Non/Monogamy

The focus of this chapter will be to outline intimate privilege and why it might be important to consider this form of privileging in discussions about non-monogamy.

(This is a pre-typesetting and final copyedit draft of this paper, originally published in Understanding Non-Monogamies (2010).)

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre are well known for their openly non-monogamous relationship: something which is reflected upon in the many biographies which have been written about their lives. Clearly de Beauvoir and Sartre's existential thinking influenced their relationship philosophy, and their relational experience reflected back into their work, notably in de Beauvoir's fiction such as She Came to Stay and her work on gender such as The Second Sex. The themes of freedom and responsibility, relational conflict, objectification, and the possibility of mutual relationships, flow throughout their major philosophical works, notably Being and Nothingness (Sartre) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (de Beauvoir).

This chapter explores the forms of open non-monogamy which have emerged in recent years, including open relationships, swinging, and polyamory (multiple relationships), providing a brief overview of their history and key practices. These relationship forms will then be explored in the context of existential perspectives on relating and more recent theories of intersubjectivity. We examine the potentials, in monogamous, and non-monogamous modes of relating, for mutuality and the embracing of freedom (of self and other), as well as the limitations of this, and whether relationship structure – in itself – is enough to forge a different way of relating.

Most social scientific work on intimate relationships has assumed a monogamous structure, or has considered anything other than monogamy only in the context of 'infidelity'. Yet, in recent years there has been a growing interest among researchers and the public in exploring various patterns of intimacy that involve open non-monogamy. This volume gathers contributions from academics, activists, and practitioners throughout the world to explore non-monogamous relationships. Featuring both empirical and theoretical pieces, contributors examine the history and cultural basis of various forms of non-monogamy, experiences of non-monogamous living, psychological understandings of relationship patterns, language and emotion, the discursive construction of mono-normativity as well as issues of race, class, disability, sexuality and gender. This volume will be of interest to academics and practitioners working in the social sciences and anyone who is seeking greater insight into the intricacies of non-monogamous relationships.

This study contributes to the development of nascent bisexual theology by examining bisexual women’s lives in relation to the stereotype that bisexuals desire concurrent male and female partners.  Building on qualitative email interviews with forty bisexual women in the Greater Toronto Area, this thesis finds that monogamy and polyamory function as strategic identities.  If bisexual theology is to speak authentically to the needs of bisexual women, it must provide a critical analysis of these identities, understand and respond to their role in shaping communities, moral agency and theological knowledge.

The sexual adventures of television characters. Dating websites for married women. News reports on raids of polygamous communities. Reality shows about polyamorists. It seems that non- monogamy is everywhere: in popular culture, in the news, and before the courts.

In Fraught Intimacies, Nathan Rambukkana delves into North American society’s fixation with monogamy and its attendant fascination with non-monogamy. Drawing on media coverage, popular culture, and recent court cases, he examines how polygamy, adultery, and polyamory are represented in the public sphere and the effect this in having on intimate relationships and aspects of contemporary Western society.
As this book demonstrates, although monogamy is considered and presented as the norm in Western society, many kinds of sexual and romantic relationships exist within its borders. Rambukkana’s intricate analysis reveals how some forms of non-monogamy are tacitly accepted, even glamourized, while others are vilified and reviled. By questioning what this says how about intimacy, power and privilege, this book offers an innovative framework for understanding the place of non-monogamy in Western society, particularly in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and citizenship status.

Timely and controversial, this book makes a stimulating and sophisticated argument for why we need to reconsider how we talk – and think – about non-monogamy.

Full text available (open access) via link above  (or copy paste: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/view/4955 )

This article develops case studies from qualitative interviews with people in negotiated non-monogamous relationships to ask what discursive or practical factors besides non/monogamy might play a role in assessments of a relationship’s structure or worth. Beginning with an auto-ethnographic reflection on the way the ‘significance’ was recognised and misrecognised in one polyamorous ‘thrupple’, I introduce three case studies of people in negotiated non-monogamous relationships in order to bring a cultural studies method of the particular to the study of intimacy. For the individuals in these case studies, the practice and experience of non/monogamy is inextricably linked to the ideas and practices surrounding gender, sexuality, sex work, friendship, HIV status and ability. Sketching a middle path between the romantic’s dream of love as a state of exception or exemption from the social and the theorist’s map of the patterned effects of hetero- and mono-normativities, this article attends to the contingency, flexibility and incoherence which so often underpins the sense we make of relationships, even as that sense is shaped by the practices, ideals and institutions of intimacy, love and friendship.

