Polyamory, Monogamy, and American Dreams

The Stories We Tell about Poly Lives and the Cultural Production of Inequality

Mimi Schippers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138895034
• eBook ISBN: 9781351717113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

This book introduces "the poly gaze" as a cultural tool to examine how representations of polyamory and poly lives reflect or challenge cultural hegemonies of race, class, gender, and nation.

What role does monogamy play in American Identity, the American dream, and U.S. exceptionalism? How do the stories we tell about intimate relationships do cultural and ideological work to maintain and legitimize social inequalities along the lines of race, ethnicity, nation, religion, class, gender and sexuality? How might the introduction of polyamory or consensually non-monogamous relationships in the stories we tell about intimacy confound, disrupt or shift the meaning of what constitutes a good, American life? These are the questions that Mimi Schippers focuses on in this original and engaging study. As she develops the poly gaze, Schippers argues for a sociologically informed and cultivated lens with which anyone, regardless of their experiences with polyamory or consensual non-monogamy, can read culture, media images, and texts against hegemony.

This will be a key text for researchers and students in Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Studies, Media Studies, American Studies and Sociology. This book is accessible and indispensable reading for undergraduate student and postgraduates wanting to gain greater understanding of debates around the key concept of heteronormativity.

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INTRODUCTION TO THE POLY GAZE

Mononormative narrative, poly narrative, and social inequality

This is a book about the stories collectively told in U.S. culture about intimate relationships, happiness, citizenship, and living a good life. Specifically, my focus is on how media representations of poly relationships, from polygamy and polyamory to sexual relationships in campus hookup cultures and sex clubs, portray non-monogamy as un-American, unsustainable, a curious anomaly, an immature phase, or, in some cases, as a viable choice or a political alternative to heteronormative monogamy. By focusing on several different kinds of texts, I hope to develop a conceptual framework for reading media with what I am calling a poly gaze. ¹

Poly is, for my purposes in this book, a broader term than “polyamorous.” Polyamory is a very specific and contemporary label for the practice of having more than one significant, emotionally and/or sexually intimate partner. Although people have been forging non-monogamous, anti-monogamous, and plural (poly) relationships throughout history and across cultures, the word “polyamory” wasn’t coined until 1999 and has become a subculture only in the last decade or so (Ritchie and Barker 2006; Sheff 2014). In the United States, Canada, the UK, and other Western European contexts, polyamory is emerging as an increasingly viable and visible relationship structure. Several books outline what polyamory is (e.g. Anapol 2010: Easton and Hardy 2009; Sheff 2014), how to pursue and maintain polyamorous relationships (Taormino 2008; Veaux and Rickert 2014), the socio-political significance of polyamory (Rambukkana 2015; Schippers 2016; Willey 2016), and there is a growing body of research on polyamorists, polyamorous relationships, and polyamorous families (Pallotta-Chiarolli 2010; Sheff 2014).

While the poly gaze can offer insight into representations of polyamory per se, in Polyamory, Monogamy, and American Dreams, the poly in “poly relationships” also includes relationships in which no one identifies as a polyamorist or calls the relationship polyamory. Poly refers to relationships between more than two adults who feel an affinity toward or kinship with each other, and they share some kind of mutual, if temporary, interdependence and responsibility. In other words, the label poly, as I’m using it, identifies a relationship structure with particular features, not an identity, subculture, or label adopted by people to distinguish their relationships from other kinds of relationships.

One of the goals in this book, then, is to identify and reveal poly resonances. To develop the concept poly resonances, I am building on the groundbreaking work of Przybylo and Cooper (2014) on archiving asexual resonances. Describing their project, they write, “we are attuned less to self-identified asexual figures than to asexual ‘resonances’—or traces, touches instances—allowing us to search for asexuality in unexpected places” (298). In a similar way, I am not searching for polyamorists in the media texts I cover here, but instead for poly moments, resonances, and attachments in order to search for poly relating in unexpected places. Przybylo and Cooper (2014) go on to say, “Such a queer broadening of what can ‘count’ as asexuality, especially historically speaking, creates space for unorthodox and unpredictable understandings and manifestations of asexuality” (298). I follow their lead, but instead of focusing on asexuality, I will focus on broadening what “counts” as poly configurations of kinship, attachment, commitment, and desire in order to identify what poly resonances do in the stories we tell about relationships.

