Coming to terms: Race,class and intimacy in Australian public culture

Abstract

In queer theory ‘heteronormativity’ has become a central tool for understanding the social conditions of our sexual and intimate lives. The term is most often used to shed light on how those lives are patterned in a way that shapes and privileges binary genders and heterosexual identities, lifestyles and practices. Frequently, however, ‘heteronormativity’ is stretched beyond its capacity when called upon to explain other normative patterns of intimacy. Drawing on Cathy Cohen’s (1997) ground breaking essay ‘Punks, bulldaggers and welfare queens: The radical potential of queer?’, this article argues that analysing the political landscape of our intimate lives in terms of heteronormativity alone fails to adequately account for the way some familial and sexual cultures are stigmatised along class and race lines. This article gestures towards examples of those whose intimacies are unquestionably marginalised and yet non-queer, or at least not-necessarily-queer, placing Cohen’s ‘welfare queens’ alongside examples from contemporary Australia public culture to argue for the critical efficacy of the concept ‘mononormativity’ for intersectional analysis.

Keywords

Heteronormativity intersectionality mononormativity non/monogamies queer theory

Introduction

[W]e must develop a critical vocabulary and analysis of the ways in which racial disparities and property relations embed and recode themselves within the private realm of family and kinship relations, only to seep back into circulation within the public domain.

(Eng, 2010: 6)

On National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children’s Day in August 2016 The Australian, a conservative broadsheet newspaper with national circulation, published a Bill Leak cartoon featuring a police officer returning a young Aboriginal boy to his father, asking the man to talk to his son about ‘personal responsibility’. The father, who is drawn in a slouched posture, holding a ‘stubbie’ (can of beer), fails to recognise his child, replying ‘yeah righto, what’s his name then?’ (Figure 1). The publication of the cartoon came a little over a week after the shocking and widely publicised revelation of the brutal treatment of children in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in the Northern Territory, where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are radically overrepresented in the inmate population (97% of children in Northern Territory Juvenile detention centres are Indigenous (Anthony, 2016)). In this context, Leak’s cartoon can be read as a particularly shameful gesture of shifting blame for the mistreatment of Aboriginal youth from the ongoing violence of the State and its agents to the imagined failings of Aboriginal masculinities and families. While all three figures are drawn with brown skin and caricatured, prominent lips intended to signify Aboriginality, the ‘joke’ depends upon stereotypes about youth delinquency, alcoholism, and neglectful parenting in Aboriginal communities, as the many Twitter users, commentators and politicians who immediately denounced the cartoon as racist rightly pointed out (see, for example, Williams, 2016).

Figure 1.

Cartoon by Bill Leak, published in The Australian, 2016.

In this article I read Leak’s cartoon as one recent example of the way ‘racial disparities and property relations’ sneak back into public discourse in Australia via ‘the private realm of family and kinship relations’ (Eng, 2010: 6). In a nation invested in promoting official policies of ‘multiculturalism’, championing the egalitarian rhetoric of the ‘fair go’, and forgetting colonial violence (or imagining its effects to be a thing of the past), real or projected differences in cultural practices of sex and kinship become an outlet for racism and classism that won’t speak itself plainly. The racist and classist assumptions which drive manoeuvres like these must be countered without implicitly upholding the hierarchies of intimacy upon which they rely. In pursuing this line of thought I am indebted to queer of colour scholarship which has a long tradition of developing ‘critical vocabulary and analysis’ (Eng, 2010: 6) capable of thinking about intimacy intersectionally.

In the spirit of that long tradition, this article addresses itself to broader queer theory and non-monogamous scholarship, two fields with foundational investments in intimate politics yet which mistake too often a white, educated, middle-class perspective as a neutral starting point for discussion. In the current political conjuncture in Australia, where same-sex marriage has been fought for on the back of a respectability politics which claims normative status for certain (monogamous, long-term, middle-class and often implicitly white) same-sex couples at the expense of those with differently organised intimacies,¹ the project of turning queer and non-monogamous scholarship toward cases like this Leak cartoon, and asking how the patterns which marginalise LGBTIQ and non-monogamous people might be implicated in the construction of raced and classed Others, is as urgent as ever.

