The Spectre of Promiscuity

Citation preview

THE SPECTRE OF PROMISCUITY

For Reinhard and Johanna in gratitude for all the support they have given me throughout my lifetime. They taught me to approach life with both empathy and a critical spirit.

The Spectre of Promiscuity Gay Male and Bisexual Non-monogamies and Polyamories

CHRISTIAN KLESSE Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

© Christian Klesse 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Christian Klesse has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Klesse, Christian The spectre of promiscuity : gay male and bisexual non-monogamies and polyamories 1. Homosexuality - Great Britian 2. Non-monogamous relationships - Great Britain 3. Homosexuality - Law and legislation - Great Britain I. Title 306.7'66'0941 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Klesse, Christian. The spectre of promiscuity : gay male and bisexual non-monogamies and polyamories / by Christian Klesse. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-4906-9 1. Gay men--Sexual behavior. 2. Non-monogamous relationships. I. Title. HQ76.K57 2007 306.84'23086642--dc22 2007023735 ISBN 978-0-7546-4906-9

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire.

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

Beyond the Myth of Equality and Democracy Changing Directions – Sexuality Research and the Question of Power Nodal Points – Heteronormativity, Hegemony and Intersectionality Routes for an Intellectual Journey … the Structure of the Book

vii 1 2 10 17

1 The State of the Law: Heteronormative Citizenship and Sexual Counterpublics The Regulation of the Public/Private Distinction The Wolfenden Strategy: Permissiveness and Control Section 28 and Heterosexual Family Values Queer Counterpublics, Hegemony and Conflict

19 20 23 29 33

2 Researching Non-monogamies: Stories on Positionality, Intersubjectivity and Power Power and the Research Process Intersubjectivity, Identity and Politics Differences, Power and Research Relationships

39 40 42 46

3

Sex and Assimilation: Gay Male Non-monogamies and the Question of Equality Metaphorical Constructions: Anti-gay Promiscuity Discourses The Same-sex Marriage Debates

57 58 65

4

Gender Troubles: Bisexuality and Non-monogamy The Construction of Bisexuality and Non-monogamy Non-monogamy Debates in the Bisexual Movement Bisexuality, Non-monogamy and Marriage

77 78 82 86

5

Polyamory: Different Kinds of Love Stories 97 From Identity to Community and Politics 98 What’s in a Term? The Concept of Polyamory 102 Polyamory and Its ‘Others’: Different Styles of Non-monogamy 107

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6

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Negotiating Non-monogamy: Difference, Power and Intimacy Negotiation, Relationship Work and the Limits of Consent Differential Positioning, ‘Relationship Defining Power’ and Social Capital Between Resitance and Normalisation: Non-monogamy, Sexual Politics and Ethics Heteronormativity and Non-monogamy Heteronormativity, Hegemony and Politics Hegemony and Agency Publics, Counterpublics and the Politics of Public Sphere Inclusion The Question of Resistance and Transgression

115 116 124

133 134 138 139 142 147

Appendix The Study: Research Design and Methodology Qualitative Interviewing Initial Analysis Sampling Issues The Sample Focus Groups (Group Discussions) Participant Observation Discourse Analysis

153 153 154 155 156 157 158 159

Bibliography Index

161 197

Acknowledgments This book would not have been written without the help of many people. I am most gratefully indebted to all the research participants for their trust, time and consideration. Their stories and ideas have brought this project to life. My discussions with the members of the AHRC Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality and in particular the group at the Keele Law School were an invaluable inspiration when I started to work on this book during my time as a postdoctoral research fellow with the Sociological Review. Over and over again I was struck by the kindness and generosity of my friends Matthew Weait, Ruth Fletcher and Nicky Priaulx who hosted me on uncountable occasions in their flat at Keele campus. At the same time, Paula Darwish, Necla Acik Toprak, Baran Acik-Toprak, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodriguez and Shirley Tate wonderfully created a home for me in Manchester – a home which has now even turned into a more permanent one. I am also grateful to Yvonne Drew and Col Bashir for welcoming me to Manchester. I thank Robert Grimm and Rute Caldeira for their friendship and hospitality. The financial support by the Sociological Review during the academic year 2004–2005 enabled me to have an enormously productive time in terms of my research and writing. Without this privileged space it would have been difficult to write this book. I would like to express my thanks to Caroline Baggeley for being such nice company and cheering me up all along. I am grateful to Graham Allan who gave me valuable advice on my proposal. I am very fond of my friends in Hamburg who have supported me all along and have been home to me, even while I was crossing borders forwards and backwards between Germany and England. I would like to thank my housemates at Chemnitzstraße for our great life together. I am indebted to Aysel Adigüzel, Tatiana la Mura Flores, Daniel Beraky, Roberta Pagni, Florian Zellner, Burkhard Fischer, Tobias Völker, and Cigdem Sayman for their great friendship and encouragement. The same applies to my wonderful friends in London, Rabiye Cinar, Rosie Phipps, Umut Erel, Jin Haritaworn and Sevtap Genc. I am grateful to Chin-ju Lin and Jin Haritaworn for our extremely enjoyable co-operation on our special issue on polyamory for the journal Sexualities. Many thanks also to Umut Erel for her early input into this group. Our discussions around this editorial project have informed many insights of mine on non-monogamy and polyamory – and beyond. My co-operation with Umut Erel, Jin Haritaworn and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodriguez on joint articles on intersectionality have also greatly inspired my theoretical thinking. Umut Erel, Jin Haritaworn, Bettina Fritzsche, Nicola Barker and Robin Bauer were so kind to give me constructive feed back on chapter drafts and other publications on the topic concerned. Many thanks go to my colleagues at the Sociology Department at MMU for having been so welcoming. I gratefully acknowledge the support through the Manchester Institute for Social and Spatial Transformation (MISST), who by the

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means of a small grant set me free from some of my teaching responsibilities in the writing up period. If I think of this book as part of my overall academic career, I wish to thank Ken Plummer and Chetan Bhatt who supported my early writings and research into nonmonogamy. Very special thanks (with a twinkle in the eye) to Nira Yuval-Davis, who was the first one who ever suggested that I should go out to publish my work. I will also never forget the amount of intellectual and emotional excitement around the meetings of the Gender and Ethnicity Research Discussion Group during my years in London. They have had a lasting impact on my intellectual work. I am particularly indebted to my parents Reinhard Klesse and Johanna Klesse for their constant support. The death of my father struck us hard, when he unexpectedly died on the 10th of July last year. I was just about to move to England to start my employment at MMU. This loss has overshadowed my work on this book for long periods of time. With the kindest gratitude I wish to express my thanks – mixed with rich memories – to Umut Erel, Tobias Völker and Cigdem Sayman, who have been very close to me and nourished me – in different ways over different times. Merci. I hereby also acknowledge the permission to include material from previously published work in this book. Versions of parts of Chapter 4 have been published in two articles. ‘Bisexual Women, Non-monogamy, and Differentialist Anti-promiscuity Discourses’ appeared in the special issue on the Cardiff Conference ‘Pleasure and Danger Revisited’ of the Sage journal Sexualities 8 (4): 445–464. ‘Heteronormativity, Non-monogamy and the Marriage Debate in the Bisexual Movement’ appeared in a special issue on same-sex marriage of the Lesbian & Gay Psychology Review 8 (4), July 2006, 162–173. A version of the second part of Chapter 5 has been published under the title ‘Polyamory and its ‘Others’: Contesting the Terms of Non-Monogamy’ in the special issue on polyamory of Sexualties 9 (5), December 2006, 565–583. A section of Chapter 7 has been published in the first issue of the Polish Queer Theory On-line Journal Inter Alia as part of the the article ‘Beyond Visibility, Rights, and Citizenship – Critical Notes on Sexual Politics in the European Union’ (http://www. interalia.org.pl/numery.php?nid=1&aid=8). I am grateful for having received the permission to use this material, in particular in the cases, where the copy right lies with the respective journals. Christian Klesse July 2007

Introduction

Beyond the Myth of Equality and Democracy

Intimacy seen in this spreading way does generate an aesthetic, an aesthetic of attachment, but no inevitable forms of feelings are attached to it. (...) This is where normative ideologies come in, when certain “expressive” relations are promoted across public and private domains – love, community, patriotism – while other relations, motivated, say, by the “appetites” are discredited or simply neglected. (...) Likewise, desires for intimacy that bypass the couple or the life narrative it generates have no alternative plots, let alone few laws in which to clarify and cultivate them. What happens to the energy of attachment when it has no designed place? (...) the wish for normalcy everywhere heard these days, voiced by minoritzed subjects, often expresses a wish not to have to push so hard in order to have “a life”. To live as if threatening contexts are merely elsewhere might well neutralize the ghostly image of one’s own social negativity; and the constant energy of public self-protectiveness can be sublimated into personal relations of passion, care and good intention. (Berlant 1998: 285–286)

With its focus on gay male and bisexual non-monogamies and polyamories, this book explores some of these ‘alternative aesthetics of attachment’ and the narratives on relationships or intimacy, which ‘bypass the couple form’ or actively embrace the ‘appetites’ stimulated by erotic desire. The relative frequency of gay male non-monogamous relationship practice has been widely noted in research into gay male relationships. Although not much research has been conducted into bisexual relationships, the few studies which exist provide evidence that many bisexual men and women are non-monogamous. Yet gay male and bisexual non-monogamous and polyamorous relationships have rarely been studied in close detail. This book is based on a comprehensive multi-method empirical research, which has put gay male and bisexual non-monogamous relationship practice at the centre of its inquiry. By the means of qualitative interviews, focus groups, participant observation, documentary research and discourse analytical techniques, I have followed up questions not dissimilar to the ones Lauren Berlant has raised in the opening quote above. How are gay male and bisexual non-monogamous lives positioned with regard to a culture that tends to value love, community and patriotism? What role do they play in contemporary sexual politics? In interviews and group discussions I have talked with people about their views on sex and relationships and the gains and difficulties of non-monogamous relationship practices. They explained to me their motivations for being in open or multiple relationships and how others respond to their way of life. We talked about sexual health issues, power dynamics in their relationships and about different aspects of sexual politics. Is there a politics of non-monogamy; and if