Despite my shift from asexuality to poly relationships, I will not completely jettison Przybylo and Cooper’s focus on asexuality. I am compelled by their suggestion that we, as queer and feminist theorists, must search for these moments and resonances of asexuality in order to rethink the centrality of sex in feminist and queer theory, and that “queerness should be reworked and rethought from asexual perspectives” (298). Taking their suggestion seriously, I will argue that contemporary definitions of polyamory rely too heavily on romance and sex. By including representations of asexual or non-romantic poly relationships in my analysis, I hope to encourage others to imagine that poly connections and interdependencies show up in all kinds of relationships, not just between romantic partners and lovers. Ela Przybylo writes of her poly relationships:

My most meaningful community formations have also been poly-asexual, though tense with affective togetherness. Asexuality manifests itself in the premium I place on friendships, broadly understood, as well as on myself. In this sense asexuality multiplies and configures relationship formations.

(Przybylo and Cooper 2014: 297)

By including representations of poly-asexual relationships under the rubric of poly relationships, especially in my discussion of queer poly narratives, I hope to expand what we mean when we speak of representations of poly relationships.

Przybylo and Cooper (2014) conclude by saying, “Only through reading asexually can we expand and newly trouble queer understandings of intimacy, polyamory, partnership, kinship, and singleness and also trace asexuality in unexpected, and perhaps even undesirable, locations” (304). By incorporating Przybylo and Cooper’s call to engage in a “queerly asexual reading strategy” (299), the poly gaze is very much about reading poly-queerly in ways that expand and trouble queer understandings of intimacy and kinship.

The poly gaze and reading queerly

In his classic text in queer media studies, Making Everything Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture, Alexander Doty argues for reading media texts and popular culture through a queer lens. Describing the relationship between queerness and media, Doty writes,

the queerness of mass culture develops in three areas: (1) influences during the production of texts; (2) historically specific cultural readings and uses of texts by self-identified gays, lesbians, bisexuals, queers; and (3) adopting reception positions that can be considered “queer” in some way, regardless of a person’s declared sexual and gender allegiances.

(Doty 1993: xi)

Queer readings are concerned with who produces texts, who is interpreting them, and how adopting a specifically queer interpretive lens can reveal queerness in texts that are not necessarily produced by or for gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, or queer audiences.

Reading queerly as developed by Doty is a conscious and cultivated interpretive standpoint available to anyone. In this book, I develop the conceptual tools with which anyone, regardless of their social location or familiarity with polyamory can adopt a poly gaze to see poly resonances. Furthermore, according to Doty, any text is available for queer reading, and reading queerly is no less valid or accurate than other kinds of readings. He writes,

Queer readings aren’t “alternative” readings, wishful or willful misreadings, or “reading too much into things” readings. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along.

(Doty 1993: 16)

In a similar vein, the poly gaze is concerned with recognizing the complex range of poly resonances that have been in media texts of all sorts all along.

Queer theorists focus on intimate relationships as political and ideological constructs (e.g. Ahmed 2006; Halberstam 2005; Rubin 1984; Warner 1999) and media representations of LGBTQ characters and relationships as reinforcing or challenging heteronormativity (see Rodriguez 2019 for a review of this literature). The monogamous couple as an ideal and institutionalized norm for intimate relationships is a central feature of heteronormativity (Schippers 2016), homonormativity (Duggan 2003; Puar 2007), and definitions of U.S. citizenship (Berlant and Warner 1998; Warner 1999). Despite this, most critically queer engagements with media representations have, for the most part, left out an analysis of monogamy and mononormativity (Kean 2015). As guest editors for a special issue on queer media in the journal In Focus, Ahn, Himberg, and Young (2014) write, “A queer approach to media theory and practice has suggested possibilities for challenging—through critical analysis—overlapping structures of patriarchy, nationhood, citizenship, heteronormativity, and the machinations of neoliberal capitalism” (119). The poly gaze, then, reads queerly in that it reveals how media representations of monogamy as moral and non-monogamy or poly relationships as immoral are deeply embedded within and constitutive of heteronormative notions of intimacy, family, citizenship, and morality. In this way, the poly gaze expands queer media studies by combining an eye for seeing poly resonances with a sociological analytic lens for unpacking the deeper social and cultural meanings conveyed in those moments.