Cardoso, D. (2015). Del amor a la amistad: la política de las relaciones. In S. Cendal (Ed.), M. Pérez (Trans.), (h)amor2 (pp. 53–66). Madrid: Continta Me Tienes.


From love to friendship: The politics of relating

Daniel Cardoso

It was not that long ago that I read Judith Butler’s text on “Doubting Love”. It had a lasting impact on me. Rather than trying to come up with one way to define love or to deconstruct the various meanings of love, Butler inverts the question, and posits love as something that can be used as a resource to ask more questions. Love – the question of what love is – becomes a possible starting point for questioning one’s epistemological certainties.

Drawing on Freud, Butler points out that, as love is constructed as a fundamental element of human existence, doubting love means the obligation of doubting everything else. According to the philosopher, “love always returns us to what we do and do not know”. One thing that seems to go unmentioned – perhaps of imposed brevity – is how to doubt the centrality of love itself, and how to doubt about which kind(s) of love are so central.

Though Butler is not explicit about it, there seems to be an undertone of romantic love associated with that text - the idea that the infatuation and power that is usually associated with romantic love (in a sense, the core notions behind this can be linked to the heterosexual matrix of the reproductive love) is somehow indicative of an essential dimension of the subject. It is around this romantic love that seems to grow a necessity for speaking the truth about oneself and one’s love (in addition to, rather than in spite of, Foucault’s analysis about the ‘truth’ of one’s sexuality). Even if Butler did not intend it as such, this undertone of romantic love does not dispel the notion that this kind of love is especially, uniquely, powerful or central.

Read more: http://danielscardoso.net/index.php/pt/homepage/77-ptwebsite/academia/197-del-amor-a-la-amistad-la-politica-de-las-relaciones

This chapter discusses the recent literature  on “open non-monogamies,” or non-monogamous arrangements that are known-about by at the very least all the involved intimate partners. (This specifically excludes a consideration of the growing parallel literature on “secret non-monogamies” (e.g., infidelity, adultery and cheating) addressed in relation to monogamy and marriage in Ziegler, Conley, Moors, Matsick, & Rubin, Monogamy, this volume.)
This growing field comprises work on polyamory (discursively “ethical” or consensual non-monogamy); on polygamy (plural marriage, usually—but not exclusively—polygynous: Muslim, Christian and other); on swinging (sometimes known as “The Lifestyle”, a subculture devoted to casual open sex); and on non-monogamies outside of these three major formulations. This last category includes open marriages and relationships; alternative marital arrangements, sometimes referred to as “swapping”  or co-marital sex; “friends with benefits”; group sex (e.g., threesomes, orgies); open-sex commune experiments (e.g., the Oneida intentional community); and otherwise-unnamed non-monogamous intimate practices such as those that can occur in some lesbian, gay, bisexual and kink subcultures. Finally, it also includes work that considers non-monogamies broadly across these categories. These practices have different histories, etymologies, facets and politics. Some of these practices are thousands of years old, some are merely decades old and some are just being fleshed out; some have their origins in religion or spirituality, others in a staunch and iconoclastic secularism. Taken together, however, they form a present and undeniable facet of contemporary intimacy that has been growing in prominence and significance in the public sphere and public culture since at least the early 1990s (Rambukkana, in press). Engaging with open non-monogamies is no longer something relegated to societal margins in the life of western societies; it has shifted to be a part of the centre—albeit a part that sits somewhat uneasily with current normative frameworks. With definite parallels to the more-firmly-established shift that brought LGBT* and queer  lifestyles into the mainstream and that have made same-sex marriage a reality (or present struggle) in a growing number of countries, this cultural movement creates tensions and new problematics in psychology and cognate fields.
Major issues relating to psychology involve the following: a) The status of open non-monogamies in relation to normative social psychology (with implications within applied psychology for individual, “couples” and family practitioners; b) The theoretical questioning of the notion of healthy romantic love between more than two people; c) The effects of non-monogamy (and polygamy particularly) on women; d) The effects of multiple partner parenting on children, communities and society; and e) The psychological exploration of the minutia of non-monogamous living (e.g., the psychology of overcoming jealousy, and of non-normative relationship dynamics/structures such as “compersion,” “sister wives,” “triads” and “New Relationship Energy” ).
Debates within this literature are linked to divides such as those between mononormative and anti-mononormative perspectives ; on all of swinging, polygamy and polyamory; between activist and critical approaches to polyamory; between pro-legalizing and pro-criminalization approaches to polygamy, and between and among multiple forms of open non-monogamy (for example, privileging polyamory over polygamy and swinging, or the identification of “non-monogamous” over “polyamorous”).
Implications are discussed for such wider fields as counselling and therapy, law, media and representation, urban and social planning, and politics; and for academic fields such as Sociology, LGBT* and queer Studies, Kink studies, Critical Race Studies, Women’s Studies, History, Religious Studies, Communication Studies, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Politics and Medicine. 
The future of work on open non-monogamies is also briefly touched on including new categories of analysis and emergent forms such as “the new monogamy”, polygamy legalization, “non-monogamous” as identification, poly children growing up, further impacts of new marriage legislation in different countries, more cross-cultural and cross-categorical work, and the impact of changing demographics.