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yes, what does it look like? How does heterosexism affect non-monogamous gay men and bisexuals? How relevant is the campaign for same-sex marriage rights to people who practice non-monogamy? In the course of these conversations and discussions I learnt a lot about the manifold and diverse personal, cultural and political issues at stake in the lives of gay men and bisexual men and women who prefer to be nonmonogamous. This book is based on the personal experience stories, ethical concerns and political opinions voiced in these encounters. Yet my intention is not to provide a comprehensive ethnography of gay male and bisexual non-monogamous relationship life in the UK. Rather, I address questions brought up by these narratives in the context of larger cultural themes. My main interest is to explore how non-monogamy is put into discourse and how it is negotiated in sexual politics. What discourses on non-monogamy circulate in the debates in the gay, bisexual and polyamorous movements? How is non-monogamy constructed with regard to partnership values such as love and intimacy? How do non-monogamous people respond to negative assumptions regarding their relationships or their character? What power issues do non-monogamous queers (have to) work through in their relationships?1 Changing Directions – Sexuality Research and the Question of Power This book is written against the grain in that it attempts to bring the issue of power (back) into the discussion of queer lives and relationships. By placing questions of power central to my discussion, I wish to challenge two unfortunate tendencies that mark current sociological writing on sexuality. The first problem regards the prevalence of narratives which hail the progressive nature of the current state of sexual politics. Within this perspective, UK or European culture is seen to be increasingly welcoming to sexual diversity. In such idealistic descriptions the specific problems that many queers continue to face in their everyday lives tend to be glossed over. The second problem relates to the tendency of recent work on samesex partnerships and polyamory to present these relationships as being in principle egalitarian. Here, too, we encounter an uncritical endorsement of European sexual culture as an intrinsically diversifying and civilising force. As I show in more detail, these two problems lead to an impoverished understanding of the complexity of power in intimate and sexual relationships and encounters. In order to develop a more comprehensive perspective, I critically explore the usefulness of some 1 In this book I use the term ‘queer’ in two different ways. In its first usage, ‘queer’ refers to a particular theoretical tradition or political project (as in ‘queer theory’ and ‘queer politics’). In its second (occasional) usage, ‘queer’ signifies an umbrella term for a range of sexual and gender subjectivities not condoned in hegemonic frames of heteronormativity (such as gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, transgender and gender-queer identities in their various articulations). In the narrow context of my discussion in this book it includes everybody who considers them selves to be part of a ‘gay male’, ‘bisexual’ or ‘queer’ relationship. The emphasis on ambiguity in the term ‘queer’ makes such an application possible. I acknowledge that not everybody may feel represented by this term, but I prefer it over equally problematic alternatives such as ‘non-heterosexual’ (which reinforces the centrality of heterosexuality) or ‘LGBTQ’ (which assumes clear-cut and homogeneous identities).

Beyond the Myth of Equality and Democracy

3

prominent concepts in gender studies, sexuality studies and queer theory. To what degree can the negativity directed towards queer non-monogamous relationships be understood through the model of heteronormativity? Is it possible to step outside of heteronormative culture? Can the lives of non-monogamous and polyamorous queers be described as being transgressive? Drawing on the critique of feminists and queers of colour, I argue that an adequate analysis of power around sexuality needs to integrate the critique of heteronormativity into an intersectionality perspective which acknowledges the mutual interconnectedness of multiple forms of oppression. There is an urgent need for feminist and queer theory to step beyond the narrow frame of a single-issue analysis (Cohen 2001, Haritaworn 2007). Into a New Future? Sexual Diversity and Citizenship Discourse in the ‘New Britain’ Over recent years, some observers have adopted a more optimistic tone in their discussion of sexual politics in Britain. In an article titled ‘An Unfinished Revolution’, Jeffrey Weeks describes liberalisation (together with secularisation and diversification) as the most salient feature of the current transformation of British sexual culture. ‘What seems to be happening is a greater acceptance of the fact of homosexuality (“live and let live”) whilst there remains an ingrained refusal to see it as of equal validity with heterosexuality’, Weeks explains (2000a: 171). He concedes that this process is ambiguous and points to the lasting repercussions of the anti-gay backlash during the moral panics around HIV/AIDS throughout the 1980s. His overall analysis, however, suggests a tendency of increasing liberalisation of sexual attitudes which would have particularly pronounced effects with regard to the perception of homosexuality. This optimism leads Weeks to interpret the continuing state prosecutions of importuning and proselytising gay men, direct violence in the form of ‘queer-bashing’, and the prohibitive effects of Section 282 as ‘distorted responses to real changes taking place in attitudes to non-heterosexual behaviour’ (2000a: 171). The attempts of the New Right Government throughout the 1980s and early 1990s to forge a conservative hegemony through the combination of neoliberal politics with social and moral authoritarianism were doomed to fail, Weeks declares confidently (2000b: 239). Progressive social movement politics on gender and sexuality have succeeded in breaking the absolute hegemony of traditionalist normative discourses on sexual morality (1995: 59). On the whole, Weeks argues, the 1990s witnessed an increasing recognition of the values of individual autonomy, choice, and freedom with regard to matters of sexual lifestyle (2000b: 239–240). Are there indications that justify such a positive account? In terms of legislation there have certainly been major developments that have resulted in the removal of some of the most outrageous sources of discriminations of non-heterosexuals and transgendered people in the UK legal system. The equalisation of the of the age of consent through the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000, access to a registered partnership scheme for same-sex couples through the Civil Partnership Act 2004, the repeal of Section 28 in Scotland in 2000 and in England in 2003, 2 Jeffrey Weeks wrote this article before the repeal of Section 28 in Scotland and England.

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and the Gender Recognition Act 2004 are some of the most prominent examples (Waites 2003, Stychin 2003, Hale 2004). However, it remains questionable to what degree these legal changes can be read as the result of a new politics of tolerance and diversity. With regard to some of these reforms, the government was put under pressure to act by rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) or felt the need to catch up with the more advanced standard of (sexual) rights in other countries of the European Union (Epstein et al. 2000). Other reforms, like the repeal of Section 28, were subject to extremely controversial debate and were met with fierce resistance both inside and outside of Parliament (Rahman 2004, Taylor 2005, Moran 2001). It may be true that the outright homophobia linked to 1980s New Right family discourses is becoming increasingly marginalised. This is evident, for example, from the fact that Conservative opponents of the repeal of Section 28 did attempt to distance themselves from obviously homophobic positions in their contributions to the debates in Parliament. They often framed their arguments as a concern with vulnerable children (who run risk of being seduced into a homosexual way of life), rather than as a moral rejection of homosexuality per se (Stychin 2003: 32). A similar tendency has been observed with regard to the debates about the alteration of the age of consent (Epstein et al. 2000). At the same time, we should be careful not to overstate the transformations within New Right moralism. Already in the 1980s, Conservatives were ready to promise gay men and lesbians a place at the table, if they only were willing to subject to a heteronormative status quo (Smith 1994a). Moreover, some analysts of New Right Conservative rhetoric also point towards the persistence of classical moral-traditionalist themes. Both the Parliamentary debates on the equalisation of the age of consent and the repeal of Section 28 were marked by residual elements around an assertive philosophy of heterosexual familialism, privilege and power. More importantly, even if liberalprogressive arguments of supporters for reform set the tone of the debate, this does not mean that their discourse was free of heteronormative elements. Although New Labour has endorsed the repeal of some anti-gay legislation, it has at the same time stressed the moral and social significance of strong families. The former home secretary Jack Straw made this quite explicit in his introduction to the government’s consultation paper Supporting Families: ‘family life is the foundation on which our communities, our society and our country are built’ (Straw quoted in Stychin 2003: 30). From the Labour government’s point of view, the ideal family-type is both heterosexual and child-rearing. The double-earner family is perceived to be best equipped and most efficient for the task of producing responsible and (economically) active citizens. Some analysts have explained this pro-family agenda as a creative incorporation of Thatcherite themes into New Labour politics (Epstein et al. 2000: 24, cf. Phillips 1998). However, in distinction to the Thatcherite pro-family discourse in which the family was emblematic of an over-arching individualism, the Blairite version placed it squarely within a communitarian philosophy which links the family with both nation and community (Bell and Binnie 2000, Stychin 2003). New Labour’s discourse on citizenship is double-edged in that it ties its commitment to social inclusion not only to a discourse of rights but also to an emphasis on responsibilities. Rights are being made dependent on the fulfilment of duties and responsibilities (with employment being one of the major expectations placed on

Beyond the Myth of Equality and Democracy

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the active citizen). There is consequently a strong disciplinary element entailed in New Labour’s citizenship discourse (Stychin 2003: 28). New Labour’s politics of strengthening families sits uneasily with its declared commitment to diversity, equality and multiculturalism. The economic and governmental utilitarianism of New Labour’s model of citizenship (which is clearly expressed in its family politics) seriously undermines the substance of its politics of diversity. In the government’s rationality for sexual law reform, active citizenship discourse merges with a selfcongratulatory narrative of national revitalisation and modernisation. ‘Law reform itself becomes implicated in the process of reconstituting the nation as progressive, modern, civilised, enlightened and inclusive; all of which are necessary in order for it to be competitive’ (Stychin 2003: 42).3 Finally, there is not really a great deal of space for the families of sexual dissidents and the opportunities for failing as a ‘bad family’ are manifold – as evidenced in the demonisation of single-headed or unemployed working class families (Ball and Vincent 2007). Recent debates, triggered by a speech by David Cameron on the significance of marriage, clearly demonstrate that the family continues to remain a political battleground with both Conservatives and Labour profiling themselves with a classical family value agenda (Woods and Smith 2007). If we look at party political and parliamentary discourse in closer detail, it appears questionable whether the ‘new Britain’ is really on the way of becoming a safer and more welcoming place for sexual dissidents. Polls and surveys on sexual attitudes in Britain of the last decade reveal the prevalence of a rather conservative morality with regard to questions of sexual lifestyle. Most polls show the persistence of widespread homophobia and a strong disapproval of same-sex sex and/or relationships. According to the national survey Sexual Behaviour in Britain more than two-thirds of men (70.2%) and more than half of women (57.9%) think sex between men to be always or mostly wrong. With regard to the sex between women the situation is not much different: 64.5% of men and 58.8% of women consider such activity as always or mostly wrong (Wellings et al. 1994: 253). Although there have been recent polls which suggest that the UK population is getting somewhat more tolerant towards homosexuality in general (Barnett et al. 1996, Weeks 2000b, Evans 2002), there are also indications that this long-term trend goes hand in hand with an elaboration of sharper distinctions between more and less ‘tolerable’ and ‘acceptable’ homosexualities (Evans 1993). ‘Even where homosexual pairings are tolerated, they are expected to imitate monogamous, heterosexual family life and remain tied to the same values’, argues Avedon Carol in her discussion of the culture of censorship in Britain (1994: 149). Non-monogamy and sex with multiple partners is clearly one of the more controversial topics. Opinion polls show widespread rejection of non-monogamy and sex outside of a firmly established partnership. The national survey Sexual Behaviour in Britain demonstrates a widespread condemnation of heterosexual non-monogamy among British citizens (Wellings et al. 1994). Out of fifty respondents, only one person held the view that extra-marital sex is not wrong at all. Four out of five respondents believed 3 See Ahmed (2000) for an excellent analysis of a similar mechanism with regard to race and multiculturalism.