But it is not a new project. Indeed, I begin with a discussion of one canonical scholarly attempt to map queer activism’s critical vocabulary onto dynamics of race, class and intimacy in North America. In ‘Punks, bulldaggers and welfare queens’, Cathy J Cohen (1997) explores how the concepts ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘queer’ might be stretched to include the intimate marginalisation of heterosexual non-white and working-class individuals and families in the United States of America. Cohen is not alone in grappling with how best to describe this landscape. The question of how to understand the way racialisation shapes experiences of sexuality and intimacy has developed before, beside and within queer theory. An indicative, but by no means exhaustive, sample of this rich and diverse scholarship might include Sara Ahmed (2006), Angela Davis (1983), David Eng (2010), E Patrick Johnson (2001), Audre Lorde (1984), Jose Esteban Muñoz (2009), Nguyen Tan Hoang (2014) and Jasbir Puar (2006). The relationship between sexuality and class has also been the subject of considerable scholarship within feminism and sexuality studies (see, for example, Hodge, 2000; Nestle, 1988; Seidman, 2011).

In the context of this valuable and diverse scholarship, I single out this particular piece by Cohen for two reasons. First, it remains an important touchstone for queer of colour critique, some of which figures itself as emerging from or indebted to her call for action in that article (as can be seen in No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (Johnson, 2016)). Second, and more directly, because the eponymous ‘welfare queens’ with which Cohen illustrates the value of her central argument are exactly the kinds of figures this article is invested in retheorizing. It is largely through the figure of the ‘welfare queen’ that Cohen considers how queer theory might frame the marginalisation of not-necessarily-LGBTIQ practices which might nonetheless be marked as non-normative, and it is the ‘welfare queen’ who I believe can be productively re-read in relation to the emerging body of scholarship theorising non/monogamy, and in particular through the concept ‘mononormativity’.

While I agree with Cohen that a queer politics too narrowly focused on sexuality per se will miss a number of sites of intimate marginalisation, especially those experienced by non-white and/or working-class people, I argue that broadening ‘queer’ and ‘heteronormativity’ to encompass these intimate marginalities has a price – the loss of the analytic precision which allows those words to be used to describe particular patterns of marginalisation. While there remain times and places where it is politically and academically useful to prioritise broad coalition over difference, there are others where it is vital to have conceptual tools capable of tracing the threads of specific social structures which generate the weave in which we live. I argue that a robustly defined ‘mononormativity’ (Kean, 2015), capable of parting company with heteronormativity when called for, allows us to recognise the frequency with which racialised and classed individuals like the ‘welfare queen’ are marginalised owing to the perceived failure to produce family in line with mononormative ideals of the good life.

The structure of this article broadly echoes Cohen’s own. It begins with a discussion of the theoretical affordances and limitations of existing theoretical terminology (illustrated, in this case, through a re-reading of Cohen’s ‘welfare queens’) and concludes by briefly gesturing toward three common discursive figurations which demonstrate the racialised and classed patterns of mononormativity in contemporary Australia: the promiscuous ‘bogan’, the polygamous Muslim migrant, and the dysfunctional Aboriginal parent so appallingly depicted in Leak’s cartoon.

Revisiting the Queen

[H]ow would queer activists understand politically the lives of women – in particular women of color – on welfare, who may fit into the category of heterosexual, but whose sexual choices are not perceived as normal, moral, or worthy of state support?

(Cohen, 1997: 442)

Through the figure of the welfare queen, Cohen (1997) demonstrates that the relationships of heterosexual individuals who are marginalised by race or class are often not afforded the same legitimacy that the relationships of white, middle- to upper-class heterosexuals are. She argues that this phenomenon could be described as heterosexuals falling ‘outside of heteronormativity’, simultaneously acknowledging this as ‘a bit of a misnomer, since as a dominant normalizing process [heteronormativity] is a practice of regulation in which we are all implicated’ (Cohen, 1997: 453, 463). I agree with Cohen that, since heteronormativity is ubiquitous, everyone is positioned within it. I also agree that straight people can challenge, or find themselves marginalised by, heteronormativity’s logics of sex, gender and sexual coherence, experiences which could be described as ‘queer’. When it comes to the figure of the ‘welfare queen’, however, Cohen’s use of ‘queer’ is broader still.

