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Critical polyamorist blog

Couple-centricity, Polyamory and Colonialism

7/28/2014

17 Comments

 
PictureAmerican Indian Gothic (1983) David P. Bradley
Several evenings ago I attended a class and conversation on open relationships at a feminist sex shop in an increasingly trendy area of my mid-Continent city. The class was for the open relationship curious, or beginners. Although I’ve been at this for about 19 months, I’m still a beginner. My fabulous fellow WOC (woman of color) sex educator friend, Divina, led the course. She also does community activism on a range of other social issues that entangle and go beyond topics of sexuality. In this largely white, middle-class poly community, where I shy away from poly group events because I feel like a cultural outsider, I willingly submit to Divina’s skilled, effusive, and politically sophisticated leadership. Like me, she thinks about the role of compulsory monogamy in propping up a heteronormative, patriarchal, and colonial society. I can jump right in with her—into the politically deepest part of a conversation on this stuff and she’s right there with me. Plus she’s got years more on-the-ground experience in open relationships than I do. This particular class was aimed at a more general audience, however, tackling issues that many Poly 101 classes do—namely handling jealousy and the kind of never-ending communication that is a hallmark of healthy polyamory.

While the heightened racial and cultural diversity at this meeting was encouraging (yay feminist sex shop!), another cultural bias nonetheless loomed large at this event, which I will address in this blog. That is the couple-centric culture that pervades our city’s poly scene, and our broader society. Coupledom is often the foundational assumption that anchors many poly discussions. Topics for conversation at this class included WHY (open the “primary” relationship)? And then ground rules (for the couple) to consider: WHO (can and cannot be a candidate for an additional relationship—mutual friends? Exes)? WHAT (kinds of sex with others does the couple agree is okay)? You get the drift. As a “single poly” person I sat there feeling feisty and thinking “What, are we single polys just out here populating the world to sexually and emotionally serve individuals in couples?!” We get the “honor” of being on lists of appropriate partners, eligible “secondaries.” Or not? Our bodies and hearts and desires get to be the objects of couples’ rules about what’s allowed. Or not? It’s easy to feel ancillary in this type of poly scene, a sort of “snap on” component to a more permanent—a more legitimate—entity.

No doubt many poly folks in primary relationships struggle against hierarchy between that primary relationship and outside relationships. After all, the structure of the couple allows only so much. The language of primary and secondary only allows so much! Even in a Poly worldview that seeks to undo so many of the repressions and exclusions of monogamy, the normativity of the couple itself goes unquestioned by far too many polys. Yet its primacy in our society is engendered of the same institutions and unquestioned values that produce the monogamy we resist. Like monogamy, the couple entity as central to the nuclear family is bound up with the sex negativity that poly people battle as we argue for and live lives in which sex and love are not viewed in such finite terms (although time certainly is) and thus not “saved” for only one other person. Like monogamy, the couple (especially when legally married), is legitimated and rewarded at every turn—U.S. health insurance eligibility, clearer child custody arrangements, tax filing benefits, and general public recognition and validation. In our society this type of arrangement is assumed as the logical end point, what we are all looking for or should be looking for. One of my favorite bloggers, SoloPoly, has an excellent post on this “relationship escalator” (the expected progression—first meeting, courtship, sex, presenting as a couple in public, intimate exclusivity, establishing a routine together, commitment defined by these steps, culminating in legal marriage that is supposed to last until one person dies). She also has a second related post on “couple privilege” and a guest post on couple-centric polyamory, which links to the Secondary’s Bill of Rights. I’m posting that one on my refrigerator!

