Polyamory, Monogamy, and American Dreams (Video)
- [Music]
- My name is Mimi Schippers. I am Professor of Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies
- and the Chair of the Department of Sociology at Tulane University.
- Today I'm here to talk about my book, Polyamory, Monogamy, and American Dreams: The Stories We Tell
- About Poly Lives and the Cultural Production of Inequality, published by Routledge. My research
- focuses on gender, sexuality, race, and culture. Throughout my career I've always been interested
- in the ways in which people do things in their interactions or subcultural practices that offer
- alternatives to the status quo. I'm particularly interested in how social inequality is challenged,
- not just through collective social action or social movements, but also through our everyday
- practices, the way we form relationships, and the way we build culture together. Most recently
- I've researched and theorized polyamory as a relationship form that could potentially challenge
- gender and race hierarchies, class inequality, and how we experience sexual orientation.
- Polyamory, for those of you who aren't familiar, refers to emotionally and sometimes sexually
- intimate relationships that include more than two people and all involved are aware of the situation,
- the relationships, relationship, and all consent to the arrangements. In the book, that I'll call
- American Dreams because the title is so unwieldy, in the book American Dreams I offer an invitation
- to readers to adopt a sociological lens to read media texts with something I call "the poly gaze".
- The poly gaze is a way of looking closely at what media representations are implicitly or
- explicitly saying about intimate relationships and family life.
- Why do representations of intimate relationships and families matter? Sociologists are concerned
- with identifying how societies operate and how social processes shape our lives. From a
- sociological perspective, the stories we tell in news media, academic research, and popular culture
- reflect and often maintain collective beliefs about gender, race, class, sexuality, and citizenship.
- Queer and feminist theorists and researchers, for instance, are particularly interested in
- how stories we tell about families in intimate relationships are often moral
- narratives about what it means to be a good citizen and how to live a good and happy life.
- This research consistently shows that the majority of media narratives about families
- situate heterosexual monogamous coupling as the key to happy, moral, and fulfilling lives.
- Embedded in these narratives about the heteronormative monogamous couple are
- implicit or explicit messages about gender, race, class, sexuality, and citizenship. In American Dreams
- I suggest that adopting a poly gaze can help us better understand how the stories we tell
- about monogamy and monogamous coupling, in particular, are deeply embedded within
- American narratives about happiness, living a good life, and the rights of citizenship.
- So what is the poly gaze? As I outline in the book, adopting the poly gaze means first, looking closely
- at how intimate and familial relationships are represented in media and paying specific attention
- to what the text or imagery is saying about monogamy, non-monogamy, and their role in living
- a happy and moral life. Secondly, the second step is to parse what the narrative or imagery about
- monogamy or non-monogamy is saying about who deserves to be happy, who deserves to be respected
- and admired, and who deserves the rights of citizenship. What I found in my research on
- media representations of monogamy and non-monogamy is that many of the different kinds of texts, many
- different kinds of texts including film and television, journalistic accounts of polygamy,
- historical biographies, and even social science research on campus hookup culture
- implicitly or explicitly assume and therefore perpetuate the idea that monogamous coupling
- is the very definition of happy endings and it's the only path for living a good and moral life. And
- importantly, often these narratives are also very much about appropriate gender relations,
- which races ethnicities and religious groups are deserving of American citizenship, and what
- constitutes a legitimate family. In other words, stories about monogamy and polyamory
- are often stories about social inequalities with some narratives fully reinforcing already
- existing inequalities and others challenging them. Let me give you a quick example from my book.
- In one chapter I analyze historical biographies. And in that chapter I take a good look with the
- poly gaze at Jill Lepore's quite brilliant and impeccably researched book, The Secret History
- of Wonder Woman, which is a biography of of William Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman.
- As described by Lepore, William Marston's family included himself, Olive Byrne, Elizabeth Holloway,
- and their children; the children they had together as three. Elizabeth Holloway was the main economic
- provider, Byrne cared for the children, and Marston worked on his own research. In other words...
- with a poly gaze this is a historical biography of not just William Marston, but also a poly family.
- So in reading that biography I adopted the poly gaze. Lepore goes into great detail about the
- relationship between Byrne, Holloway, and Marston. It's a really fascinating and engaging read.
- However, reading this historical biography through the lens of the poly gaze,
- it becomes quite clear that Lepore characterizes the poly arrangement as a spectacle of sorts.