Cohen moves between utilising ‘queer’ in reference to ‘deviant’ or marginalised erotic or gendered practices, and drawing on the anti-identitarian aspects of the term in order to ‘bring together all those deemed marginal and all those committed to liberatory politics’ (1997: 440).² This broadening is in aid of Cohen’s call for a unified ‘leftist’ analysis capable of bringing queer politics into more meaningful conversation with antiracist action and critiques of liberal politics and capitalism (1997: 442). Cohen’s choice to stretch ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘queer’, rather than rely on the more generic language of ‘power’ that she deploys elsewhere, brings her critique to the doorstep of the queer activists and scholars whose investment in sexuality alone leads them to focus exclusively on white experiences of sexuality³, a tendency which has alienated or marginalised activists and scholars whose work proceeds from an acknowledgement of the way sexuality is a system which interlocks with race and class. Cohen’s broadening of queer thus takes place in a context where ‘queer’ had gained a reputation as ‘a politics based on narrow sexual dichotomies which make no room either for the analysis of oppression of those we might catagorize as heterosexual, or for the privilege of those who operate as “queer”’ (1997: 451). This remedial reframing continues to be generative for a range of queer scholars- and activists-of-colour whose active concerns might otherwise be marked as ‘in excess’ of queer’s core business of sexuality.⁴ Yet her use of very broad terms like ‘power’ on the one hand and the interchangeability of ‘queerness’, ‘marginality’ and ‘non-normativity’ on the other, empties the term ‘queer’ of much of its specificity.

Toward the end of the article Cohen provides a variety of examples of groups whose intimacies have historically been marginalised within American public culture. This marginalisation has included:

‘The stigmatization and demonization of single mothers, teen mothers, and, primarily, poor women of color dependent on state assistance’ (Cohen, 1997: 455).

The depiction of ‘the crisis and pathologies facing Negro family structure as being generated by the increasing number of single-female-headed households, the increasing number of “illegitimate” births and, of course, increasing welfare dependency’ (Cohen, 1997: 455).

The portrayal of ‘poor, often black and Latina women … as unable to control their sexual impulses and eventual reproductive decisions, unable to raise their children with the right moral fiber, unable to find “gainful” employment to support themselves and their “illegitimate children,” and of course unable to manage “effectively” the minimal assistance provided by the state’ (Cohen, 1997: 456).

Cohen rightly points to these as groups whose intimate, sexual and family lives are maligned and marginalised, despite their presumed heterosexuality. She uses this marginalisation to argue that these are straight people who do not benefit from ‘heteronormativity’. While I agree that there are straight people and practices that are marginalised within heteronormativity, I am not convinced that these are examples of it. Yes, straight single-parents (especially women on welfare and/or people of colour) and families with a number of so-called ‘illegitimate’ children (especially families where the children have different fathers) were and remain socially marginalised, indeed in some times and places they are subject to more criticism than middle-class, two parent, same-sex families. But the key question for me in this article is whether or not we ought to call this particular pattern of marginalisation ‘heteronormativity’.

‘Heteronormativity’ was first used by Warner (1991) in the introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet. Although that introduction does not provide a definition of ‘heteronormativity’, his analysis of the ‘heteronormativity of modern culture’ makes it clear that the term is intended to recognise the inextricable ways that the sexual and the social are mutually entangled. In ‘Sex in public’, Berlant and Warner (1998) develop this line of thought, arguing that sex and sexuality, rather than distinct and minor aspects of private life, should be understood as implicated in a wide range of ‘public’ practices. Part of the original conceptual work of ‘heteronormativity’, therefore, was to suggest that the cultural domain of ‘sexuality’ might be far broader than generally understood – including, for example ‘paying taxes, being disgusted, philandering, bequeathing, celebrating a holiday, investing in the future, teaching, disposing of a corpse, carrying wallet photos, buying economy size, being nepotistic, running for president, divorcing, or owning anything “His” and “Hers”’ (Berlant and Warner, 1998: 555). Berlant and Warner understand these practices, and the ‘ideologies and institutions of intimacy’ of which they are a part, as providing ‘heterosexual culture’ with much of its ‘metacultural intelligibility’ (Berlant and Warner, 1998: 553). Their analysis opens up the possibility that heteronormativity is imbedded in everyday practices we don’t automatically associate with it.