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that it is always or mostly wrong (78.7% men and 84.3% women). Two-thirds of men and more than three-quarters of women disapprove of sexual relationships outside a live-in relationship. Sex outside a regular relationship is perceived to be always or mostly wrong by more than half of the men and two-thirds of the women. The authors argue that even the younger generations do not show higher degrees of tolerance. For the majority of British people, the authors argue, the question whether they approve of sexual acts or relationships is still dependent on monogamy and married couple status (pp. 249–251). More recent surveys indicate the persistence of such moral rigidity (cf. Barlow et al. 2001, Clarke and Thomson 2001). As I show throughout this book, non-monogamy – or as it is expressed in the language of moral condemnation, ‘promiscuity’ – tends to be associated with certain identities and collectivities. The assumption of promiscuity forms part of a racialised, classed, gendered strategy of sexual stigmatisation (LeMoncheck 1997). In hegemonic discourses, gay men, lesbians and bisexual men and women are framed as being promiscuous due to their nature – some even more than others, depending on their social positionality. What these opinion polls may tell us is consequently not necessarily a decline in homophobia (or biphobia), but a transformation of the ways in which it is articulated. Queer people who engage in non-monogamous relationships continue to find themselves in opposition to the dominant sexual morality. They are prone to being delegitimised, pathologised, marginalised and stigmatised. They are vulnerable to attacks on different levels, including ridicule, physical violence, state prosecution, interference into their families and child-rearing, and so on. The spectre of queer promiscuity haunts the national imagination. As a frequent point of reference in sexuality debates, promiscuity-allegations continue to unsettle lesbian, gay and bisexual politics. Anti-promiscuity discourses are part of a wider and complex network of power that encircles queer sexual and intimate lives. However, homophobia, biphobia and sex-negativity are not the only power dimensions understated in current sociological writing on sexuality. The common optimism extends to the celebration of contemporary relationships as being ‘in principle’ egalitarian. This discourse is particularly pronounced with regard to same-sex relationships. The Vanguards of Modernity? The Myth of Same-sex Relationship Equality There has been a pronounced tendency in sociological research to emphasise the egalitarian character of lesbian and gay relationships at least since the late 1970s. Researchers committed to lesbian and gay rights aimed to correct the common misrepresentation of same-sex relationship practices as bizarre copies of heterosexual gender scripts. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the bulk of academic research advanced such stereotypical representations. However, in the course of this positiveimage campaign by well-meaning academics, the nuances of the power relations that potentially structure any kind of relationship slipped out of focus (Carrington 1999: 3–28). In recent sociological debate the ‘equality myth’ has been revitalised through Anthony Giddens’ influential work on intimacy. Giddens’ thesis of the democratisation of intimacy has been widely discussed in British and continental European relationship and family sociology (for example, Silva and Smart 1999b,

Beyond the Myth of Equality and Democracy

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Smart and Neale 1999, Weeks et al. 2001, Schmidt 1998, Schmidt and Strauß 1998, Schmidt et al. 2006). According to Giddens, the radical cultural transformations caused by processes of modernisation have brought to the forth a new type of intimate relationship. His concept of the ‘pure relationship’ stands for a relationship which is entered and maintained by choice and for its own sake. It is based on an active form of love, an endorsement of commitment and intimacy, and permanent re-working of trust through negotiation. The generalisation of the ‘pure relationship’, according to Giddens, carries the promises of true ‘emotional democracy’. Giddens’ model of the pure relationship has been widely criticised. In particular, feminists have rejected it as an inappropriate tool for understanding contemporary heterosexual relationship cultures. Lynn Jamieson’s (1998, 1999) review of empirical research shows that Giddens’ focus on a reductionist model of ‘disclosing intimacy’ (rather than ‘caring intimacy’) obscures the persisting division of labour in most heterosexual relationships. Moreover, the narrow focus on the dyadic couple relationship fails to take into account that intimate partners are usually part of wider kinship networks and may have responsibilities for dependents, such as young children. Since care work in general and child care in particular are effeminised, it is obvious that women’s labour is rationalised out of focus in the pure relationship model (Smart and Neale 1999, Silva and Smart 1999b). What is striking is that while the pure relationship has not been taken seriously as a suitable model for the study of heterosexual relationships, it has gained an enormous popularity in the literature on same-sex relationships. Among others, this is due to the fact that Giddens has positioned gay men and lesbians so benignly as the vanguards of a democratic relationship culture (Bech 1997, Weeks 1995, Weeks et al. 1996, Yip 1997). Lesbians and gay men have always been free from constricting relationship norms, Giddens argues. This is why they have pre-perceived the conditions of late modernity in their experience (1992: 135). Left without any binding norms and traditions, gay men and lesbians were put in the position to develop relationships of relative equality in their ‘everyday experiments’ in living (p. 15). Giddens further credits lesbians and gay men for being the vanguards of a democratic culture of recreational or ‘episodic sexuality’ as it has blossomed, for example, in gay male cruising and bath-house culture. I think we should welcome Giddens’ non-judgmental comments on gay male and lesbian casual sex and nonmonogamy. However, his equation of queer lives with the ‘pure relationship’ is at the same time utterly romanticising the reality. As David Bell and Jon Binnie rightly point out, such idealisation forecloses the analysis of power, violence and exploitation that resides in same-sex relationships as much as in heterosexual ones (2000: 216–217). As I have discussed in more detail elsewhere, Gidden’s work is illustrative of two tendencies that are widespread in current sociological writing on sexual relationships (Klesse 2006a, 2007a). It is due to these problematic assumptions that the equality myth regarding gay male and lesbian relationships can be upheld: Firstly, most researchers work with an impoverished and one-dimensional concept of power. Secondly, gay men and lesbians are frequently ascribed a privileged place in currently quite fashionable detraditionalisation discourses, according to which they are presented as ‘pioneers of intimate and sexual democratisation’. In the

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following, I will briefly illustrate with one example how these assumptions work in an empirical research context. Jeffrey Weeks has frequently taken recourse to the ‘pure relationship’ in order to make his points about ‘intimate democratisation’ and the diversification of sexual cultures (Weeks 1995, 1999/2000, 2000b). Weeks acknowledges the validity of the feminist critique of the concept, but has continued to apply it in his analysis of lesbian and gay contexts. Even if same-sex relationships are compromised by all kinds of power, Weeks suggests, they are ‘in principle’ relationships chosen by free agents (1995: 35). A similar ambivalence shapes the empirical work that Jeffrey Weeks has conducted with Catherine Donovan and Brian Heaphy on ‘non-heterosexual’ families of choice. In their early publications, the research team unequivocally endorses the pure relationship model (cf. Weeks et al. 1996). In their later work and in particular in their book Same-Sex Intimacies, the research team discuss Giddens’ work in a more nuanced way (Weeks et al. 2001). Although the authors now reject the thesis of the pure relationship as a descriptive concept, they insist that gay men and lesbians invest to a much higher degree than heterosexuals in the ideal of emotional democracy. ‘The key issue, we nevertheless argue, is the commitment to striving for an equal relationship, which is the prime characteristic of non-heterosexual ways of being’ (p. 109). Even if gay men, lesbians and bisexuals, too, rarely achieve truly egalitarian relationships, this firm commitment to egalitarianism sets them apart from heterosexuals. The research team describes non-heterosexual relationships as advanced because they are not constrained by hierarchical gendered relationship scripts nor even build their relationships in opposition to heterosexual codes (p. 50). Here the authors draw heavily on the work of Gillian Dunne (1997, 1998b). Dunne theorises gender as a process, that is, as something that people are doing and that is done to them. Stressing the relational dimension of gender performance, Dunne argues that it matters profoundly towards whom and in which context one is ‘doing gender’. The production and enactment of gender in the context of heterosexuality tends to affirm difference and to play down similarity. In the context of a lesbian relationship the compulsion to perform gender as difference is less accentuated and gender solidarity may be expressed as a ‘passion for sameness’. While differences and power imbalances are seen as a feature of lesbian relationships, Dunne is convinced that ‘lesbianism is about a preference for negotiating (balancing, valuing, offsetting) differences within the solidarity that comes from experiencing the world as women’ (1999: 79). A range of studies, including Dunne’s own empirical work, suggest that lesbians empower each other with respect to employment and education, reach fairly balanced arrangements in terms of allocation of waged and unwaged labour and have a more egalitarian approach to housework and child care (Dunne 1997, 1998a, Golombok and Tasker 1997). Other research contradicts the equality thesis. Among the same-sex families studied by Carrington (1999) only a tiny minority reached an egalitarian pattern in the ways they organised their domestic life (pp. 184–187). This group of families consisted of very affluent couples/families, who relied on the service economy or the labour of badly paid (usually immigrant) domestic workers, people with good employment conditions, and families who downsize domesticity. Carrington’s study powerfully illustrates that the ‘equality myth’ gets drawn into

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question when class and labour issues and the wider economy are brought into the equation. Against the backdrop of his study we may also ask whether the fact that most non-heterosexuals want egalitarian relationships is really more important than that their relationships often are not. The thesis of enhanced same-sex egalitarianism rests on an analysis of power which prioritises gender (and sexuality) as the major axes of power. Although the research team acknowledge that class and race issues have got an impact on the power dynamics in non-heterosexual relationships they do not focus on these issues in their analysis to the same extend as they do on gender. Apart from such a prioritisation of gender as the major source of power, the thesis of non-heterosexual emotional democratisation further stems from the authors’ endorsement of detraditionalisation theories. Paul Heelas (1996) uses the term ‘detraditionalisation theories’ to refer to a diverse set of meta-sociological narratives which assume that the most significant feature of the late modern or postmodern condition consists of the strengthening of autonomous subjectivity and self-responsible agency in the face of fading certainties and binding cultural and moral codes. In particular within the paradigm of ‘reflexive modernisation’ (a position strongly associated with the work of Giddens, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim) the concepts choice, agency, creativity and self-invention gain enormous prominence (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, Giddens 1991, Beck, Giddens and Lash 1995). Giddens’ work on the ‘pure relationship’ is just one example among many of the application of detraditionalisation theory to the field of sexuality and intimacy (cf. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995, Beck-Gernsheim 1997, 1998, Simon 1996, Bauman 1998, Plummer 2000, 2001a, Bech 1997). Whereas the bulk of this sociological meta-narratives on the effects of high modernity or postmodernity on intimate relationships is quite hetero-centric and does not have much to say on queer sexualities, gay men and lesbians tend to get attributed a privileged position in the work which includes them in analysis (Giddens 1992, Weeks 2000b). The influence of these kinds of theories has left a strong mark on the research report by Weeks et al. (2001). It is in the light of these theories that they drift – despite all attempts to keep a balance between structure and agency – strongly towards the side of agency in their analysis. Since the themes of detraditionalisation and individualisation are over-inflated in their guiding theoretical assumptions, choice emerges as a key concept in their analysis. Yet within the paradigm of choice, detraditionalisation gets easily conflated with democratisation. The overall effect is that power and processes of normalisation move out of focus. As I have shown elsewhere, a further problem with detraditionalisation theories of the intimate is that they tend to advance a racialised concept of modernity in that they clearly allocate the motor of (post)modernisation (and democratisation) in the West. Black or ethnic minority cultures both outside and inside the West consequently appear as being backward and traditional with regard to the question of gender equality and sexual rights (cf. Klesse 2006a, 2007a, Erel 2007). In the context of escalating anti-Islamic discourses after September 11, this theme has emerged as a particularly strong feature of new forms of racism, which allows (white) Europeans with a hegemonic ethnic or cultural background to project the problems of sexism and homophobia onto Islamic or Muslim cultures (Puar 2006, Haritaworn and Tauqir 2007).