The fight for recognition of same-sex marriage also testifies to the pervasive couple-centricity of our culture. The dyad, for so long opposite sex and now increasingly also same sex, is portrayed as the fundamental unit of love and family. It is a key structure used to try and gain what should be fundamental human and civil rights for all of our citizens. I am reminded of biology textbooks that describe the gene as “the fundamental unit of life,” an instance of gene fetishism in which molecules come to stand simplistically for much more complex social-biological relations, for nature and nurture that actually shape one another in all kinds of interesting and unpredictable ways. In addition to genetic essentialism, we have in our culture couple essentialism. We fetishize the couple making it stand at the heart of love and family, which are actually the product of much more complex social-biological relations. The (monogamous) couple and narrower notions of family have a hard time containing and often sustaining the great complexity of relations that we humans feel and forge as we attempt to connect with one another throughout life. As with genes, I am not saying the couple produces only myths and master narratives. Like molecular sequences, there is sometimes beauty and profoundness in what the couple produces. But just as genes do not alone embody the enormity of “life” (despite the assertions of too many scientists and pop culture more generally) neither should the “couple” and its offshoot “nuclear family” embody in its most essential form the enormity of human love, physical desire, and family. A final note on same sex marriage: gays don’t always do marriage like straights expect them to—to give but one example of many, their greater acceptance of ethical non-monogamy. I see this as another upside of marriage equality in addition to it being the right thing to do for same sex couples. From this non-monogamist’s point of view it may help us revise marriage into a less repressive institution.

Of course it was not always so that the (monogamous) couple ideal reigned. In Public Vows: A History of Marriage and Nation, Nancy Cott argues with respect to the U.S that the Christian model of lifelong monogamous marriage was not a dominant worldview until the late nineteenth century, that it took work to make monogamous marriage seem like a foregone conclusion, and that people had to choose to make marriage the foundation for the new nation.” In The Importance of Being Monogamous, historian Sarah Carter also shows how “marriage was part of the national agenda in Canada—the marriage ‘fortress’ was established to guard the [Canadian] way of life.”[1] At the same time that monogamous marriage was solidified as ideal and central to both U.S. and Canadian nation building, indigenous peoples in these two countries were being viciously restrained both conceptually and physically inside colonial borders and institutions that included reservations/reserves, residential schools, and churches and missions all designed to “save the man and kill the Indian.” Part of saving the Indians from their savagery meant pursuing the righteous monogamous, couple-centric, nuclear-family institution. Land tenure rights were attached to marriage in ways that tied women’s economic well-being to that institution.

Indeed, the nuclear family is the most commonly idealized alternative to the tribal/extended family context in which I was raised. As for many indigenous peoples, prior to colonization the fundamental indigenous social unit of my people was the extended kin group, including plural marriage. We have a particular word for this among my people but to use it would give away my tribal identification. With hindsight I can see that my road to ethical non-monogamy began early in my observations in tribal communities of mostly failed monogamy, extreme serial monogamy, and disruptions to nuclear family. Throughout my growing up I was subjected by both whites and Natives ourselves to narratives of shortcoming and failure—descriptions of Native American “broken families,” “teenage pregnancies,” “unmarried mothers,” and other “failed” attempts to paint a white, nationalist, middle class veneer over our lives. I used to think it was the failures to live up to that ideal that turned me off, and that’s why I ran for coastal cities and higher education—why I asserted from a very early age that I would never get married. Now I see that I was suffocating under the weight of the concept and practice of a normative middle-class nuclear family, including heteronormative coupledom period.

I was pretty happy as a kid in those moments when I sat at my grandmother’s dining room table with four generations and towards the end of my great-grandmother’s life FIVE generations. We would gather in her small dining room with it’s burnt orange linoleum and ruffled curtains, at the table beside the antique china cabinet, people overflowing into the equally small living room—all the generations eating, laughing, playing cards, drinking coffee, talking tribal politics, and eating again. The children would run in and out. I would sit quietly next to my grandmothers hoping no one would notice me. I could then avoid playing children’s games and listen instead to the adults' funny stories and wild tribal politics. Couples and marriages and nuclear families got little play there. The collectives—both our extended family and the tribe—cast a much wider, more meaningful, and complexly woven net. The matriarch of our family, my great-grandmother, was always laughing. She would cheat at cards and tell funny, poignant stories about my great-grandfather who died two decades before. Aunts and uncles would contribute their childhood memories to build on those stories. My mother would often bring the conversation back to tribal or national politics. A great-grandchild might have been recognized for some new creative, academic, or athletic accomplishment. The newest baby would be doted on as a newly arrived human who chose this family. The Mom who might be 18 or 20 and unmarried would have help, and she would be told to go back to school, or find a career track to better her life for her baby.

