Abstract
In Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities, Mimi Schippers creates a space for a much-needed focus on polyqueer identities. The selection of works on polyamorous people is tremendously limited. Schippers’ work creates a solid foundation for the queering of these works and the room to create a new theoretical background. The stigma against the polyamorous community stems from a mononormative view on how relationships and love should look. This unconventional text breaks the barrier between the academic and the non-academic to make her work more accessible.
The book is organized in four substantive chapters as well as an introduction and a conclusion. She completed this study through an auto-ethnography as well as a content analysis of the novel Invisible Man and the film The Other Man. Some content was extremely explicit. This should not be considered a shortcoming. It bridges the gap between the academic and the non-academic. It creates an accessible tone, giving the reader a larger space to both hold the reader’s attention and relate to the research in terms of non-academics, and gives it a more realistic viewpoint.
She sets out to create two theories based around two central points. One is determining the link between compulsory monogamy and race/sexuality. The second is what she calls the undoing of racial and gendered hierarchies through identifying as polyqueer, or the involvement of more than two people in a sexual or emotional relationship.
She does this by breaking the text down into four parts in which she analyzes the logistics of a polyqueer identity. To begin, she starts with an auto-ethnography that sets the tone for the theory she is attempting to create. The work brings in not only gender and sexuality, something that she argues is a shortcoming of other texts on polyamory, but race as well. Until Beyond Monogamy, there has been no notable work that analyzes the relation between compulsory monogamy and the intersections of gender and racial inequalities. She notes that feminist scholars, critical race theorists, sociologists, and queer theorists should take the polyqueer into account when discussing the polygamous community. The next two sections are composed of queer readings of Invisible Man and The Other Man to focus on race, sexuality, and polyqueer homosociality. She notes that focusing on these dimensions can provide a way to begin dismantling these power structures. The last section focuses on heteromasculinity and the competition within a woman-male-male threesome.
Beyond Monogamy ends up being situated in a queer space, which is an ideal place to be given the nature of this text. It not only acknowledges the struggles of identifying as polyqueer within a mononormative society, but also brings up important points about polynormativity. Like homonormativity, there is still privilege within an oppressed group that allows the people with more privilege to have a louder voice than others. This takes place within the polyamorous community as well. Schippers brings to light that polyqueer may assist in dismantling these power roles. She does not conflate being polyqueer with dismantling all power hierarchies, which is important to note, just that it may help further the cause.
There was one shortcoming of her work, however. It frames polyqueer identities as something that has the possibility to stem from infidelity. In each of the content analyses, the protagonist was involved in cheating on their partner. Her way of navigating this was to say that these people were struggling with the fact that they had this polyqueer identity, via the queer reading of it, but were not allowed to fulfill it in our mononormative society. She speaks on how they may have navigated this if society permitted it, if we were more open to polyqueer identities. Yet, there are other polyamorous-centric works or resources that present a healthy way to be polyqueer. She could have performed the same task with a more realistic representation that would have been beneficial to the community rather than given a hypothetical. This would have also helped bridge the gap further between academia and the non-academic community.
This work not only would be appropriate for academics within the sociology of sexuality, those who practice feminist pedagogies, queer theorists, and critical race theorists, but also would be ideal to connect the polyamorous community with the academic world. The book is written in accessible language, and it can be useful for undergraduate and graduate classes in gender and sexuality. Beyond Monogamy is a significant work for the future of polyamorous studies in addition to being such an intriguing read.