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The Spectre of Promiscuity

Many of the theoretical tools currently fashionable in the study of sexual relationships are consequently inadequate to account for the complex landscape of power relations in the context of which queer non-monogamous relationships are enacted. I suggest that a broad definition of heteronormativity as hegemony can be helpful to explain the persistence of some aspects of anti-gay and anti-bisexual sentiment and their specific articulation with anti-promiscuity discourses. However, theories of heteronormativity can only ever cover partial aspects of the power relations around sexuality. Previous analyses have mostly been flawed in that they failed to address that normative ideas on sexuality and gender are always mediated by discourses on class, race, ethnicity, age and the able body (Cohen 2001, Haritaworn 2007). Such a perspective has emerged from the debates among anti-racist feminists and queers of colour on how to theorise the intersection or simultaneous working of multiple forms of power (cf. Brah and Phoenix 2004, Erel et al. 2007). Moreover, most theories of heteronormativity lack a satisfying conceptualisation of agency. In this context, positive conceptualisations of power as the ‘ability to cause’ are much more appropriate, if we want take account of dynamics of power and/or resistance on the intersubjective level of relationship practice. Nodal Points – Heteronormativity, Hegemony and Intersectionality Queer theorists tend to read the power relations around gender and sexuality through the model of heteronormativity. The critique of heteronormativity has taken manifold forms and draws on a wide range theoretical traditions, including lesbian and materialist feminism, lesbian and gay theory, psychoanalysis, discourse theory and deconstruction (Wagenknecht 2007). Heteronormative power has been mapped via a critique of the heterosexual/homosexual binary (Fuss 1991, Sedgwick 1995), a denaturalisation of the heterosexual gender ‘matrix’ through a theory of performativity (Butler 1990, 1993), or a Foucauldian perspective of governmentality (Probyn 1996). In my study I have worked with a broad definition of heteronormativity as it is associated with approaches that define heteronormativity as a form of hegemony. Most definitions of heteronormativity assume that it works through a set of cultural practices and values which privilege (certain forms of) heterosexuality. ‘By heteronormativity we mean institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only as coherent – that is, organized as a sexuality – but also privileged’, argue, for example, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1998: 548n). Heteronormativity stands for a complex regime of moral assumptions and cultural practices, which have the potential to instil a sense of rightness in some individuals and a devastating feeling of shame in others. The mechanisms through which this is achieved are manifold, subtle, often unconscious and at times contradictory. Heteronormativity is about more than the celebration of heterosexual identity, the naturalisation of a particularly gendered object choice (that is, the ‘opposite sex’), or the condemnation of homosexuality and bisexuality. Discourses on heterosexuality are tied into a wider web of significatory practices which structure our understanding of subjectivity, identity, biography, destiny, achievement, community, culture and society. According to Diane Richardson

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(2000), heterosexuality stands for a hegemonic representational system which governs dominant conceptualisations of sexual and gendered subjectivity, the body, relationships, the intimate, sexuality and the social itself. In a similar vein, Michael Warner suggests that ‘[w]estern political thought has taken the heterosexual couple to represent the principle of social union itself’ (1993: xxi). Drawing on Monique Wittig’s (1992) work, he claims that heterosexuality is always already present within the mental categories that we are using to decipher the social. The hegemonic dominance of heterosexuality depends on its ability to articulate complex and multiple equivalences between object choice, life course, relationship patterns, sexual roles and acts, and so on. This is the back drop against which Berlant and Warner claim that ‘[c]ontexts that have little relation to sex practice, such as life narrative and general identity, can be heteronormative (…), while in other contexts forms of sex between men and women might not be heteronormative’ (1998: 548n). Their argument has a variety of implications. Firstly, heteronormativity is a pervasive form of power which extends to the control and regulation of both sexual and social identities and practices. Secondly, although heteronormativity sets up discourses on proper sexual activity around an idealised image of heterosexuality, not all heterosexual practice is necessarily heteronormative. Thirdly, if heteronormativity does not equate with heterosexuality, sexual identities and practices other than heterosexual, too, may be drawn within its normalising spin. In her path-breaking essay Thinking Sex, Gayle Rubin (1984/1992) has demonstrated that heterosexuality is integrated into a wider system of sexual stratification which does not only privilege heterosexuality, but also couplehood, monogamy, marriage, and the privatisation of sexuality. According to Rubin’s analysis, sexual acts are attributed differential status depending on which identities, genders, body parts, relationship status, styles of touch, numbers of partners and emotional undercurrents are involved. Homosexual, unmarried, promiscuous, non-procreative sex, sex for money, sole, group or casual sex, cross-generational involvements, sex in public, BDSM,4 the use of sex toys or pornography, and so on, are located at the lower end of a continuum ranging from good, condoned or natural to abnormal, perverse or unnatural forms of sex. Combinations of these characteristics may result in differential or shifting judgment. As a discursive formation, heterosexuality thus normalises more than just gender and sexual identities (cf. Seidman 1997, Warner 1999). According to my reading, a theory of hegemony is implicit to most of the critiques of heterosexuality discussed above, even if not all use this conceptual language. ‘Good Homosexuals’ and ‘Dangerous Queers’ – Hegemony as Normalisation Anna Marie Smith (1994a, 1994b, 1998), in my opinion, has so far provided the most elaborated theory of heteronormativity as hegemony. Smith draws upon a refined understanding of hegemony derived from the post-Marxist social-linguistic theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) elaborate 4 BDSM stands for bondage & discipline, dominance & submission, sadism & masochism. Due to its more differentiated practice of naming, many prefer it over the term S/M.

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the Gramscian model of hegemony in the light of deconstructive theory with the aim of freeing the concept of its essentialist class core. They thereby try to bring about the full potential of the concept of hegemony by radicalising its central element articulation. In their conceptualisation articulation runs wild, so to speak. On the grounds of the assumption of différance rooted in an excess of signification, articulation is being pushed towards a radical logic of contingency. Articulation is defined as ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as result of the articulatory practice’ (p. 105). As a practice of fixation or displacement it is the basic process which makes discourse possible and recognisable through a construction of ‘nodal points’, that is, privileged signs which regulate the flux of meaning. Because Laclau and Mouffe suppose that discursive closure is impossible, they describe hegemony as being always partial, unstable and constituted in ambiguity (cf. Smith 1998, Howarth 2000). As a strategy of power, hegemony regulates the frames of intelligibility (cf. Butler 1990, 1993). Any hegemonic articulation, Smith argues, due to its constitutive contingency, depends on the suppression of its alternatives. Heterosexuality as a hegemonic formation thus renders certain modes of heterosexuality the only valid and intelligible expressions of sexual desire and social identity. Since articulation only ever partially fixes meaning, the cultural representations, social subject positions, and relations of power articulated around heteronormative discourses are continuously contested and constantly evolving (Laclau 1994, Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000). In her analysis of New Right discourses on homosexuality in the Thatcher period, Smith shows that hegemonic defences of heterosexuality do not necessarily depend on the total demonisation of homosexuality per se (1994a, 1997a, 1997b). In Conservative arguments for the introduction of Section 28, the deployment of the imaginary assimilable ‘good homosexual’ (law-abiding, diseasefree, self-closeting who knows his/her place in society) went hand in hand with the demonisation of the ‘dangerous queer’ (promiscuous, diseased, flaunting, selfpromoting, angry and militant). By structuring their discourse around the ‘good homosexual’/’dangerous queer’ dichotomy, New Right populism avoided being read as crude extremism and disguised itself as a moderate ‘middle ground’. The ‘imaginary inclusion’ of the good homosexual, Smith keeps emphasising, was a matter of mere rhetoric. In fact the ‘good homosexual’, she maintains, cannot exist, except from complete self-annihilation (as social identity, community or political movement) through assimilation. The most interesting aspect of Smith’s analysis of (heteronormative) hegemony as normalisation is the demonstration how the discursive differentiation between ‘good homosexual’ and ‘dangerous queer’ may incite the desire for an ‘imaginary inclusion’ within the lesbian and gay, and I would like to add, bisexual ‘communities’. ‘Imaginary inclusion (…) can have a material effect on the identities of the social group which resembles the included figure, the promise of inclusion can be extremely seductive and give rise to all sorts of strategies of self-correction and voluntary assimilation.’ (Smith 1994a: 20).

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Smith’s theory of ‘hegemony as normalisation’ powerfully demonstrates that normalisation transcends any subject position and any category of gender and sexuality in the sense that they all can be drawn into this form of power. No cultural terrain, no identity category and no political project is located entirely beyond the terrain of (hetero)normative hegemony. This insight renders a theory of hegemony particularly useful for the analysis of intra-social movement political conflict. As I will demonstrate throughout this book, the common denigration of gay, lesbian and bisexual promiscuity has repercussions in the debates about political strategy in the gay, bisexual and polyamorous movements. Empty Spaces – on the Drawbacks of Heteronormativity Analysis Queer theories of heteronormativity have their drawbacks, too. I discuss three of the major problems associated with heteronormativity perspectives: (a) their implicit single-issue-focus, (b) their lack of capacity to account for the relational dimensions of power and (c) their difficulty in theorising agency. Sexual dissidents of colour have rightly complained about the lack of concern white queer intellectuals have shown with regard to the fact that sexuality is always already classed and racialised. Cathy Cohen highlights the white bias at the heart of Michael Warner’s (1993) assumption that all queers would share a common knowledge due to their experience of oppression by heteronormative society. This claim denies differences in perspective of people who apart from being stigmatised in terms of sexuality, face the harsh and violent effects of other forms of oppression. ‘While heterosexual privilege negatively impacts and constraints the lived experience of “queers” of color, so too do racism, classism, and sexism’ (Cohen 2001: 209, cf. Skeggs 1997). The common denial of white mainstream queer theorists to reflect on the implications of white privilege makes it possible to posit a ‘uniform heteronormativity from which all heterosexuals privilege’ (p. 214). However, as Jin Haritaworn (2007) demonstrates in a study of part-Thai relationships and families in Britain and Germany, not all heterosexual genders are considered to be respectable. In contradistinction, hegemonic representations of, for example, Thai (heterosexual) femininities are over-determined by the discourses on sex work and trafficking. This means that Thai women have to frequently ward off offensive reactions born out of the stereotypes produced in sexualising, moralising, or victimising discourses. A further implication of a monolithic theory of heteronormativity is the tendency in queer politics to define ‘heterosexuality’ as the main target of the queer struggle. However, for Black and racialised ‘queers’ the struggle against racism may have more salience – in general or at certain times in certain contexts. The political alliance with heterosexuals therefore has got a completely different significance for many of them (Cohen 2001: 212). While a tendency to privilege certain forms of heterosexuality may cut across many cultural and political contexts, the major task consists in finding a theoretical language that can take account of the simultaneity of multiple forms of power and different modes of oppression. Heteronormativity can only provide a partial perspective or one element in a more comprehensive over-aching analysis of an ‘intersectional’ articulation of power. The same applies to the critical study of nonmonogamy and polyamory (cf. Haritaworn et al. 2006, Noël 2006).

