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Research article

First published December 2006

Polyamory and its ‘Others’: Contesting the Terms of Non-Monogamy

Christian KlesseView all authors and affiliations

https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460706069986

Abstract

Drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews with bisexual-identified practitioners of polyamory in the UK, this article shows that love, intimacy and friendship are salient themes in polyamory discourses. An exploration of the question of how respondents define polyamory with regard to different ‘styles of non-monogamy’ reveals that the boundaries of polyamory are contested within the movement that has formed around this concept. The prevalent definition of polyamory as ‘responsible non-monogamy’ usually goes hand in hand with a rejection of more sex- or pleasure-centred forms of non-monogamy, such as ‘casual sex’, ‘swinging’, or ‘promiscuity’. The author argues that the salience of the relational ideologies of love and intimacy hampers the potential of polyamory to ground a truly pluralistic sexual ethics.

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1. The majority of research participants resided in London and the south-east of England, others lived in (or around) Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Dublin, Glasgow, and Edinburgh.

2. For a more detailed discussion of this aspect of my research sample and of methodological concerns regarding questions of social positioning and intersubjectivity in the research process, see Klesse, 2003.

3. With the usage of the term ‘interview partner’ I intend to acknowledge that the production of knowledge in the context of qualitative interviewing is a joint enterprise and an active collaboration between researcher and research participants. Due to inherent connotations of differing degrees of activity/passivity this aspect is not so well expressed in a terminology that distinguishes between interviewer and interviewee.

4. Polyamory emerged as a significant trope in my interview partners’ narratives only when I started to interview people who had closer links with the bisexual movement in the UK. While most of the bisexual research participants in my study strongly identified with polyamory, only one of the gay male research participants declared his strong sympathy for the concept.

5. Idealistic accounts of polyamory come very close to what Giddens (1992) has described as the ‘pure relationship’. However, critics have argued that this model implies a reductive notion of intimacy and does not reflect inequalities and power imbalances in the relationship context (Jamieson, 1999; Klesse, 2006a).

6. The Polyamory Society defines compersion as follows: ‘the feeling of taking joy in the joy that others you love share among themselves, especially taking joy in the knowledge that your beloveds are expressing their love for one another’ (http://www.polyamorysociety.org/compersion.html[accessed: 25 June 2005]).

References

Allan, G. (1996) Kinship and Friendship in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press .

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