Progressive Polyamory: Considering Issues of Diversity
Abstract
Polyamory has the potential to revolutionize how people in the USA engage in and think about relationships and families at the beginning of the 21st century. However, as indicated through content analysis of 12 texts published between 1992 and 2004, polyamorists fail to meaningfully acknowledge or collaborate with others with shared interests to advocate common goals. In particular, these texts, written by and geared toward an assumed audience of white, middle-class, able-bodied, educated, American people fail to address how nationality, race, class, age and (dis)ability intersect with gender and sexuality in the theory and practice of polyamory. In order to successfully challenge systemic, intersecting oppressions, polyamorists must move beyond the limits of identity politics to build coalitions and norms of inclusivity around shared issues, such as expanding definitions of relationships, families and communities.
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1.
1. The term ‘polyamory’ is most often credited to Morning Glory Zell (1990). Although the concepts around polyamory appear to have emerged in discourse in the 1970s, the specific terminology appears more frequently in literature beginning in the 1990s and, according to Daum (2001), was only recently included in the Oxford English Dictionary.
2.
2. I do not claim to know each author’s race, class, educational background, (dis)ability, gender or sexual orientation. However, through photos, interviews and self-disclosure, it is possible to get a sense of the overwhelming similarity in cultural lens of the current authors writing about polyamory.
3.
3. I had hoped to include Raven Kaldera’s Pagan Polyamory: Becoming a Tribe of Hearts (2005) in my analysis, but was not able to locate it before going to press.
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