But this does not mean that Berlant and Warner’s ‘heteronormativity’ is without limits. In an early footnote they provide a comprehensive definition of ‘heteronormativity’ – a definition that I believe is crucial for understanding the substance and specificity of the term. For Berlant and Warner, while heterosexuality names a provisionally coherent set of practices or identities, heteronormativity names the ‘institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations’ which secure heterosexuality’s provisional ‘coherence’, along with its ‘privilege’ (Berlant and Warner, 1998: 548). Berlant and Warner use the word ‘heteronormativity’ in order to name the assemblage of disparate objects, ideas and complex social structures that works to support and sustain hierarchised, binarised heterosexuality. Cohen’s initial definition of heteronormativity is quite close to Berlant and Warner’s, naming ‘both those localized practices and those centralized institutions which legitimize and privilege heterosexuality and heterosexual relationships as fundamental and “natural” within a society’ (Cohen, 1997: 440).

In this schema, a thing will be understood as part of ‘heteronormativity’ insofar as it is implicated in the securing of heterosexuality’s privilege and coherence. The fact of its implication in ‘heteronormativity’ does not preclude it from being implicated in some other structural formation. Take a practice like marriage, for example. Marriage is an oft-cited bastion of heterosexual privilege and pillar of heteronormativity, but its implication in our ideas about legitimate sexuality, heterosexuality and the gendered couple form do not preclude it from being recognised as a historical site of the sexist division of labour and property. There is no need to decide if marriage is heteronormative or sexist – people are generally happy to concede that marriage, at least in its traditional formulation, is both. Refusing this choice does not force us to concede that heteronormativity and sexism are one and the same thing. Sexism and heteronormativity are co-present and intersecting, but not necessarily coextensive. Marriage is heteronormative insofar as it naturalises and reifies the legitimating, edifying effect of an opposite-gendered pairing. If we want to pinpoint its historical or contemporary effect on women – the way that women have been practically and symbolically subjugated through the union – then we need words like ‘sexism’, or perhaps ‘patriarchy’. Maintaining this distinction allows us to draw one and then another aspect of marriage forward for critical attention, and gives us sharper tools for mapping the interactions and co-implications of these patterns. If we say that contemporary western cultures are characterised by ‘heteronormativity’ which marginalises certain sexual and intimate lives, that does not mean that all marginalisation of sexual and intimate lives in the contemporary moment are marginal by virtue of ‘heteronormativity’ alone.

Inspired by Rubin’s (1993) argument for the utility of a distinction between critical theories of sexuality and feminism, I argue that the ‘critical tools’ of queer theory are similarly ‘fashioned to handle very specific areas of social activity’, and that, ‘other areas of social life, their forms of power, and their characteristic modes of oppression, need their own conceptual implements’ (Rubin, 1993: 34). ‘Heteronormativity’, as conceived by Berlant and Warner, allows us to point to the patterned ways in which binarised hierarchies of sexuality distribute privilege, and there are certainly cases where this form of ‘heteronormativity’ is complicit in racism and nationalism (for examples of this see Puar, 2006). But if we want to think about the particular patterns in those examples used by Cohen – whereby single mothers, ‘illegitimate’ children and ‘broken’ families face ridicule and shame – then we need a term capable of pointing to the patterned ways in which privilege is afforded to the monogamous, nuclear family.

Enter ‘mononormativity’

The emerging and interdisciplinary scholarship on negotiated non-monogamies, including the particularly active sub-field of scholarship on polyamory, has a stake in this conversation. While a good deal of the early scholarship in this field reflected and reproduced the whiteness of the communities of practice that were its first objects of study (Noël, 2006), an awareness of the necessity of thinking intersectionally about non-monogamies is increasingly common. This awareness has taken a number of forms – from considerations about why particular non-monogamous communities of practice are overwhelmingly white, educated and middle class (Klesse, 2005; Sheff and Hammers, 2011), to the exploration and theorisation of the distribution of ‘intimate privilege’ between and within specific non-monogamous groups – e.g. polyamorists vs polygamists – (Rambukkana, 2015).