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Contemporary queer theorising is marked by a strong Foucauldian legacy. Foucault’s insistence that sexuality is an effect of power and regulative discourses on subjectivity, the body and sexual desire is central to the queer theoretical trajectory (Bristow 1997, Halperin 1995). It is due to this legacy that queer theories tend to discuss (heteronormative) power primarily within a disciplinary paradigm. This has two problematic effects: Firstly, theories of heteronormativity do not usually tackle the inter-subjective and inter-personal power dimension of sexual relationships. Secondly, they tend to lack a conceptualisation of agency. A purely discursive conceptualisation of power which focuses on ‘normativity’ is inevitably quite specific and cannot take account of the full range of ways through which power may be exercised. According to Davina Cooper (1995), a complex analysis of power needs to address the following levels: distribution (symbolic and material resources and capital), textual politics (ideology, discourse, representation), discipline (surveillance, subjectification, normalisation) and force (manipulation, coercion, threat, violence) (pp. 21–24). Feminists have usually emphasised the need for a theory of power to provide answers concerning the personal level of articulation (Allen 1998). Cooper, whose ambition is to modify and expand the Foucauldian paradigm in order to suit a feminist analysis, works out a model of power which is both relational and productive. She suggests that both these aspects can be addressed in a definition of power as ‘the ability to create effects’. According to this perspective, power is rooted in the ability to induce certain effects, which may either transform or maintain the status quo of social, material or ideological relations. Such capacity conceptions of power have played a significant role in the feminist theorisation of power (Squires 1999: 32–46). Cooper believes that her approach is different from a simple theory of causation through her emphasis on the ‘differential ability to cause’ (p. 18). This aspect anchors a focus on inter-personal or inter-group relationships and renders an intersectional perspective a central criterion for a satisfying analysis. Her model of power is linked to an ethical orientation, which she calls an ethics of equal power, that is, a normative ideal that all individuals should have the same power to impact on their environment or to fulfil their wants or desires. According to my view, Cooper’s thoughts on both theory and ethics are highly useful for the analysis of the multiple forms of power around and within queer non-monogamous relationships. On Fisting and Friendship – Agency, Transgression and Resistance As I have argued earlier, the strong reliance of Foucault’s early work on disciplinary power renders queer theories of heteronormativity somewhat inadequate to theorise about personal agency and forms of resistance. Queer theory consequently shares a common dilemma of most Foucauldian approaches to power (Fraser 1989, McNay 1994, Freundlieb 1994). In order to carve out some theoretical space for agency and resistance, queer theorists – just like Foucauldian feminists – have frequently taken recourse to Foucault’s later work on the care of the self. Many queer theorists concerned with a theory of resistance as transgression have found great inspiration in the interviews that Michel Foucault gave in the early 1980s on gay identity and politics (Halperin 1995, Warner 1999, Sullivan 2003). In these interviews Foucault

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develops an interesting outlook on sexual and relationship practice as resistance. For Foucault, resistance is not so much a matter of claiming the right to be a homosexual, but to become homosexual, that is, to engage in a cultural politics of inventive, progressive and counter-normative practices. As a way of life, the exploration of what it could mean to be gay draws on the rejection of existing lifestyles and aims at the transformation of self and social life. ‘I would say that one must use sexuality to discover and invent new relations. To be gay is to be in a state of becoming’ (1996a: 370). I think Foucault goes a step further here than in his rather individualistic ethics at the heart of his writing on the ‘care for the self’ (1985, 1986). There is a collective appeal in this statement that renders it a proposal to the lesbian and gay movement to adopt more cultural-revolutionary perspective. For Foucault, gayness is not simply a matter of the individual: ‘I would say that the homosexual consciousness certainly goes beyond one’s individual experience and includes an awareness of being a member of a particular social group’, he explains in a different context (1996b: 323). Foucault develops his vision of a transgressive politics on the terrains of the body, pleasure and relational creativity. He sees the seeds for such a cultural politics in gay men’s sexual practices in the bath-houses of New York and San Francisco, which he praises as ‘laboratories of sexual experimentation’ (p. 330). The complex deployment of power, of a mixture of rules and openness in S/M play, for Foucault, may result in the creation of ‘perpetual novelty, perpetual tension and a perpetual uncertainty’ (1996b: 331). For Foucault, S/M seems to promise the uninhibited, effervescent pleasures of a polymorphous perversity. ‘The idea is to make use of every part of the body a sex-instrument’ (p. 331). Fist fucking is one of Foucault’s prime examples on how it is possible to ‘produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies’ (Foucault, quoted by Halperin 1995: 91). Fisting, for Foucault, symbolises a de-sexualised, de-genitalised, and de-centralised form of pleasure, an escape route out of the mental corset of ‘sexuality’ and traditional masculinity (cf. Halperin 1995). While most of Foucault’s references aim at the creation of a new culture of bodies and pleasures, he also raises questions around relationship practice (1996b: 324). This is most obvious in his interview ‘Friendship as a way of life’ (1996c). A ‘gay way of life’ as a cultural project could ‘use sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships’ (p. 308). The political aim of ‘freedom of choice’ aims at a societal climate in which diversity of social relationships is acknowledged and fostered. Due to the long history of denial and suppression, Foucault attributes gay men and lesbians a particular privileged role ‘to re-open affective and relational virtualities’ (p. 311). As a political and cultural project the lesbian and gay movement ought to multiply the erotic, intimate and sexual possibilities which at the moment are confined to ‘the two ready-made formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers’ fusion of identities’ (p. 310). I think there is something extremely beautiful in this vision of becoming, creation and world-making. It is inspired by a strong and radical ambition to go beyond the existent – which, as many of us know only too well, often is restrictive and oppressive. Foucault’s interviews on sexual politics and his work on the ‘care for the self’ (of which they may be considered being part of) provide a rare outlook in

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Foucault’s writing on the possibility of stepping outside the forms of interconnected regimes of normativity. These ideas have provided significant elements for a major route through which transgression has been conceptualised in queer theory (Warner 1999, Halperin 1995, Sullivan 2003). It is certainly tempting to think about queer non-monogamous relationship practices through this perspective on transgression. However, as I will show in the following, there is also a range of problems with this approach. Even More Fisting – on the Limitation of the Transgression Discourse Many feminists have been highly critical of Foucault’s ethics around his theory of ‘practices of freedom’ in which he endorsed elitist, exclusive, masculinist and individualistic philosophical traditions from within Greek antiquity. Others feel that his ethics lack any normative orientation regarding which forms of power could be considered as being benign and which ones as problematic (Fraser 1989). Some consider Foucault’s later philosophy inconsistent and irreconcilable with his earlier work on disciplinary power. These criticisms notwithstanding, some feminists have critically drawn from this strand of thought to ground a feminist theory of autonomy (Grimshaw 1993, McNay 1994). However, in the context of my discussion the question whether a definition of resistance and queer politics on the level of sex, bodies and relationships – or for that matter, on the level of culture – does not result in a somewhat limited understanding of political activism is even more interesting (cf. E. Wilson 1993, Phillips 1993). Katherine Raymond expresses her doubts about the endorsement of transgressive sexual acts as an act of resistance as follows: ‘[I]t’s certainly true that the personal is political, in that sense that one’s identity, even in its most “intimate” components, is informed by a larger sociopolitical context. Yet the idea that individual sex acts will, over time, somehow permeate and alter collective social consciousness seems a bit suspect to me. The casual gaps between sex acts and political theory, to say nothing of those between theory and political practice, are vast and indefinable. It is difficult to make the argument that one female fist inserted into one male ass – or, for that matter, dozens or even hundreds of fists inserted into as many asses – can really make a difference for, say, lesbian mothers fighting for custody of their children’ (1997: 59).

Raymond takes on the argument that fisting symbolises an act of political resistance, which may have the potential to undermine heteronormative practices of gender and sexuality. Although Raymond does not necessarily refute the validity of the argument of transgression in the narrow terrain of sexual performance, she puts it into perspective by pointing to other fields of politics which she perceives as more relevant, namely reproductive rights and the construction of queer sexualities vis-àvis the state (cf. E. Wilson 1993, Johnson 1997). Diverse fields of politics cannot be addressed through a conceptualisation of resistance as transgression. Strategies of transgression ultimately are constricted to a limited terrain of struggle and operate through a reductionist analysis of the political. At the same time, the metaphor of transgression (as an act of over-stepping a limit) fosters a rather one-dimensional theorisation of power (Haritaworn 2005). If, for example, a group of bisexual

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men and women lives in a multiple relationship, they may resist compulsory monogamy, hegemonic constructions of heterosexuality, normative ideas of the family, and so on. If they have queer sex, they may performatively undermine heteronormative matrices of gender and sexuality. However, if the women remain the primary care givers to the children, such an arrangement may at the same time reinforce normative practices and assumptions with regard to gender. If we stylise non-monogamous queer relationship practices as transgressive resistance this may make us less attentive to other power-issues within a relationship-context (whether based on gender, race, class, body ideals, and so on). The question of resistance is too complex to be grasped within a one-dimensional concept such as transgression. In this book I address the question of power around gay male and bisexual nonmonogamous relationships. The lines of my inquiry have been strongly influenced by work within the tradition of queer theory, among others on heteronormativity and transgression. At the same time, I hold quite ambivalent views about these categories and wonder how useful they are regarding their capacity to account for the complex forms through which power works in queer non-monogamous lives. My aim with this book is not only to provide novel insights about non-monogamous relationship practice and sexual politics in the UK, but to further generate innovative ideas which may broaden and refine the theoretical perspectives in critical sexuality studies. Routes for an Intellectual Journey … the Structure of the Book In Chapter 1, I continue to develop my theoretical framework. I turn to the question of the law and provide some examples of how the state regulates sexualities by policing the private/public distinction. The long tradition in UK legal practice to banish queer identities, sex and relationships from the public sphere attests to the fact that citizenship has been constructed in heteronormative terms. I further look at how social movements have contested hegemonic constructions of the public sphere and argue that a model of multiple public spheres, related in conflict and hierarchy, is adequate for understanding these forms of struggle. In Chapter 2, I explain my personal reasons for doing this research and discuss some aspects of the research process. The main focus is on questions of difference and power and the ways in which they impact on the intersubjective dynamics of the researcher/researched relationship. My discussion of questions regarding power relations around differential positionality in this chapter establishes an analytical perspective that is deployed throughout the whole book. This chapter also introduces the reader to some innovative debates with regard to research methodology, research ethics and epistemology. In Chapter 3, I highlight the centrality of anti-promiscuity discourses in homophobic representations of gay male masculinity. I further explore conflicts within the gay movement over non-monogamy, public sex and the same-sex marriage campaign. In particular, I engage with the argument (also held among gay men) that gay male promiscuity would damage the overall reputation of the gay community. With regard to the question of same-sex marriage I discuss the finding that many

