1998, p. 46) argues, ‘within a matrix of heterosexism, reproduction can be seen as the ultimate visible expression of being a sex and having a sexuality’, thus pronatalist ideologies frequently represent ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ as synonymous identity positions (Rich et al. 2011). his is evident in my early lived experiences of being encouraged to understand sex through the naturalisation of opposite-sex roles based in reproductive capacity, advanced through forms of socialisation and enculturation within a range of familial and educational contexts. Such ‘mundane’ accounts reveal the formative beginnings of my subjectivity as a heterosexual woman, while also providing glimpses into the hegemonic power of heterosexuality as a central organising principle which operates as ‘institution, practice, experience and identity’ ( Jackson 1996, p. 30) Pronatalism advances a position that supports and encourages fertility and parenthood through attitudes, beliefs and actions that may be implicit or explicit (Rich et al. 2011). In contemporary Australia, this supports the availability of speciic forms of federal government inancial assistance, such as the “baby bonus” introduced in 2004. his initiative was a response to declining fertility rates in Australia and a corresponding belief that increased births were necessary to balance population age levels and encourage economic growth (Guest 2007). he number of women without children is growing in Australia, and it is important to note that this group includes women who experience being child-free as a voluntarily chosen state, and women who have no children due to involuntary reasons (Rich et al. 2011). As a recent Australian study demonstrates, being child-free frequently serves as a discrediting attribute, often associated with selishness or a lesser inherent capacity for care or compassion (Rich et al. 2011). Such beliefs are evident in a statement about the Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, by politician Mark Latham, who contended that ‘anyone who chooses a life without children, as Gillard has, cannot have much love in them’ (Wright 2011). Julia Gillard’s reproductive status was also a matter deemed appropriate for comment by politician Bill Hefernan in 2007. In remarks that he later apologised for, Hefernan described Gillard as ‘deliberately barren’ and thus not having experienced ‘one of the great understandings in a community’, namely ‘family and the relationship between mums, dads and a bucket of nappies’ (Harrison 2007). As the second comment suggests, pronatalist rhetoric can invoke and naturalise the heterosexual nuclear family model as the speciic location for birth and child rearing. In calling for an increase to the birth rate, Peter Costello similarly seemed to invoke and naturalise this model when he urged Australians to have ‘one for mum, one for dad, and one for the country’ (Ryan 2010). While policies such as the baby bonus might have provided inancial incentives to encourage births, changes to the single parent payment in 2012 by the federal government demonstrate a lack of substantive ongoing inancial support for those raising children outside the nuclear family model. In the Richmond–Tweed region of New South Wales, which has a higher percentage of single parent families than the national average, these cuts particularly impact women, who head approximately 210 211 ninety percent of single parent families in this region (Flynn 2012). In addition to a loss of income support, Sain (ABC News 2012b) notes that low-on efects caused by payment restructuring will also cause some single parents receiving government payments to lose inancial incentives to undertake study. As Peatling (2012) contends, the term ‘single parent families’ can be seen as ‘a form of dog whistling’, that speciically relates to women who are popularly represented as ‘deadbeat, welfare-dependent druggie mums who are probably playing the pokies and have lax morals’. As this suggests, women who raise children outside normative nuclear family bounds can be marginalised or demonised in ways that position single parent families at the bottom of the ‘hierarchy of families’ (Peatling 2012). his also shows that simplistic divisions between women who do, and do not, have children, fail to acknowledge the central role of socioeconomics in shaping diferent experiences of motherhood. On this point, hooks (2000, p. 42), argues that while welfare cuts for women who are sole parents evidences the ‘feminization of poverty’, women who are not directly impacted by such cuts have consistently failed to engage in widespread protest against such forms of governmental ‘assault’ on marginalised women. For hooks, this failure demonstrates how feminisms that focus only upon the concerns and ambitions of white, middle-class women betray solidarity across class and/or race lines. In suggesting how this might be addressed, hooks calls for feminists who hold privileged positions to use their skills and resources to contribute to forms of action that might achieve radical and lasting change, such as the development of housing co-operatives for low-income women. When ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ are conlated, female subjects are required to have children in order to be seen as having an interpretable sex and sexuality: one that represents an enactment of their “natural” state. Conversely, this logic also positions women without children as ‘unnatural’ or ‘unwomanly’ (Rich et al. 2011). Yet, as a marginalised identity position, being a voluntarily child-free woman can also ofer ‘generative potential’ at the boundaries of hegemonic heterosexuality (Hockey et al. 2007, p. 115). Here, rather than conceptualising reproduction as a “natural” state to be achieved, a counter discourse represents being child free as “natural”, as it is a state experienced, at some stage in life, by all people (Rich et al. 2011). Importantly, “natural” can be a problematic concept if it seeks to “explain” childlessness in solely biological terms that do not consider cultural, social, economic and environmental factors that may inform decisions about voluntary childlessness. Further, as shared experiences of childlessness are primarily experienced in young age, assertions of “naturalness” can represent childfree women as immature. While voluntary childlessness is often presented in negative terms, some of the positive aspects identiied by voluntarily childless subjects include a lack of demand on time, inances and emotional resources necessitated by parenting, and the ability to experience relationships with intimate partners without a parenting element in this engagement (Cain 2001). In my lived experience, I believe this range of beneits, particularly the lack of need to direct time, emotional and inancial resources to parenting, supports other conditions that enable me to maintain ‘diferently conigured cultural relations’ (Harding 1998, p. 98). My decision not to have children has been primarily guided by a consistent lack of desire to experience pregnancy or childbirth or mother a child, 212 213 in addition to a dislike of babies; feelings that I have experienced from an early age. Dislike of children is a strong social taboo, as ‘[n]ot bearing a child is blasphemous enough, not liking them is tantamount to infanticide’, so women who are voluntarily child-free for this reason are sometimes represented as having an inherent lack of compassion or love (Cain 2001 p. 21). Yet, an alternative perspective would suggest that recognising adverse feelings towards motherhood or children, and choosing not to have children because of this, evidences an ethical decision in the face of sustained cultural and social pressure to mother. Further, rather than feeling that I inherently lack the ability to express care, compassion or love, I actively seek to express these emotions through a dispersed range of interpersonal relationships. Critically, my experience of living as a child-free and non-monogamous woman is facilitated by an ongoing ability to access methods of artiicial contraception, particularly barrier protection, which prevents conception and reduces risk of sexually transmitted infection. As this illustrates, subject positions that seem voluntarily chosen are enabled or constrained by broader conditions that shape the lives of individual subjects. In Australia, the 2006 parliamentary clash over RU486, known as the abortion pill, illustrates the role of government in shaping such conditions. After a heated debate, responsibility for RU486 was returned to the herapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) from the control of Tony Abbott, Minister for Health at that time, who had exercised a ministerial veto over it, efectively banning it from use in Australia (Taylor 2012). In discussing the vote to transfer responsibility for RU486 back to the TGA, Senator Lyn Allison noted that it was ‘ … overwhelmingly carried by women. It’s certainly the case that the case against was largely that of men and men in the Coalition party’ (McMurtrie 2006). hus, the vote on RU486 can be viewed as a contemporary link to the one of the enduring insights of feminism: that denial of bodily integrity through lack of reproductive choice is central to many women’s oppression (Gordon 1973). In Australia, abortion laws are state or territory based, evidencing a broad disparity in the conditions and terms that enable women to access pregnancy termination services (Abortion Legal Support 2012). Costs of medical abortion also evidence disparity, with women in regional areas of Queensland paying more for these services (Children by Choice 2012). RU486 will therefore potentially prove important for women who live in regional and remote areas with low or no access to surgical abortion, although questions of cost and availability remain unknown at this stage (Pineda 2012). RU486 is also arguably important as a means to counter the consequences of ‘reproductive coercion’, which includes a variety of behaviours (e.g. the sabotage of contraceptive devices) by men to promote unwanted pregnancies in their intimate partners (Miller et al. 2010). Critically, reproductive coercion is strongly linked to the experience of women who are subject to intimate partner abuse and violence, as these women experience higher levels of unintended pregnancy and are often compromised in their ability to make decisions about contraceptive use and family planning (ibid). Such issues of control, power and violence in relation to women’s reproductive capacities can be seen as highly relevant to the Partial Defence of Provocation, located in the Crimes Act of 1900. In contemporary Australia, New South Wales is one of the few 214 215 emaining Australian states not to have signiicantly revised this defence (Martin 2012). Partial Defence of Provocation enables a claim that speech or behaviour (including committing, or admitting to have committed “adultery”, or behaving “promiscuously”) by an intimate partner can be provocative enough to induce a response of murderous rage. While largely being employed in cases where men have killed their female partners, this defence can also be applied in situations involving a non-violent homosexual advance, arguably serving to put the victim on trial and condone homophobia (Martin 2012). In relation to heterosexual partnerships, this legal defence promotes understandings that sexual jealousy triggers caused by the actions of women can have speciic and extreme efects upon their heterosexual male intimate partners.  