- As something so beyond the world of normalcy that it is in need of some kind of explanation.
- And just as a side note when you read historical biographies of figures or subjects who are in
- long-term monogamous marital relationships, the biographers usually don't try to explain
- why. What could explain this person staying in a long-term monogamous marital relationship? Which
- reflects the need for the poly gaze with Marston, Byrne, and Holloway.
- Lepore's explanation for this quite unusual family situation turns out to be- my interpretation with
- the poly gaze is that Marston charmed and coerced Byrne and Holloway into accepting the situation.
- And he did so because of his own psychological deficiencies and perversions. Moreover, as Lepore
- paints a portrait of Marston's pathologies and perversions she also tells an implicit tale
- about gender. Marston must have dominated Byrne and Holloway because no woman would willingly
- accept another woman in the household is the tone of Lepore's characterization. Interestingly though,
- however, reading this through a poly gaze, it's important to note that Byrne and Holloway, as
- reported by Lepore, continued to live together as partners for decades after Marston's death. From my
- perspective, this is an indication that Byrne and Holloway were not coerced, they weren't dominated.
- That they were willingly participating in a family dynamic that worked for everybody. There
- are also ways in which Lepore tells a narrative about appropriate gender relations while
- pathologizing the poly household when talking about the division of labor. For instance, Lepore
- suggests that the division of labor where Holloway supported the family economically, was a
- result of Marston's own selfishness. And that he coerced Holloway to be the economic
- provider and Byrne to care for the children so that he could pursue his own selfish interests.
- Holloway, as reported by Lepore, always wanted to pursue a career in law and was far more interested
- in her career than she was in the household and the children. And importantly, Byrne's willingness
- to care for the children in the household allowed Holloway to do that. The poly arrangement, in other
- words, allowed an alternative gender arrangement in the family. In other words, the historical biography
- as told by Lepore makes the poly kinship between Marston, Holloway, and Byrne seem unseemly, perverse, and
- exploitive despite all evidence provided by Lepore herself that the arrangements worked well for all
- involved, including the children. Most important perhaps is that all three: Byrne, Holloway,
- and Marston were committed to what they called equality of the sexes. They were feminists. And
- their family arrangement, from where I'm sitting, makes sense given their political commitments.
- Instead of seeing the poly arrangement as consistent with and perhaps part of
- their political commitments, Lepore instead argues that it went against their political commitments
- and is evidence of duplicity and hypocrisy on the part of Marston. In other words, their household was
- anti-feminist according to Lepore, while their public politics were feminist. With the poly
- gaze, however, one could interpret their family as fully consistent with their political commitments.
- It's the same for Candace Falk's biography of Emma Goldman and Susan Cheever's biography
- of E.E. Cummings. Both Goldman and Cummings were politically committed to what they called "free
- love" or non-monogamy throughout their entire lives. In both biographies, however, the authors reduced
- their subject's efforts to live a non-monogamous life with quite gendered psychological
- difficulties or pathologies. Thereby erasing the ways in which non-monogamy or living a poly
- life can be and has been throughout U.S. history, an important political decision made by some.
- As I outlined in the chapter, it's not inevitable that biographers adopt a monogamous gaze
- to understand their non-monogamous subjects. For instance, Alex De Veaux's biography of Audre Lorde
- and Nancy Milford's biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Both biographies interpret a commitment to
- non-monogamy as fully embedded within and part of their subjects larger political commitments.
- And I argue in the book that this is important because as long as we keep considering
- non-monogamy in historical figures lives as an aberration rather than embedded within their lives
- more fully, we perpetuate the idea that polyamory is something new and different.
- And moreover, that there's nothing political about the ways in which we form our households and our
- familial relationships. So this is just one example of how I adopt a poly gaze to analyze
- texts. In the other chapters which focus on social science research on campus hookup cultures,
- film and television narratives, and journalistic accounts of religious forms of polygamy, I ask the
- same two questions: What is the text saying about monogamous, non-monogamous, and poly relationships?
- And what is the text saying about gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and living a
- good and moral life, by telling a narrative about monogamy, non-monogamy, and poly lives?
- The stories we tell matter sociologically and my hope is that after having read my analysis
- of these different texts, my readers will be willing and able to adopt a poly gaze
- to better understand the stories we tell about living happily ever after. Thank you.
- [Music]