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non-monogamous gay men, too, support the campaign for same-sex marriage despite their concerns that a politics of marriage may foster pressures to assimilate. In Chapter 4, I explain the prominence of the monogamy/non-monogamy debates in the bisexual movement with regard to widespread anti-bisexual promiscuity stereotypes. The chapter further explores the bisexual debate on both same-sex and other-sex marriage. The question of other-sex marriage seems to be even more contentious than the demand for same-sex marriage since it brings up worries about subjecting to heteronormative discourses. I also engage with the question of how other-sex marriage between partners can affect inter-personal dynamics in multiple relationship networks. In Chapter 5, I explore the discourses on polyamory. The relationship philosophy of polyamory is becoming more popular in the UK. My conversations with polyamorous people suggest that a commitment to polyamory is often linked to a distinctive social or sexual identity. Polyamory activists in the UK are currently engaged in shaping poly-networks and work towards the creation of a larger polyamory movement. There are different interpretations of the concept. While some claim polyamory to be an oppositional discourse, sex-radicals contest the over-emphasis on love and intimacy in the stylisation of polyamory as ‘responsible non-monogamy’. This conflict shows that polyamory creates its own margins of less condoned styles of non-monogamy which are to a stronger degree motivated by an endorsement of sexual pleasure. In Chapter 6, I explore how power relations affect the dynamics between non-monogamous partners. I argue that differences in social positioning in terms of age, gender, class, race/ethnicity, religion, sexual identity, and so on affect the ways in which people’s non-monogamy is perceived. Differences in positioning are furthermore linked up with power structures and imbalances that may complicate the negotiation of non-monogamous relationships between partners. The way the research participants described conflicts about non-monogamy in their partnerships illustrates that gender alone does not provide a sufficient perspective for the analysis of power dynamics in non-monogamous relationships. In Chapter 7, I draw together the main arguments which run through this book and develop the most significant theoretical insights gained from this study. I highlight the exclusive effects of certain social movement strategies and explain them through the ways in which the public sphere is politically constructed. The attempts by the gay and lesbian and bisexual movements to gain public sphere inclusion and full citizenship rights often deploy strategies of creating ‘positive images’, which tend to construct non-monogamy, sex with multiple partners, and episodic, recreational or public sex as the ‘outside’ of a respectable lesbian and gay or bisexual ‘community’. At the same time, queer alternatives tend to endorse a romanticist vision of radical alterity and counter-normativity that glosses over the contradictions and power relations that determine queer sex and relationship cultures. Although the chapters are intended to appear in this order, readers should feel free to progress in the way that responds to their immediate interests. Each chapter also stands on its own. All readers interested in the concrete design of the study should turn to the Appendix, where I provide detailed information on methods and research sample.

Chapter 1

The State of the Law: Heteronormative Citizenship and Sexual Counterpublics

The injustices of gay lifestyle annoy me. The fact that there are these ancient laws which discriminate against gay people, more than two men can’t have sex together, it’s illegal. That sort of thing really annoys me. (...) When I read, in the gay papers (…) about the Bolton Seven1 – as they’ve been called. The reaction of the Establishment against them makes my blood boil. And when I read those articles, I can feel my blood pressure rising. It annoys me. (...) And quite often I will not listen to the news or things on the radio and TV (…) because I get so emotionally involved with it, that it upsets me and I would rather not know about it, so I can’t get upset. But it’s that side of the gay world which does annoy me and I wish I knew what I, as an individual, could do to get things like that changed. Since I’ve left work I no longer have to conform myself. (Lee)

Scholars and activists alike have emphasised the privileged role of the state in the regulation of sexualities and genders (Duggan 1995, Smart 1995). Despite internal contradictions and the contestation of particular legal politics between and within different state institutions and its major actors, the state has remained a key obstacle to progressive sexual politics in Britain (Pringle and Watson 1992, Cooper 1995, Stychin 1995). This is not only because of the state’s prohibitive functions, but also because of its ability to construct sexualities, social formations, ‘the public’ and its constituents. From within a Foucauldian perspective on the law a close interrelation exists between legal discourse and sexual identities and the conditionality for the emergence and development of erotic cultures (Herman and Stychin 1995, Moran et al. 1998). Some have argued that the particularly enhanced effectivity of the law to construct and regulate sexuality rests in its ability to present itself as a superior form of truth. This particular authority of the law is derived from its ability to incorporate or to ally itself with other scientific discourses, such as medicine, psychology or social work (Smart 1989: 96). Legal practice and the emerging space of its contestation, consequently, are important aspects of the creation of heteronormative hegemony. The definition of the division between public and private has been central to the state’s ambition to regulate sexual and gender cultures. Through the discussion of 1 The term ‘Bolton Seven’ refers to a court case in which seven men were tried and convicted on January 12, 1998 (the sentence was then deferred to February 20, 1999) for consenting to group and same-sex activities in their private homes in Bolton, a town in northwest England.

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some key events in the legalisation of sexualities in Britain, I demonstrate how the law works to banish queer sexualities from the public sphere. I argue that it is largely through the containment of queer sexualities and identities in the private that full citizenship has been withheld to gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and other queers. Legal practice thereby works as a productive form of power that privileges hegemonic heterosexualities and delegitimises queer sex, relationships and identities. In the last part of the chapter, I suggest framing the attempts of the lesbian and gay, bisexual and feminist movements to challenge heterosexist state politics as a construction of counterpublics. I argue that a theory of multiple, intersecting publics that are related in hierarchy and based in struggle is helpful for understanding complicated processes of normativity, resistance and hegemonic conflict around alternate relationship practices. The Regulation of the Public/Private Distinction The distinction between the private and the public sphere is deeply embedded in our understanding of intimacy and sexuality, the social, and the political. In its manifold and distinct theorisations, the public/private dichotomy tries to take account of the complex interrelations between the state, civil society and the personal (Squires 1999, Young 2000). Feminists have shown that the public/private dichotomy has been inserted in political discourse in a way that justifies the exclusion, disenfranchisement and subordination of women. Often backed by essentialist discourses on sexual difference, women’s lives, work, roles and ‘virtues’ have been constructed as private (Moller Okin 1991/1998). In dominant political discourse the private tends to have no meaning and is supposed to add nothing to the understanding of society in general. For women, the civil freedoms supposed to flow from the social contract have always been undermined by a sexual contract that has defined the public and private in gendered terms and subordinated women in both spheres (Pateman 1988, Walby 1994). Feminists have consequently politicised and contested the dominant construction of the public/private divide. The slogan ‘the personal is political’ is based on a discursive strategy that attempts to shift the parameters of the traditional definition and stresses the interrelation and inseparability of the two spheres. It further highlights the constructed character of the boundary between them (Phillips 1993, Cooper 2001). ‘The private/public division is fluid, historically and contextually determined, contested and constantly struggled over and redefined’, argue, for example, Werbner and Yuval-Davis (1999: 29). They foreground the classed, gendered, racialised and culturally specific character of the divide, which tends to be drawn against the back drop of nationalist discourses. Moreover and most important for my argument in this chapter, the dichotomy is also sexualised (N. Duncan 1996, Richardson 2000). The Regulation and Contestation of Sexualities The flexible operationalisation of the public/private draws on the articulation of myriad connotations around sexuality, gender, race and class. These connotations

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render the distinction an effective tool for regulating access to certain social spheres and to police forms of behaviour possible therein. The transgression of the boundaries drawn by the hegemonic articulations of the public/private division may result in serious consequences for the ‘transgressors’, ranging from stigmatisation to physical violence (Myslik 1996, Valentine 1996). This is because transgressions are often experienced ‘not as merely theoretical, but as violation of deep instincts about sex and gender’ (Warner 2002: 23). The exclusive mechanisms that are activated in the public/private distinction revolve around a common sense of what is considered to be ‘appropriate’ behaviour in the context of a particular public sphere context (Cooper 2001). It also establishes differential criteria of entitlement (to presence, participation, certain forms of interaction, and so on). While many have highlighted the potential of the public sphere in enhancing participatory democracy, others have directed attention to the mechanisms by which the public sphere fosters discourses which exclude certain groups of people and styles of interaction (Cooper 1994). Among others this works through the construction of the public sphere as the arena of proper politics and critical-rational discourse (Habermas 1969, Calhoun 1993). Feminists have shown that the assumption of a single, universal public sphere dedicated to a rational debate and the enhancement of the ‘common good’ has been used to question the legitimacy of certain demands with the argument that they would be either particularistic or irrational in form or content. This way the body, sex, affection, feeling and passion could be marginalised in public realms. The same applies to certain groups of people that have been associated with physicality or sexuality (Young 1990a, 2000, Fraser 1997). However, if we want to fully understand the normative processes that work through the public/private divide, we should pay attention to the fact that it tends to be particular sexualities and bodies which are scrutinised in the public sphere. These have been in particular lesbigay, gender-queer, racialised and interracial sexualities, and so on (cf. N. Duncan 1996, Dawson 1995, Steinbugler 2005). From this perspective it becomes very obvious that, far from being static, the public/private divide is mediated by discourses on gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality. Heteronormativity and Citizenship Hegemonic interpretations of the public/private distinction have had an enormous impact on the conceptualisation of citizenship (Turner 1990). In the British debate on citizenship the work of T.H. Marshall has been extremely influential, if not paradigmatic. Marshall has defined citizenship as ‘a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed’ (1950: 14). Marshall’s primary concern was with social class and he stressed civil, legal, political and social rights as the basic components of a historically evolving citizenship status. Contemporary citizenship debates have gone far beyond Marshall’s framework by stressing the gendered, racialised and sexualised dimensions of citizenship discourses and practices. Marshall’s historical account has been criticised as androcentric (Lister 1997a, Yuval-Davis 1997). Moreover, more recently a range of authors has shown that the practices of citizenship are profoundly sexualised (Evans

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1993, Carver 1998, Weeks 1998, Plummer 2001a, Richardson 2000, Johnson 2002). Marshall’s theory has further been challenged for equating civil society with the national community (Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999). Moreover, globalisation, post-war national migration flows, the growth of international organisations and agencies (such as UN and UNESCO), the gaining strength of human rights discourse and the emergence of multi-state polities (such as the EU) have resulted in the growth of postnational modes of citizenship (Soysal 1994, Turner 1993). National and postnational (or transnational) modes of citizenship coexist in interrelation. According to a widely held criticism, Marshall’s definition of citizenship as ‘full membership in the community’ fails to acknowledge that people are in fact involved in manifold communities or identity-based projects. This insight challenges the universalism at the heart of dominant citizenship discourse (Yuval-Davis 1997). It is only through an emphasis of the multi-layered character of citizenship that politics in the name of citizenship can take account of these complexities. In order to realise its full democratic potential, many argue, we have to sever the exclusive ties of the concept to the terrain of the nation state and need to accept that ‘full membership’ in any particular ‘community’ exceeds questions of legal entitlement and tends to be defined in much more subtle ways (cf. Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999, Richardson 2000). In general, I agree with such a broad interpretation of citizenship. At the same time, I hold the position that the nation state and its legal practice continue to have crucial weighting in determining the degree to which people can access resources, participate in democratic processes, and communicate or realise their cultural and sexual identities (cf. Erel 2002). I use the concept of citizenship in this chapter as a primarily analytical concept in a mode of analysis first set out by David Evans (1993, 1995).2 Evans has shown that the boundaries of the national community is also constructed in moral terms and correspond with ethical codes associated with hegemonic heterosexualities. Moral disapproval on the level of public discourse and state politics results in a graduated and hierarchical system of citizenship in which certain sexualities and genders are confined to the margins of the social space of proper citizenship and respectability (cf. Carver 1998, Richardson 2000). In the following sections I provide a selective discussion of the legalisation of queer sexualities in the UK in order to show that the state through its legal practice constructs both the public sphere and the conditionality for citizenship in heteronormative terms. I strategically focus on significant legal ‘events’ in the history of UK law to illustrate ‘the intimate relationship between state form and practices and the organisation of sexuality’ (Cooper 1993: 191). I develop my argument along a critical analysis of (a) strategies within the practice of criminal law as they have been articulated in Wolfenden and the Sexual Offences Act 1967 and (b) the centrality of heteronormative family values expressed in the implementation of Section 28. Both acts of legislation aimed at shoring up a definition of the public sphere as heterosexual. The self-identification of the state in heterosexual terms is 2 Claiming citizenship rights has also become a significant strategy in lesbian and gay and bisexual politics (Herman 1993, Rahman 2000). As I will argue in more detail in Chapter 7, there are serious drawbacks linked to the promotion of the concept of citizenship as a rallying point for radical sexual politics.