Too many in my family faced life choices more restricted than mine are now. Others were simply unwilling to sacrifice a life lived daily among extended family and tribe, as I have done. From where I stand it looks like my most of my extended family members have more security in that small town family and tribal community, or in the coherent, densely-populated “urban Indian” community in which I spent part of my childhood, than they do in Euro-centric traditions of nuclear family and marriage. On the other hand, my security and primary partnership is the educational and professional escalator that I ride and climb to ever more opportunities in high-up cities. Paradoxically, in seeking security outside of one colonial imposition—marriage and nuclear family (although I also tried that for a good while and wasn’t so skilled at it)—I chose a highly individualistic path that enmeshes me in different sets of colonial institutions: all of those corporate, nonprofit, government, and academic institutions in which I have worked. I also have a global indigenous and professional network that brings tremendous meaning to my life. But individuals among them are rarely here at night when I need someone to share words, laughter, food and touch with. I need to build some sort of extended kin group here in this city where I live. I doubt that coupledom (mine or others) combined with “outside” relationships will ever suffice in this context. Building something more collective is my desire and my challenge. Despite my focus on couple-centricity in Poly World, some polys refer to their intimate networks—their extended made families as “tribes.” But even those individuals are an ill fit for me for cultural reasons I’ve written about in earlier posts, ISO Feminist (NDN) Cowboys and Poly, Not Pagan, and Proud. I learn especially open communication lessons from Poly World, but I’ve made few real friends there. I look more to indigenous peoples for partial models, and I continue to seek non-indigenous people in this city who don’t fit the existing poly cultural mode, but who are committed to open relationships. Alas, it is exhausting being a minority within a minority. But I can never resist a challenge.

One final insight: Indigenous colleagues that I admire speak and write of “decolonizing love,” for example the Nitâcimowin blog of University of Victoria graduate student Kirsten Lindquist (Cree-Métis). I obviously love her focus of decolonial analysis on relationships. It is a generative framework for pushing us to articulate a better world. But my slightly cynical aging self doesn’t quite believe that we can decolonize, meaning to withdraw from or dismantle colonialism. We live inside a colossal colonial structure that took most of the world’s resources to build. Does not every maneuver against colonialism occur in intimate relationship to its structures? There is no outside. Deep inside the shadows and shifting (cracking?) walls of that edifice I don’t anymore see my family’s and tribe’s failures at lasting monogamy and nuclear family as failure. I see us experimenting, working incrementally with tools and technologies that we did not craft combined with indigenous cultural templates in any open space we can find to build lives that make any sense to us at all.

As ever,
The Critical Polyamorist


[1] Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) in Sarah Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press 2008): 3-4.  


17 Comments
Deaf Polyamorist link
7/28/2014 10:05:17 am

Amazing article! Thank you for writing it. I feel a lot of resonance and a lot of concepts you wrote about also apply to the Deaf community; which has been throughly colonized by the Hearing communities in each intersectional area of life.

This line in particular I think is brilliant and describes perfectly: "I see us experimenting, working incrementally with tools and technologies that we did not craft combined with indigenous cultural templates in any open space we can find to build lives that make any sense to us at all." There is indeed no outside of the system, like you said.

Reply
Critical Poly
7/28/2014 11:49:57 am

dear deaf polyamorist, THANK YOU for your comment. I am glad some of what I've written resonates. I can only imagine how it must feel to live in a world saturated with the assumptions of hearing people, and to try to carve out a life within that. people like you are why i write this blog---to connect with others who share some of my concerns with mainstream poly and who are nonetheless trying to live this practice.

critical poly

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Leo
8/12/2014 02:18:13 pm

Thank you for your insight

Reply
PolyCouple link
9/7/2014 02:18:03 pm

My partner and I have been married for 5 years and poly for life. While we have been polyamorous together things have been a bit difficult, running into issues here and there. After we changed our 'rules' to be simply just open communication and honesty things got a lot easier. Thanks for your posting, we love reading about other people in similar relationships and how to navigate the emotions behind everything.

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Critical Poly
9/8/2014 05:25:07 am

dear PolyCouple, thank you for your comment. i like the move to "just open communication and honesty" from more rigid rules. the process of communication is such an intellectual and ethical process. and it will have to happen anyway, whether there are more or less rules. thank you for being poly in this world that does not make it easy.