While these contributions are indispensable to the study of non-monogamy as such, the work in this field which I find most useful for unpacking Cohen’s ‘welfare queens’ addresses itself not to specific non-monogamous relationship styles, but to the practices, structures, institutions and ideas which marginalise those styles. Willey has pointed to the ways in which the emergence of the binary non/monogamy is inextricably linked to notions of race and ‘civilisation’ often used to justify the colonisation of non-European lands by European national states (Willey, 2006, 2016). This intervention is markedly different from (although compatible with) those calling for a critique of the homogeneity of specific non-monogamous communities: from her analysis we learn to consider the way race is foundationally imbricated in how we think about non/monogamy, in her words: ‘the classification of humans into these groupings makes sense in part because racism does’ (Willey, 2016: 91). In this light, the denigration of the ‘welfare queen’ might be seen as part of a long history wherein racialised and classed others have been used to mark the boundaries of acceptable intimacy through their (imagined) intimate deviance.⁵

The other conceptual tool emerging from contemporary non-monogamous literature is ‘mononormativity’. In its strongest formulation mononormativity is conceived through direct analogy to heteronormativity, as an interlocking but analytically distinct ‘system of ideas, institutions and practical orientations that provide the backdrop against which the idea that monogamy is practical, common and right congeals’ (Kean, 2015: 700). This approach departs from Cohen, whose broad application of heteronormativity to explain the marginalisation of ‘welfare queens’ would encompass the territory claimed by ‘mononormativity’. I argue that the ‘welfare queens’ described by Cohen, while certainly marginalised, are marginalised on account of their non-nuclear family structure and/or perceived promiscuity.

While nuclear families and monogamy are both part of the broad intimate culture within which the binaries of sex/gender and sexuality are sustained and heterosexuality is privileged, naming this marginalisation as a product of ‘mononormativity’ rather than as a product of ‘heteronormativity’ allows us to point with more precision to the particular set of ideas and institutions that naturalise public disapproval and even disgust at the figure of the single-mum, the promiscuous parent or the accidentally-pregnant teen. This precision has the added advantage of allowing us to leave as an open question the relationship of those families, communities or individuals to the word ‘queer’ – making it easier to say, when necessary, that a certain practice is marginalised due to mononormativity while remaining wholeheartedly complicit in heteronormativity.

Bogans, bad parents, and polygamists

I want to turn briefly now to three figures within Australian culture which have bearing on this discussion: the figure of the bad Aboriginal father, the figure of the polygamous Muslim migrant, and the figure of the hyper-heterosexual ‘bogan’. These three have been chosen because of their prominence in contemporary public discourse in Australia, and because in each case, despite their differences, the circulation of the racist and/or classist stereotype is underwritten by mononormative ideas about what makes a stable, mature relationship or family. Of course, the utility of ‘mononormativity’ for dissecting Australian public culture with an intersectional sensibility is not limited to these three figures. The following sketches are indicative – designed to gesture toward the promise of this theoretical alliance rather than exhaust it.

First, the so-called ‘bogan’. In their discussion of the gendered nature of discourses surrounding ‘the bogan’, Pini and Previte (2013) define ‘bogan’ as ‘an Australian term of disparagement for the white working-class poor’ (2013: 348). Quoting from the comedy website ‘thingsboganslike.com’ the authors demonstrated a trend in shaming the ‘female bogan’ via her perceived relational deviance:

Having babies and having them young, by multiple fathers [sic]. Bogans are actually producing the majority of kids in Australia, while the hard working university women cannot afford kids until much later, because they need to pay off student debt, and so often have fewer babies at an older age. (thingsboganslike.com, 2010, quoted in Pini and Previte, 2013)

Pini and Previte go on to say that ‘there are recurring references in the texts to the bogan mother’s age (teenage), number of children (numerous) and marital status (single)’ (Pini and Previte, 2013: 354). Shamed for reproducing too young and too often, too promiscuously or without the support of a committed, long-term partner, these (imagined) women fall foul of the mononormative structures through which western cultures understand what kinds of intimacy count as ‘normal’, ‘natural’, ‘right’ and ‘good’.

This same discourse, however, most often portrays the ‘bogan’ not only as uncomplicatedly heterosexual but as hyper-heterosexual. Given that discussions of ‘bogans’ that are framed in these ways are almost always conducted at a distance and riddled with classist assumptions, we should leave as an open question the relationship of the actual communities hailed by that term to heteronormativity. But it does seem clear that they are imagined as intimate deviants primarily because of their supposed promiscuity, non-monogamy or failure to long-term couple, not because of their sexual- or gender-queerness. Similarly, teen mums (and perhaps to a lesser extent teen dads), categories which are also figured as working class in the Australian popular imaginary, face a huge amount of shame for an act of presumed heterosexual reproductivity that falls short of mononormative ideas about the best conditions for coupling and reproduction. In both cases heterosexuality and the gender binary remain unquestioned – it is the relationship between the erotic and the intimate that is deemed ‘brash’ at best and deviant at worst.