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further evidenced in the stubborn denial (until very recently) to recognise queer relationships and families in British civil law. The Wolfenden Strategy: Permissiveness and Control The Wolfenden Report and the Sexual Offences Act 1967 (which was drafted in the spirit of the former) established a legal double-standard of privacy for male same-sex and heterosexual (and lesbian) sexuality. Only with the introduction of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 the provisions within criminal law regarding the offence of ‘public sex’ were formally equalised with regard to (male) same-sex and heterosexual behaviours (Bainham and Brooks-Gordon 2004). Benjamin (the pseudonym of a Jewish gay male activist whose life story I recorded in a previous research project) wrote in an unpublished essay in 1983: ‘For those who remember far back enough, pre-Wolfenden was a time of no hope for homosexuals. Keeping out of trouble and enjoying oneself, maybe as a couple, was the aspiration. Lily law, bosses, landlords and all were liable to persecute one with virtually no redress: after all you were a criminal pariah. This was the common expectation. All homos had to consider the possibility of a knock at the door by police or blackmailers. A low-level totalitarian situation’ (Benjamin, quoted in Klesse 1997: 60).

As a result of this existential threat many homosexual men were forced to lead a double life or to retreat into ‘the closet’, as this condition of life was later described in gay liberationist language (Chauncey 1995). Although Benjamin talks of a widespread aspiration of many homosexual men to have a long-term partnership, the threat of a jail sentence and a shameful loss of respectability made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for many men to build such a relationship (Porter and Weeks 1991). Many of my interview partners who have lived through the pre-1967 period remember it as a time of total repression, shame and anxiety. The risk of criminalisation enforced years of celibacy for some of them. During the 1930s an average of 500 men a year were arrested on the grounds of consensual same-sex activities. A set of partially very old penal laws which criminalised certain bodily, sexual or social acts provided the framework for an increasingly escalating police repression. During the years after W.W.II homosexuals suffered a new scale of police persecution. Arrests on the grounds of ‘buggery’ (referring to sodomy), ‘gross indecency’ (referring to – among others – oral sex) and ‘soliciting’ (indicating one’s interest in sex in public) reached the number of 1,666 in 1950 and 2,504 in 1955 (Miller 1995). Chain persecutions aiming at cracking down on homosexual friendship networks became common and the police started using entrapment tactics to get hold of cruisers and cottagers. This ‘excess of zeal’ in policing and prosecuting male same-sex cultures drew upon a culture of paranoia and a discursive repertoire in which anti-Communist cold war ideology merged with homophobic conspiracy theories (Weeks 1977/1990, Shepherd 1989). Hegemonic discourses constructed homosexuals (the prime example of the sexual pervert) outside of the (respectable) national community. The

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fact that some prominent men, too, were caught in the escalation of arrests resulted in a growing public awareness of ‘the problem of homosexuality’. The Wolfenden Committee and the Limits of Liberalism On August 24, 1954 the British government set up a committee to review the criminal law and the penal system with respect to its treatment of homosexuality and prostitution. Named after its chair, the Vice Chancellor of Reading University Sir John Wolfenden, the committee later came to be known as Wolfenden Committee. After three years of inquiry and sixty-two meetings during which the testimonial of two hundred different individuals and organisations were heard, the committee published its recommendations, the so-called ‘Wolfenden Report’ on September 4, 1957. With respect to homosexuality the committee recommended the partial decriminalisation of consensual male same-sex activity: ‘We accordingly recommend that homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence’ (HMSO 1957, quoted by Miller 1995: 283). The committee further recommended to fix the age of consent for homosexual consensual sex at the age of twenty-one. It took the Government about ten years to translate these recommendations into legislation with the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. What on the first glance looks like a movement towards sexual liberalism, permissiveness or an increased acceptance of male homosexuality turns out to be much more complicated. The Wolfenden recommendations, Stuart Hall (1980) suggests, were born out of an escalating panic at the increasing visibility of street prostitution and male homosexuality. The first experts to be heard on the issue of homosexuality by the committee were police representatives (Mort 1999). Although homosexuals, too, were later invited to speak to the Committee, analysis of historical documents reveals that the authority of naming and definition of homosexuality was confined to experts and ‘duly qualified’ speakers such as psychiatrists and prison doctors (Moran 1995). Hall (1980) attests the report’s opinions and recommendations a high degree of social orthodoxy. This is in particular the case with the ones referring to the subject matter of prostitution.3 With respect to homosexuality, too, Wolfenden’s liberalism had its drawbacks. Hall speaks of a moral ‘double taxonomy’ built into Wolfenden and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. While the committee argued that ‘the laws of society must be acceptable to the general moral sense of the community’, it also suggested that the law should concern itself with matters of public morality only insofar as they directly impinged on the public good. According to the Committee members, the function of the law was ‘to preserve public order and decency, to protect the citizen from what is offensive and injurious and to provide sufficient safeguards against exploitation and corruption of others’ (HMSO 1957, quoted by Hall 1980: 12). 3 On prostitution the Wolfenden Report proposed a range of ‘tougher’ legislative measures: (a) an increase of the maximum penalty for persistent soliciting, (b) progressively higher fines for repeated offences (Greenwood and Young 1980). The Street Offences Act 1959 modelled in the spirit of these recommendations created the legal instruments to ‘clear the streets of prostitution’ (Hall 1980: 10, Bland et al. 1979).

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Although Wolfenden proposed the decriminalisation of certain private sexual acts between men, it made sure that this would not be misunderstood as a public approval of homosexuality by declaring male and female homosexual acts as ‘reprehensible from the point of view of the family’. The character or the limits of the Wolfenden report’s liberalism are expressed in its continued appeal to the ‘respectable’ public man or woman and its demand of ‘the privatisation of selective aspects of sexual conduct’ (Hall 1980: 13). The ‘moral economy’ of Wolfenden distinguished formally between immorality and illegality. It further sharpened sexual definitions of the public and the private. Moral regulation extended to both areas, whereas criminalisation was supposed only to apply to what is defined as the public (Mort 1980, Weeks 1985). This moral taxonomy has been extremely influential on British sexual politics over many decades. Plummer (1998) argues that it provides the key to understanding the creation of moral discourse in post-war Britain and the backdrop towards both early legal changes and later social movement activism. The Sexual Offences Act 1967 and the Privatisation of Gay Male Sexuality Wolfenden’s moral and legal philosophy strongly influenced the formulation of the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Here the relaxation of the law in the private sphere went hand in hand with the reinforcement of persecution and legal punishment of sexual ‘offences’ in the public. The law promised the exemption from prosecution of certain consensual male same-sex sexual activities between adults over twenty-one in England and Wales. The boundaries of the private were drawn extremely tight with respect to sex between men. Privacy was defined to end where more than two people were (or were likely to be) present. The aspiration to protect the ‘youth’ as a particularly vulnerable group resulted in an increase of the prison sentence for sex between adult men and men over sixteen but under the age of consent to five years’ imprisonment.4 The Sexual Offences Act 1967 did not remove the criminalisation of ‘buggery’ (anal sex) and ‘gross indecency’ (gay male acts other than buggery, for example, fellatio or mutual masturbation) which had been first laid out in the Labouchère Amendment and were later codified in Sections 12 and 13 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956. Rather than being repealed, these sections were only watered down in the 1967 reform. It is appropriate therefore to interpret the law a contingent promise not to prosecute rather than as an act of decriminalisation (Waites 1998, Bamforth 1997). An immediate effect of the law was a backlash in terms of prosecution (Weeks 1977/1990). According to Simon Watney the ‘Wolfenden Strategy’ ‘led to a widespread displacement of sexual attention away from the home, in the larger direction of “public” places, which were henceforth to be rigorously – and at times obsessively – policed’ (1987/1997: 60). Lord Arran, who had been very supportive in bringing the act through the House of Lords, appealed to all homosexuals: ‘I ask 4 Because English law has only been applicable to England and Wales the partial decriminalisation of male same-sex activity did not apply to other parts of the UK such as Northern Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.

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those who (...) were in bondage and for whom the prison doors are now open, to show their thanks by comporting themselves quietly and with dignity’ (quoted by Evans 1993: 128). The ones who did not comply with this demand were subjected to even harsher treatment than before. The discourses and the strategies of policing around the law produced two types of homosexuals: the majority of ‘decent’ homosexuals who preferred to meet (other adult men aged twenty-one and over) in private and a ‘reprehensible’ minority who continued to indulge in public acts or chose under-aged partners (Greenwood and Young 1980). Moralising the public/private division the law worked through a dichotomy juxtaposing ‘good homosexuals’ and ‘dangerous queers’ (cf. Smith 1994a). The Sexual Offences Act 1967 had a thorough impact on the material construction of sexual identities, cultures and modes of representation. Frank Mort (1980) argues that the act constructed ‘a new type of homosexual subject, understood as operating in the private sphere; a subject who in matters of sexuality and morality is defined as consenting, privatised and person-focused’ (1980: 42). According to Mort, the individualised, pleasure-seeking and mostly apolitical character of the gay subculture has its discursive roots in this legal confinement. David Evans (1993, 1995) extends this analysis by placing the Sexual Offences Act 1967 in the context of a longer period of legal reformism and larger cultural and economic changes which gave rise to leisure-oriented lifestyles and new forms of consumerism. In this perspective, the reform of the legislation of gay male sexuality appears to be a response to the cultural requirements of capitalist market strategies rather than as the success of the struggles of the homosexual law reform movement (cf. Weeks 1977/1990). By diminishing restrictions on personal freedom through reform laws the legislators responded to the demands of salient forms of market-related ‘economic individualism’. In the context of these cultural and legal changes, new space emerged for the articulation of sexuality and pleasure. This development, however, was at odds with the central values of the love ethics at the heart of heterosexual monogamous culture. The ambiguity of Wolfenden’s liberalism emerged from this conflict between ‘amoral’ market interests and the state’s claim to act as a moral authority. In order to resolve this problem in a balanced way, marginalised sexual identities/groups had to gain the permission to express themselves to a certain degree in a limited public space, which could then be permeated by market strategies. Formal legal enforcement and informal social incorporation created the basis for specific forms of sexual citizenship that remained largely confined to part-time leisure and lifestyle spaces. This system of partial citizenship is based on heteronormative values and a double standard with regard to publicity and privacy (cf. Carver 1998, Richardson 2000, Cooper 2001). From this perspective, sexual citizenship provides a regulative machinery in which rights are granted on the basis of an adherence to certain codes of sexual behaviour and/or identity. A politics of compromise is written right into the heart of citizenship discourse, which David Bell and Jon Binnie summarise as following: ‘we will grant you certain rights if (and only if) you match these by taking on certain responsibilities’ (2000: 3). Because this ‘system of sexual citizenship’ (David Evans) promises the possibility of inclusion on the grounds of conformity, it presents itself not only as a regime of exclusion, but also as one of ‘normalisation’.