In understanding the broader ideologies that support this position, “natural” sexual diferences between men and women, as advanced by evolutionary psychology, provide insight. Here, the equation of “woman” with “mother” is enmeshed in explanations of human behaviour, with the perceived reproductive capabilities of women playing a central role in diferences between women and men. his is seen in an article about ‘Human Mate Guarding’ by Buss (2002, p. 25), who argues that men become more ‘distressed’ than women by indicators of inidelity due to the threat of ‘genetic cuckoldry’ which would jeopardise the certainty of their paternity status. While Buss does identify potential losses that may accrue to women whose partners “cheat”, he argues that sexual inidelity provokes a diferent, and higher, response in men than women. Such arguments can serve to rationalise male violence towards women, representing it as a “response” to particular kinds of provocation. In doing so, the ‘instrumental’ role of violence as a means of reinstating an assumed propriety right to the body of an intimate other is elided (Martin 2012). If viewed as an instrument of power, rather than a provoked response, murder might be understood as the ultimate means of preventing ‘the permanent defection of a male’s partner’ (Buss 2002, p. 28). While state laws throughout most of Australia have signiicantly revised or removed the Partial Defence of Provocation, a recent analysis of court cases in Victoria, which banned this defence in 2005, found that some judges still evidenced lingering sympathy to notions of provocation (Elder 2012). his demonstrates that although laws may change, notions that women’s inidelity can cause a speciic and heightened response in their heterosexual male partners may continue. Such beliefs entrench patriarchal notions of ownership and control that continue to have detrimental, even fatal, consequences for women. As Vance (1984) reminds us, while it is important to understand, and consistently struggle to change, the patriarchal structures that shape women’s lives, it is also important not to limit engagement solely to this arena. Focusing exclusively on women’s experiences of sex as they relate to oppression and violence necessarily neglects accounts of resistance, inadvertently increasing ‘the sexual terror and despair in which women live’ (Vance 1984, p. 1). Segal (1994) argues that sexual pleasure can function as a powerful source of resistance to morally conservative discourses that disavow and punish women’s sexual autonomy. Supporting this, the need for accounts of non-abusive experiences of heterosex has been identiied by Smart (1996) who also points out that language available to describe sexuality is rigid and may limit the communicative vocabulary that women have to describe their experiences of sex. 216 217 In relation to this, the function of language to advance male dominance and female passivity is highlighted by Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1994a, p. 446) who point to the dominant meanings that have accrued to heterosex, such as women being ‘had’, ‘taken’ or ‘fucked’. Importantly, Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1994a) exclusively deine heterosex as penile-vaginal penetration and argue that pleasure in heterosex is based on an eroticisation of gendered power diference between male domination and female submission. hus, in their analysis of queer attempts to ‘rehabilitate’ heterosexuality, the authors present gender fucking (performative acts that illustrate sex and gender as constructed, rather than natural) as being about ‘parody, pastiche and exaggeration’ (Kitzinger & Wilkinson 1994a, p. 454). Yet, as gender fucking in heterosex can occur through practices such as the anal ‘penetration’ of men by women, restraining analysis of heterosex to instances of penile-vaginal penetration necessarily ignores practices that evidence luidity in conventional gender roles and challenges the hegemony of the dominant male/submissive female binary. Further, through participation in such practices, heterosexual men can be seen to perform a subversive role in stalling the dominant system of normative heterosexuality through refusing to fully participate in hetero-masculine culture (Heasley 2005). Rather than representing an attempt to delect critical analysis, as Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1994a) suggest, a focus on pleasure in heterosex can be used to advance an explicitly political stance. As Abramson and Pinkerton (1995, p. 54) argue, sexual pleasure is never an isolated, individual occurrence, it ‘bears witness’ to other critical behaviours and social systems. In polyamory and relational anarchy, non-monogamous sexual bonds can serve as means to establish or cement diferent kinds of relationship practices and destabilise the mononormative underpinnings of heteronormativity. Here, non-reproductive