The poly gaze and reading sociologically

According to sociologist Stuart Hall (1997), “we give things meaning by how we represent them—the words we use about them, the stories we tell about them, the images of them we produce, the emotions we associate with them, the ways we classify and conceptualize them, and the values we place on them” (3). The stories collectively told through media representations about intimate relationships, including poly lives, are embedded within and constitutive of collective beliefs and values. Collective beliefs and values are important sociologically because they provide legitimating rationales for setting up social structure including how resources are distributed, which groups are considered valued members of society, and who is understood as having a legitimate claim to authority. Media representations and the stories we tell maintain or sometimes reconfigure dominant narratives about what it means to have intimate relationships, foment kinship ties, and build families. One way to read texts about intimate life from a sociological perspective would be, then, identifying how the implicit and explicit messages, images, and meanings conveyed by the text resonate with or work against prevailing meanings and structures of inequality.

The stories told about intimacy, kinship, and family in U.S. popular culture and other media are, with few and isolated exceptions, decidedly mononormative in that they consistently portray monogamous coupling as the very definition of happily-ever-after (Saxey 2010) and non-monogamy, including polyamory, as titillating but also difficult and dangerous (Antalffi 2011; Corey 2017; Ritchie 2010). For instance, Esther Saxey (2010) identifies how fictional narratives are often pre-occupied with non-monogamy as triangulation, temptation, and/or threat. Although these representations offer a glimpse of monogamy as complicated if not vexed, according to Saxey’s analysis, the main function of non-monogamy’s presence is to pose a problem in need of solution rather than a viable way to have relationships. Saxey (2010) concludes, “Because monogamy is conflicted and negotiated in these texts, the reader is consistently engaged in a debate; invited to weigh the evidence, assess the worth of sexual options, and (almost invariably) eventually encouraged to dismiss every option but monogamy” (32). Representations of non-monogamy as immoral, unnatural, undesirable, or potentially dangerous are also present in journalism (Antalffi 2011; Mint 2010) and in scientific research (Conley et al. 2017; Willey 2016). In a mononormative world, we are surrounded by mononormative stories about non-monogamy and poly relationships, and they are often morality narratives that endorse monogamy and de-legitimize poly relationships.

When representations of and narratives about relationships convey the message that monogamous coupling is the key to happiness and non-monogamy is impossible, immature, or dangerous, it steers us toward monogamous coupling as the path to living a happy life. Feminist and queer theorist, Sara Ahmed (2010) adopts a feminist skepticism toward happiness narratives that steer us toward what is presumed to make us happy.

We learn from this history how happiness is used as a technology or instrument, which allows the reorientation of individual desire toward a common good. We…learn from rereading books…how happiness is not simply used to secure social relationship instrumentally but works as an idea or aspiration within everyday life, shaping the very terms through which individuals share their world with others, creating “scripts” for how to live well.

(Ahmed 2010: 59)

One of those scripts orients us toward monogamous coupling as a common good and the key to living well and being happy. Ahmed (2010) writes, “Happiness involves a form of orientation: the very hope for happiness means we get directed in specific ways, as happiness is assumed to follow from some life choices and not others” (54). These scripts often convey and endorse the collective belief in contemporary U.S. culture that the path to good citizenship and happily-ever-after is paved by heterosexual, monogamous coupling (Kipnis 2003; Warner 1999).

The stories we collectively tell also matter sociologically in that they have an effect on how we understand our own place in the social world. Focusing specifically on sexual identities and the coming out stories of lesbian, gay, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction to the poly gaze: Mononormative narrative, poly narrative, and social inequality
• 2. The polygamous other and American identity
• 3. Casual sex on campus: The mononormative narratives told about sexual relationships in heterosexual hookup cultures
• 4. Historical biography and the erasure of poly pasts
• 5. Poly-positive narratives and American sexual exceptionalism
• 6. The (poly) love that dare not speak its name: Poly kinship as a design for living queerly
• 7. Conclusion: From poly reading to poly living: Poly lives in a time of neo-fascism
• References
• Index