Keynote at the 1st International Queering Partnering Conference, dealing with an affective analysis of the rise of poly-activism in Portugal, and with the importance of constituting archives of the situated rise of poly-activism throughout the world, taking into account how the political becomes personal, and how this personal (affective) dimension is fundamental to understanding activism and subactivism.

In this paper I make an analysis of the dominant ideas on love in Belgian society, based on the narratives of men and women in (predominantly heterosexual) non-monogamous relationships. The narratives of these men and women show that although their practices do not conform to the ideal of the monogamous couple relationship, they often reproduce the gendered power relations inherent in the romantic love complex, thereby privileging the doctrine of detached individualism and invulnerability over notions of responsibility and care. Building on feminist critiques of the romantic love complex, this paper questions the subversive potential of these non-monogamous lifestyles as they seemingly fail to adequately challenge underlying patriarchal structures and mechanisms. The paper proposes an ethics of intersubjective vulnerability, which is defined by both a critical disposition and responsiveness to our own vulnerability and the vulnerability of others, as a prerequisite for radically rethinking love.

This dissertation uses genealogical discourse analysis to unpack recent Western conceptions of monogamy and non-monogamy in the public sphere. Beginning from the premise that discourses surrounding monogamy and non-monogamy (taken together as a system of non/monogamy) have come into particular prominence in recent years, this dissertation deploys a thread of queer theory focused on the study of broader conceptions of “intimacy” to explore the ramifications of such a prominence in the public sphere. More specifically, drawing on theorizations of spatiality (Temporary Autonomous Zones, Mapping/Reterritorialization, Heterotopia) and the concept of “privilege”, I formulate the theoretical lens of “intimate privilege” to explore how non/monogamy is distributed throughout, takes up, and creates forms of intimate space.
In exploding the overly-simple notion that monogamous sexuality is societally privileged, while non-monogamies are marginalized, I show how while there is a societal meta-narrative that centres monogamy, it is really the intersectionality of non/monogamy with other forms of privilege/oppression that truly locates a subject practicing (or connected to) non-monogamous intimacy as having intimate privilege, defined as the emergent state in which one’s intimacies hold societal privilege.
Engaging in theoretical and discursive analyses of the contemporary public sphere presences of three major forms of non-monogamy (adultery, polygamy and polyamory) through texts such as journalistic articles, policy documents, self-help literature, television programs and Internet sites, I continue the academic discussion surrounding non-monogamies that is just beginning to come into its own in the fields of social science and humanities, as well as to complicate less-nuanced discourses on non/monogamy that are circulating more broadly in the public sphere.