sexualities (which could arguably include heterosexuals who are voluntarily childless) work to challenge ‘lines of continuity between male and female bodies, masculinity and femininity’, rendering the heterosexual economy ‘liable to erosion’ (Harding 1998, p. 46). Heterosexual women who hold subjectivities that beneit from race and class privilege, such as myself, can potentially experience increased opportunities to seek relationships and sexual encounters that ofer scope for experimentation. Such experimentation facilitates practice in relating diferently to intimate others in a range of ways, including reconceptualisations of heterosex and engaging in new modes of sexual practice. Indeed, dissatisfaction with or alienation from normative understandings of heterosex has historically led to a search for alternatives by female subjects, such as Elmina Slenker, a nineteenth-century Quaker reformer. Slenker advanced a theory of ‘Dianaism’ that encouraged sexual contact of all kinds between heterosexual subjects, except penetrative intercourse. his vision developed from the material conditions of Slenker’s lived experience as a female subject who experienced gender-based inequality in economic, legal, social and cultural spheres, and she sought to address this inequality while also valuing her desire for sexual pleasure. In Dianaism, Slenker developed a creative solution that facilitated both ‘voluntary motherhood’ and the expression of sexual desire without use of any contraception method, including abstinence (Gordon 218 219 1973). hus, Slenker can be seen to have advanced an alternative sex ethic, in which male sexuality was conceptualised outside the markers of erection and penetration, and female sexuality was conceptualised outside the bonds of service to men, sharing a reconiguration of heterosex that challenged ‘sexist thinking by both men and women’ (hooks 2000, p. 90). Ince (2005) argues that patriarchal, ethnic and religious hierarchies and bureaucracies all evidence erotophobia, which is expressed through a mutually causal efect of sexual attitudes and political structures. Within this efect, a subject’s compliance to control mechanisms is frequently achieved by forms of self-regulation and censure, rather than overt policing or prosecution. In considering this, anarchist writings represent sexual freedom and political freedom as entwined goals, as internal repression in ‘personal’ life and willingness to accept political controls enacted by others are seen as consistent behaviours (Kinna 2005). Anarchism thus grounds politics in everyday thought and action, necessarily including, and valuing, sexual pleasure. In sharing lived experience, sex and sexuality can be revealed as sites of anarchist experimentation which show processes of questioning, struggle and/or learning about the enactment of non-oppressive and non-hierarchical connections with others (Kinna 2005). Anarchism provides a way of thinking that encourages subjects, including those who experience privilege and can thus live relatively easily and comfortably within democratic societies, to acknowledge and confront the social systems and hierarchies of power that control and regulate their lives. In addressing these issues, anarchists work for broad and systemic change in connection with others, demonstrating an ongoing commitment to political action in diverse spheres (Kinna 2005). Here, the concept of direct action is especially valuable, as those who are implicated in or impacted by a particular issue take action to achieve change, rather than relying on indirect forms of appeal. Direct action is therefore undertaken with intent to succeed in creating change, not simply to draw attention to an issue, or express dissatisfaction (Kinna 2005). In the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, where I live, I am a member of a non-violent direct action group that opposes Coal Seam Gas (CSG). In the Northern Rivers, as in other parts of Australia, and elsewhere in the world, large scale community protest actions against CSG are currently occurring. In a poll conducted during local government elections in 2012, more than 87% of Lismore voters answered that they did not want CSG exploration or extraction in their region (Turnbull & MacKenzie 2012). Shortly after, and despite this result, the NSW state government released a Strategic Regional Land Use policy on CSG and enabled new and renewed licenses for CSG activity across New South Wales, including the Northern Rivers (Broome 2012). Importantly, action against CSG in the Northern Rivers seems largely situated in a desire to enact change through existing mechanisms of governmental control, such as laws that enable mining exploration and extraction. his approach informs the direct action group I am involved with, which seeks to enact democratic change. Although this group does not express any ailiation to anarchist thought or politics, it evidences principles of anarchist organisation and cooperation, such as free association and 220 221 oluntary disassociation (there are no formal mechanisms to facilitate joining or leaving the group) and non-hierarchical structure (e.g. people can take turns facilitating meetings, if they wish, and everyone has an equal say). hrough being part of this group, I experience direct action as a practical and meaningful way to participate in collective political action for change. While this group contains people with diferent political beliefs, it ofers me an opportunity to participate with others in my geographic community while also my asserting personal opposition to the actions of mining corporations, which I believe may potentially enact signiicant environmental harm.  