Redden and Brown draw on the work of Beverly Skeggs to remind us of the attribution of sexual impropriety to working-class women, where impropriety is attributed to being ‘sexually open’ (2010: 239) or sexually assertive (2010: 241). Attwood (2007) also reminds us of discursive links between class and sexual deviance through her rumination on the term ‘slut’:

As the history of the term shows, ‘slut’ carries a particular class significance. It is the lowly, dirty, sleazy quality of the slut that marks her out, a quality that suggests that overt sexuality in women is precisely not ‘classy’ … Future work on the use of the term ‘slut’ might contribute to the development of our understanding of the way representations of class, gender, race and sexuality are interrelated. (Attwood, 2007: 238–239)

Discursive manoeuvres like these draw upon widely held mono-norms for how families ought to be structured, and classist stereotypes about ‘bogan’ deviance from those norms, in ways that allow each to reinforce the other. This stigma is often used to naturalise class-based stigma which is in conflict with the popularly cherished Australian ideal of an egalitarian society, where everyone is given a ‘fair go’.

Another group whose (imagined) intimacies are marginalised within mononormativity are Muslim families, especially prospective Muslim migrants. Clear recent examples of the way concerns about non-monogamy become associated with the spectre of the Muslim migrant can be found in two news media articles released in September 2016 in relation to the rising popularity of the polygamous Muslim match-making site ‘secondwife.com’. The first article, ‘Polygamy dating site is a warning: first same-sex marriage, next polygamy’ (2016) comes from conservative commentator Andrew Bolt, who regularly blogs for The Herald Sun. Bolt uses the rising popularity of ‘secondwife.com’ within Australia as evidence to support his view that the legalisation of same-sex marriage would put Australia on the ‘slippery slope’ toward the legalisation of polygamous marriage. This is an argument that has also been embraced by a number of Australian politicians, opponents of marriage equality raising the ‘spectre of polygamy’ in federal government inquiries into the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2009 and 2012 (Ash, 2013: 9). Although the ‘slippery slope’ between same-sex marriage and polygamous marriage is the primary focus of the piece, Bolt uses the discussion of polygamy as an occasion to invoke the spectre of ‘unassimilated Islam’, a recurrent figure in Australia’s ongoing, xenophobic public debates about migration and refugee policies. The blog seamlessly weaves together mononormative ideas about good families (read: monogamous) and racist ideas about good migrants (read: assimilated and non-Muslim) to advance an anti-Islam, anti-LGBT politic.

The second article, ‘Secondwife.com site gaining traction in Australia, says UK founder’ by Rachel Olding (2016) for The Sydney Morning Herald, is altogether more subtle in its linking of polygamy to concerns about Muslim migration. Indeed, the body of the article is relatively neutral in tone, including quotations that map a range of views about polygamy, without any mention of migration at all. However, a photo of one of the interviewees, which is attached to the story as it runs on the Sydney Morning Herald NSW website, bears the caption ‘Keysar Trad said he was “heartbroken” to hear 49 per cent of Australians support a ban on Muslim immigration.’ The caption seems to suggest that the shockingly high support for a ban on Muslim immigration among the Australian public is due to popular concern about the potential polygamy of Muslim families, rather than the racism and Islamophobia of Australian public culture. In this case, the passing mention of migration in an article that has nothing to do with it cloaks the racism and xenophobia of Australian migration anxieties (mononormative) ‘family values’.

This use of the spectre of polygamy has a history in Australian public culture that predates the notion of ‘Australia’ itself – Angela Willey describes the way that polygamy and sexual non-monogamy were often implicated in the justification of British settler colonial projects (2016: 30–34). The contemporary conflation of ‘polygamy’ with Islam in aid of National projects of ‘border protection’ and xenophobic projects of cultural homogeneity calls for theorisation in relation to that history in settler colonial states like Australia⁶ (Ash, 2013).

