The Anti-Monogamy Framework: Reimagining Relationality

By Lisa Zheutlin '22

Thesis Advisor: Professor Jen Manion

Abstract: The anti-monogamy framework is a queer feminist undertaking that elucidates the political grasp of monogamy and questions why dominant culture and society prioritizes romantic, coupled, sexual love above all else, why other nourishing forms of love are not similarly valorized, both interpersonally and structurally. The first chapter, The Romance Myth, traces the harmful social and cultural privileging of romance, driven by a desire to understand the funneling toward compulsory monogamy, both personally and theoretically. A key component of this chapter questions and queers the line between platonic and romantic love, with asexuality exposing their categorizational ambiguity, and shows the harmful consequences of prioritizing the latter over the former. Chapter 2, the Weaponization of Monogamy, traces monogamy’s normalization/naturalization in its shift from a doctrine of Christianity and nationalism to a discourse of science. This chapter unearths monogamy’s racist, colonial roots, detailing how the United States and Canada weaponized monogamy as a tool of settler colonialism in 19th century nation-building, using an “Othering matrix” to define and distance oneself and one’s people against a racialized, sexualized, pathologized “Other,” with a specific focus on monogamy’s brutal imposition onto Indigenous sexuality and kinship networks. Filtering these historical and political processes through the anti-monogamy framework unearths the long-lasting impact these enforcements have on our sense of belonging, both with one another and in the nation. The final chapter, Queer Alternatives, is committed to world building, to evaluating and crafting practical queer alternatives to counter monogamy’s hegemony, imaginaries which internalize the lessons from the first two chapters and critically do not reify the privileging of romance and sex. This chapter both acknowledges the racialized legacies of the “Othering” matrix on perception of non-monogamies and illuminates the ways in which non-monogamy can also lead to naturalizing and normative discourses, obscuring more expansive intimacies. In casting the anti-monogamy framework onto the legal and economic realms, this section demonstrates the applicability of the framework to broader social justice and anti-capitalist movements. In decentering settler sexuality, sex, and romance, how can we rescue and reimagine our relationalities and realities?