As my engagement with anarchist thought has been largely facilitated through readings about sex and sexuality, especially the work of Jamie Heckert, I have come to situate my lived experience of polyamory in a more holistic political context. his has encouraged me to think about the material conditions and privileges that support my ability to practice polyamory, and prompted questioning that has facilitated a growing engagement with relational anarchy as a progression of this practice. In addition, examining my “personal life” has ultimately encouraged an increase in active political engagement with others in broader spheres, such as taking direct action against CSG. Relecting upon this, I believe that a critical engagement with my lived experience has provided an impetus to reconigure and expand my concept of erotic connection, particularly through engaging with an erotics of everyday life (Heckert forthcoming). hrough this, I have experienced the dynamic connection between the personal and the political: a connection that I feel has ultimately called me ‘… away from isolation and alienation into community’ (hooks 2000, p. 92). 222 223 exhalation : the end of the word  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajy1xNB-LkI 225 Overheard during a train journey: ‘How do I know you love me?’ ‘Because I buy you chips and fuck you’.  hat kind of chips? Probably not woodchips. Are ‘chips’ potato crisps or fries? If hot chips are being referred to, is the use of condiments some kind of safe sex pact? Or perhaps gravy or tomato sauce or vinegar require extended sexual engagement; beyond simply being the fuckee for the fucker. Words can mean diferent things depending on context and location. Take ‘fanny’ for example: arse in one country, vagina in another (one should always clarify before proceeding if both options are present). Sexuality is not just about who puts what where with whom. Sex goes beyond appendages and oriices. It is a system, a way of making and circulating meaning. It is social, it is cultural, it is a construct. From this recounted, overheard exchange on a train, I am left wondering whether fucking is something we must always do to others: we must fuck or be fucked. Or in some ways, at some times, might, perhaps, we be fucking with each other? Who is this “we” I write of? Who does it include? Who does it exclude? those in intergenerational relationships? consanguineous relationships? people who have sex in public spaces? humans who have sex with non-human animals? people who experience sexual pleasure with buildings? people who enjoy BDSM? fetishists? voyeurs? sado-masochists? exhibitionists? I reject a blanket disavowal of relationship types, sexual object choices or sexual acts just because they are popularly believed to be “strange” or even “immoral”. I follow Rubin’s (1984, p. 153) argument that the morality of sexual acts is located in ‘the way partners treat each other, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion, and the quantity and quality of the pleasures they provide’. This framework replaces absolutes with complexity and ambiguity: making judgements according to the particularities, desires and intents of the individuals who engage with each other, and the power dynamics within their relationship. Thus, the “we” I speak of is not determined by pre-set boundaries, and may include people who fuck in ways that I do not, or in ways that I might not like, nor even understand. I hope to ind solidarity with you. I hope you might ind it with me. 226 227 n? seclusion? confusion? difusion? CONCLUSION: é 228 In the printed thesis, this is a mirror é 229 Please give me of your hands. Please tell me of your mouth. Wrap me in brown paper, fastened with coarse bindings: nothing should protrude that may interfere with other postal items, nor damage sorting mechanisms. I may be inspected by customs unfamiliar. Upon my knees, I beg of you: let me rest. I am weakened by this aphrodisiac of alphabet Soup. Yet, I must condense and edit and reduce and simplify and reine and cut and purge and starve and waste and punish and restrict, to rise again, remade anew. A deathbed recantation: set me down to infathomable depths, a stitch through my nose to be sure. 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It examines the tensions and pleasures of beneiting from heterosexual privilege while simultaneously being marginalised by mononormativity and pronatalism, revealing a liminal subject position within heteronormative discourses. In examining this position, the concept of queer, or non-normative, heterosexuality, is engaged. As this indicates, the research is informed by queer theory, and additionally draws from feminist and anarchist perspectives, evidencing a polyamorous relationship with theory. Further, the project employs a polyamorous research approach, using writing as a method of inquiry, facilitated through poststructuralist autoethnography, and deconstructive textual practices. This work transverses disciplinary boundaries, drawing from cultural studies, writing, and graphic design to present a lively and experimental text. Including three autoethnographic chapters, with a critical essay accompanying each, this thesis is presented as an open text that invites conversation, or dialogue, with the reader.