Critical Poly

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Situationally Poly
9/14/2014 01:39:47 am

Dear Critical Poly,

it's true that we live in a couple-centric society, formed by the colonial structures that privilege it; heteronormativity, Christian marriage or some other form of religious dogmatic thinking, nuclear families, etc.

however, my experience as a former poly person is not informed so much by those institutions. For me it is more about the logistical complexity of maintaining healthy open relationships. You mentioned the communication aspect in a "healthy" poly relationship. And it's true that this is the foundation of successful polyamory. this is what I found so exhausting about being in poly relationships. It's complicated enough in mono relationships, but it's complexity exponentially increases with more people involved. I think ultimately this is why the poly lifestyle was unsustainable for me. plus, it requires basically the same level of skill and when you start involving people with different communication skill levels, well, that's when people get hurt. and unfortunately, most of the time you don't know until you get there what their actual skill sets are.

I chose monogamy over poly for several reasons. the bottom line is that life is complicated enough and adding the complications of poly relationships was just not worth it for me, after 20+ years of doing open relationships. That said, I believe that to privilege monogamy over plural relationships on a societal level is fundamentally unjust because it removes choice from the matter.

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Critical Poly
9/14/2014 07:32:18 am

Dear SP,

thank you as always for your insightful contributions to this conversation. i really value your greater experience in these matters. i focus especially on this passage from your above comment:

"It's complicated enough in mono relationships, but it's complexity exponentially increases with more people involved. I think ultimately this is why the poly lifestyle was unsustainable for me. plus, it requires basically the same level of skill and when you start involving people with different communication skill levels, well, that's when people get hurt. and unfortunately, most of the time you don't know until you get there what their actual skill sets are."

Two things come to mind for me: 1) yes, when different skill sets are involved it makes poly relating difficult. but this is probably true in mono relationships right? people come to a couple with different emotional and social skill sets. but your comment (on top of a lovely conversation with one of those former open-marriage partners) makes me think i need to go back to my most recent post, "Critical Polyamory as Fieldwork" and add a line about the learning and growth that happens in struggling together through poly relationships, despite our failures. so when i complain about being "practiced on" by open marriage couples, i must also remember one day i might be practicing on/with someone with greater skills than me too. and 2) i don't think poly is probably inherently more difficult than mono despite the added people. but rather our world is structured for mono relationships. ethical non-monogamists meet resistance and stigmatization at almost every turn. if our world was structured to accommodate both mono and poly relationships we might find our poly/environment interactions a bit easier. we tolerate loving multiple children, multiple friends, multiple grandparents. why not multiple partners?

With thanks,
CP

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Melissa Danielle link
10/14/2014 07:47:21 pm

"we tolerate loving multiple children, multiple friends, multiple grandparents. why not multiple partners?"

This question has been one of the key pillars of my personal and social exploration of creating and sustaining intentional, intimate, non-monogamous relationships, both platonic and sexual.

I find that monog folks have a difficult time reconciling the exclusivity of sexual relationships with the openness of their familial and platonic ones.

Situationally Poly
9/14/2014 01:44:46 am

btw, have you seen the Showtime show "Polyamory"?

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Critical Poly
9/14/2014 07:12:47 am

dear SP, i have not. i don't have cable. i wonder if it's on Netflix? you know, i know about the show but have shied away because they seem so privileged and well...so California. i am trying to do this in a place that is not that. YET i am of course relatively privileged so i cannot cast aspersions! second, there are so few of us (albeit we are a quickly growing population) of ethical non-monogamists that i increasingly think we need to be in rigorous conversation whatever our differences. this society is structured for monogamy and we meet resistance at every turn in our practice, and a good deal of stigmatization--both intentional and unintentional. so yes, i should engage it i think :) Thanks for the reminder.

CP

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Situationally Poly
9/14/2014 08:13:16 am

"i know about the show but have shied away because they seem so privileged and well...so California."

Haha.....even though I am a California girl born and raised, I hear you. It does seem to reinforce certain cliches. I haven't seen the show either (I also don't have cable, just Netflix and I know it's not on there yet, but i imagine it will be eventually) but I did watch trailers. I agree about the privilege of the people involved, and also noticed their youth. It makes me wonder how much actual experience they all have.