It is my argument that this pattern – whereby mononormative concern about family structures that are non-monogamous, or reproductively promiscuous, are evoked as alibis for prejudice that is no longer easy to publicly avow – is also at play in the Bill Leak cartoon. Leak’s cartoon trades on the notion that Aboriginal men are failing to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their children or families. One available reading of the father’s failure to know his own child is that he has fathered too many children to keep track of. Another is that he has fathered this child without simultaneously forming a long-term, monogamous, co-parenting relationship with the mother of the child. A third, indicated by the can of beer, is that the father is too drunk to remember his child’s name. The first two readings rely on racist stereotypes about Aboriginal promiscuity, the third on racist stereotypes about Aboriginal alcoholism, all of which have circulated in Australia since European invasion. Far from an outlier, Leak’s cartoon references a string of discursive associations that continue to justify radically discriminatory State policies. The notion of Aboriginal promiscuity, or the ‘failure’ of Aboriginal families to function in the way considered correct by the European colonisers, have formed part of the justificatory framework for a range of genocidal and discriminatory policies, including those which have come to be known as The Stolen Generation/s and the Northern Territory Intervention. Fiona Paisley’s (1997) description of Aboriginal child removal in the inter-war years includes a range of examples of the way promiscuity and/or non-monogamy were used as part of the justificatory framework for the cruel removal of children from their mothers, where Aboriginal women were seen as ‘dissolute and immoral, not married under white law and therefore sexually available to all white men’ (1997: 6). Similarly, Larissa Behrendt’s analysis of the stories which circulated about Eliza Frazer, a white woman who was stranded for several weeks with the Butchella people on an island off the east coast of Australia in 1836, draws attention to the way the Aboriginal women were depicted ‘as promiscuous, as bad mothers, as vindictive’ (Behrendt, 2016: 7). We can see here the recurrent mobilisation of the association between promiscuity and poor parenting (and poor character more broadly) in aid of colonial projects.

In all these cases, a critical response must clearly, forcefully and urgently counter the racist and classist stereotypes which underpin the attack (‘bogan’ women aren’t necessarily promiscuous, Muslims people aren’t necessarily polygamous, Aboriginal people aren’t necessarily carelessly reproductive, promiscuous or uncommitted parents). In order to truly unravel the patterns through which these intimacies are marginalised, however, we must not reproduce the intimate hierarchies that those stereotypes rely on. This is a different critical manoeuvre, one which involves challenging the idea that there is anything wrong with being promiscuous or polygamous, or with parenting outside of a neat nuclear arrangement. Intersectional non/monogamies studies can lead the way in countering these harmful stereotypes without incidentally reinforcing the logics of mononormativity itself.

Conclusion: Coalition through critique

Just as Cohen calls for a coalitional ‘queer’, capable of addressing itself to heterosexual people who find themselves marginalised by ‘mononormativity’, in invoking non/monogamy studies in relation to this material I am calling for a critique of mononormativity capable of encompassing more than specific relationship practices (like polyamory or polygamy). In doing so I am echoing Melita Noël (2006) who emphasised the need for scholars of polyamory to think beyond identity and to ‘build coalitions and norms of inclusivity around shared issues, such as expanding definitions of relationships, families and communities’ (2006: 602).

The critical vocabulary of ‘mononormativity’, developed in non/monogamy studies, can work to supplement queer theory’s ‘heteronormativity’, thus enhancing our capacity to name the precise patterns through which some intimacies are systematically marginalised – including, and perhaps particularly, the intimacies of those who are stigmatised through systems of race and class. For this specificity to be useful it must be mobilised to advance intersectional, coalitional scholarship and activism, and not be allowed to justify the scholarly or political isolation of intimacy from sexuality, race, class, gender and other structures of power. If Cohen’s concern is ‘with any political analysis or theory which collapses our understanding of power into a single continuum of evaluation’ (1997: 452), then we need to sustain conceptual terms which resist that collapse while also resisting the temptation to allow difference to justify critical inattention.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants at the Space, Race, Bodies and Non-Monogamies and Contemporary Intimacies conferences for their feedback on my early thinking for this article. Sincere thanks also to my friends and colleagues Jaya Keaney, Adam Gall and Timothy Nicholas Laurie for their invaluable feedback and encouragement as I crafted this article in its current form.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research has been funded by the University of Sydney’s School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry Support Scheme.

Notes

Jessica Kean is an Academic Fellow in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research combines cultural studies methods with queer and feminist theory to consider gender, sexuality and intimate relationships, specialising in non/monogamous relationships and mononormativity. She has recent publications in Sexualities, Cultural Studies Review and Hypatia.

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