I do think you're right about needing to be in "rigorous conversation" with other non-monogamists, despite social differences. I suppose it's like tribes needing to be in solidarity with each other, whether they are wealthy gaming tribes or landless, non-federally recognized tribes.

questioning link
6/29/2016 12:46:06 pm

This is INCREDIBLY well written and insightful. Thank you!

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Fanboy
12/26/2017 03:46:17 am

Thank you for your thoughts. It's a great article. I wish you luck and success in your experimentation !!!

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Litahi
12/27/2017 11:46:49 am

Hello,
I love your article. My concern is, that for example my partner (a straight male) thinks he has been disappointed by the colonial system since we can't have access to white women as other white men can. Plus, his push to be polyamourous and polygamist (he sometimes mixes the too terms) is that he has been denied the right. Adding this to his idea that he can hit on his younger students make me think that he is just reproducing a patriarchal heterosexist structure. He is not recognizing that my place as an indigenous woman has been relegated and ostracized, and that (as far as I see it) I don't want to bee seen as the body that nobody wants. Still with this I am not convinced that having an open relationship is going to solve colonialism as he puts it. I want to be outside the Eurocentric structure, but how this is possible when sexual hierarchies among women are enforced by WOC men? My partner follows this pattern of being resentful and trying to be "radical". Notwithstanding structures of beauty and age.
Any comments are appreciate it.

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Critical Poly
1/3/2018 07:39:39 pm

dear litahi,

as i am fond of saying, there seem to be proportionally just as many dysfunctional relationships in polyamory world as there are in monogamy world. your partner sounds confused and yes, patriarchal. he does not sound like he would do either monogamy or polyamory in a healthy way. and there are plenty of examples of patriarchal foundations continuing to influence polyamorous relationships too. there are plenty of convos in poly world about especially men using polyamory as an excuse to act badly. you're not alone on that one.

i use polyamory as a practice dedicated to undoing the norms of settler monogamy and marriage. that is not i think how many people see or do it. the settler-colonial critique is largely missing from most polyamory conversations and relationships as far as i can tell.

and there are also ways to be technically monogamous while embracing the forms of more fluid relationality that i talk about in my blog posts. so one could also do monogamy in more decolonial ways.

as for the polygamy question, i do not paint all forms of polygamy with the same broad brush. i don't condemn all forms of polygamy. although most "westerners" do, including a lot of polyamorists who would not want the two practices to be confused. your partner should be more careful not to use those terms interchangeably. i also suspect most polygamists would not want to be confused with polyamorists. i am one of the few polyamorists i know who reaches into Indigenous traditions of so-called polygamy and attempts to map them onto a contemporary practice that for lack of a better word i call "polyamory." that is not a perfect translation as i write about.

best of luck.

cp

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visitor
1/29/2019 12:02:29 pm

Dear CP,

I am here because I am prepping a class on polyamorous families and bc I know your other works (and admire you). I have a quick question: I once read Aldous Huxley's "The Island" in which he builds a positive utopia (contrasting Brave New World) in which he mixes philosophies, pedagogies, and practical questions to build a different kind of society. For instance, in relation to family life, everyone in the island has 7 Clubs of Mutual Adoption. This means that you have your own biological parents, grandparents, children but 6 other more in case you want get out of you parents' house for a while, etc. I wonder if you had read that book and what do you think about it. I also think that it is clear that one of the first thing Colonial powers did in the Americas (from current Canada to Argentina) and the rest of the world, was to dismantle the tribal and extended kin structures bc they saw them as threatening and potentially subversive. Cutting off affective kin lines was both a practical and political and so the imposition of monogamy and the power of men over women. Thanks again for this post.

Reply
Critical Poly
1/29/2019 03:30:32 pm

i have not read the island. thanks for the recommendation. good luck with the class. you're aware of the new chapter (portions of which were drafted in blog posts here), in this book?

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo28583407.html

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    Photo credit: Short Skirts and Cowgirl Boots by David Hensley
    The Critical Polyamorist, AKA Kim TallBear, blogs & tweets about indigenous, racial, and cultural politics related to open non-monogamy. She is a prairie loving, big sky woman. She lives south of the Arctic Circle, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. You can follow her on Twitter @CriticalPoly & @KimTallBear

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