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Policing Queer Sex, Affection and Bodies in the ‘Public’ After decades of struggle, the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000 finally set an age of consent which did no longer distinguish in a discriminatory fashion between heterosexual and same-sex acts and relationships (Waites 2003). The revision of sexual offences policies in England and Wales which was first announced on January 25, 1999 has highlighted the principle of equality with the aim to remove laws which discriminate either between men and women or male-female and same-sex behaviours (Waites 2002: 337, McGhee 2004). The double standard of privacy expectations regarding heterosexual and gay male sex remained written into law until recently, when the Sexual Offences Act 2003 defined the penalties for public sexual activities irrespective of the gender of the participants (Bainham and Brooks-Gordon 2004). These changes now open up the legal possibility to extend prosecution to include public sex between men and women, a demand that has occasionally been aired in sensationalist tabloid press coverage on local ‘dogging’ cultures (Bell 2006). It is too early to judge whether these changes in law will really change patterns of prosecution. Traditionally police in the UK have considered it a high priority task to survey and arrest men who have sex with men in ‘public places’ (Burke 1993). For many decades the conviction rate for ‘gross indecency’ offences between men defined in the Sexual Offences Act 1967 has remained almost unchanged (Bamforth 1997). Around 30,000 men were arrested on the basis of these laws between 1967 and 2003 (Cooper 2007). During this long period of time ‘public sex’ was discursively framed as a problem of gay male sexuality. The recent announcement by Merseyside Police to crack down on male cruising activities in the Otterspool area in Liverpool is an example that male public sex cultures remain a target for policing (Outnorthwest 2007). To what degree the behaviours prosecuted over all these decades of police surveillance and interference can be unequivocally described as ‘public sex’ is open to question. The distinction between what is public and what is private is far from being self-evident. Like the identity of any space, the identity of the public and the private is multiple, shifting and potentially unbounded (Massey 1994, Hubbard 2001). ‘Both private and public spaces are heterogeneous and not all space is clearly private or public’, Nancy Duncan explains (1996: 129). The boundary between the two spheres is discursively constructed. Where exactly it is drawn is contextual, culturally specific, and a contested issue between different groups or discourses (Fenster 2000). Participants in so-called ‘public sex’ usually follow certain precautions (both in terms of interaction and the usage of space) which aim at precluding that the sex taking place can be witnessed by non-interested attendants who may appear on the scene by chance (Edwards 1994, Coxon 1995, Woodhead 1995). Califia’s (2000) analysis of policing strategies used to target dissident sexualities in the USA reveals important insights in the moral economy that regulates the discourse on ‘public sex’. According to Califia, most people who are presumed to pursue ‘public sex’ could righteously assume some privacy for their acts, was it not for police officers spying on them by overcoming physical barriers, cutting down bushes, climbing on toilet roofs or pretending to cruise themselves, and so on. Moreover, Califia emphasises, that police surveillance and harassment has not remained constricted to places of easy public access, such as cemeteries,

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fields, restrooms, public toilets, and so on. Police often targets ‘bath houses’ or ‘sex clubs’, which require membership or provide sufficient privacy in the sense that nobody would seek access, who does not in principle consent that sex takes place on the premises. Although the official allegation is one of ‘public sex’, the motivation for prosecution clearly springs from a heterosexist assumption that the sex in question is ‘unnatural’, ‘lewd’, ‘indecent’ or ‘perverted’. The discourse on ‘public sex’ is not simply defined by its spatial dimension. It is deeply saturated with moral assumptions (Altman 1982/1997). The Sexual Offences Acts 1956 and 1967 only criminalised sexual acts between men. Sex between women has not been specifically targeted in UK criminal law. Most analysts have seen this as a consequence of a profound denial of female sexual agency and autonomy which results in an erasure of lesbian and bisexual female sexuality from legal discourse (Weeks 1977/1990, Haste 1992). However, the absence of anti-lesbian regulations in the criminal law does not mean that sexuality between women would be beyond the scope of criminal law. For example, censorship laws have been frequently used to prohibit the representation of lesbian sex and culture (Smyth 1992). In the course of a changing discourse on the age of consent, sexual relationships between women which involve a significantly younger partner have also been subject to legal prosecutions, in particular since the 1990s (Waites 2002: 336/337). Moreover, gender and sexuality non-specific laws – despite their general applicability – are much more likely to be enforced for penalising queer sex and affection in public. Same-sex couples are much more likely to be convicted under the Public Order Act 1986 for expressing physical affection in public. This law is designed to punish the offence of ‘using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour within the sight or hearing of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby’ (Bamforth 1997: 31). The enactment of such laws aims at an erasure of queer visibility in public. They install a demand on same-sex couples not to be affectionate or sexual in public and to pass as same-sex friends rather than as lovers or sexual partners. The absence of effective legal redress against ‘queer-bashing’ further illustrates the limits of the state’s concern with the safety and well-being of citizens who do not subject to heteronormative codes of identity, behaviour and gendered embodiment. Moreover, the great success with which attackers can build their defence on the argument of either ‘homosexual panic’ or ‘provocation’ reveals the prevalence of a ‘common sense’ (which extends to the juridical system) that queers better be invisible in public (Bamforth 1997, Sedgwick 1994, Nardi and Bolton 1991/1998). The manifold ways through which queer sex, affection and bodies are policed in public spaces attests to the role of the law in the construction of the public sphere in heteronormative terms. Through legislation, the state constructs its own discourse on the ideal character of the public sphere and the nature of the citizens, who are supposed to express themselves therein. One of the most striking examples of the banishing of queer relationships from the public sphere (with regard to the realms of speech, representation and education) has been Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988. The ferocity of the debates on the introduction of Section 28 in the late 1980s and about its repeal in the years around the turn of the millennium leaves out of question that in the UK there has been a strong ambition to represent the community of respectable citizens as heterosexual.

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Section 28 and Heterosexual Family Values An important strategy to bind popular sentiments was the self-presentation of the Tory party as the party of the family. Tory discourse constructed the heterosexual family as a natural and homogenous entity which embodies universal values (David 1986, Abbott and Wallace 1992). In Thatcherite philosophy the family assumed the role of the foundational unit of society. The strong emphasis on family values in Thatcherite discourse ideologically flanked the government’s anti-welfare politics. The emphasis on self-reliance, family care, individual economic initiative and consumption rights shifted social and political responsibilities from the state onto families and kinship relationships. This is the programmatic orientation at the heart of Thatcher’s unforgettable axiomatic statement: ‘There is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and their families’ (quoted by Evans 1993: 135). With the equation of the family with the nation, the Thatcher government set up a discourse that idealised certain hegemonic identities (white, English and heterosexual) at the expense of marginalised ones (Black, racialised, immigrant, queer). ‘Let us remember we are a nation, a nation is an extended family’, Thatcher proudly announced, or: ‘A nation of free people will only continue to be great if family life continues, and the structure of the nation is a family one’ (both quotes in Evans 1993: 136). The normalisation and naturalisation of heterosexual marriage and family extensively drew on discursive strategies of ‘othering’ in which ‘normal’ (that is, heterosexual procreative English) families were juxtaposed with abnormal and perverted queer ‘lifestyles’. The gay and lesbian affirmative politics and ‘positive image campaigns’ of some progressive local governments provided the fodder for nasty attacks on both gay men and lesbians and the ‘loony left’ that allegedly provided them a forum (Reinhold 1994, Cooper 1994, Smith 1994a). The homophobic campaigns of the Tory government and moral right grassroots organisations (often in the form of parents groups) culminated in the introduction of the infamous Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 (and Section 2A in Scotland). It was designed to prohibit the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local governments, which is put in obvious terms in subsection 1: [1] A Local authority shall not [a] intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality; [b] promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. (quoted by Pringle et al. 1991: 4)

Smith’s (1994a) analysis of the anti-gay discourses deployed by supporters of the bill interprets the campaign around the law as part of a strategic ‘homosexualisation’ of Leftist local governments, that is, the symbolic fusion of local Labour socialism with homosexuality in order to mobilise popular homophobic sentiments against this political enemy. The accusations against gay men were manifold: they were accused of being promiscuous, diseased and responsible for spreading HIV to the innocent heterosexual community. Gay men were described as paedophiles lusting to seduce kids and teenagers. According to manufactured conspiracy theories, local councils

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were run by queers who plotted the destruction of the family and the abolition of heterosexuality, and so on. According to Smith, lesbians were largely absent from the hate speech of Tory MPs and local campaigners. This feature of 1980s conservative anti-gay discourse reinforced exclusive constructions of the political as a sphere in which men are the only relevant actors. At the same time, the wording of Section 28 (the prohibition to ‘promote homosexuality’) for the first time included lesbians in antigay legislation (Hamer et al. 1991). Despite being a relatively weak law in terms of its formal enforceability in the courts, Section 28 has played a significant role in reinforcing the hegemony of a conservative moral agenda. According to Evans, Section 28 meant the ‘codification of prejudice of almost mythical proportions’ (1993: 134). In practice, the discourse around the section did not only feed popular homophobic sentiments, it effectively undermined – with a long-standing impact – gay and lesbian-affirmative politics on the local government level (Cooper and Monro 2003). Local governments and other institutions responded to the law with censorship and/or self-censorship in their cultural politics and funding decisions (Pringle et al. 1991, Evans 1995, Carabine 1995). Section 28 seriously affected the discourse on homosexuality in diverse public sphere contexts. Section 28 and Educational Politics Section 28 has been an important element in a conservative strategy in educational politics (Thomson 1993, Epstein 2000, Moran 2001). Most significantly, Section 28 has had an impact on the practice of sex education. ‘While the Section should not affect the teaching of sex education, there is evidence that it does make teachers wary of dealing with the issue of homosexuality’, argues Moran (2001: 87). However, the problem runs even deeper. The repeal of Section 28 has been subject to ongoing controversies in Parliament, the media and other political forums (including the streets). The intentions to repeal Section 28 by the New Labour government did trigger a well-organised campaign under the banner ‘Keep the Clause’ by homophobic, religious and moral right-wing forces (cf. Rahman 2004, Burridge 2004, Waites 2000, Wise 2000, Epstein 2000). Although the section was repealed in Scotland in June 2000, in the rest of the UK such a legal step was initially hampered by the organised resistance in the House of Lords. The law was finally repealed on November 18, 2003. In order to reach a compromise on this issue, the Labour government produced guidelines emphasising that teachers have a legal duty to teach ‘the significance of marriage and of stable relationships as key building blocks of community and society’. The proposed guidelines were even reinforced in March 2000 under the pressure of the Conservatives to put an even greater emphasis on the significance of marriage. An amendment to the Learning and Skills Bill declared that children would have to be protected from ‘inappropriate teaching and materials’ and propagated to teach children about the ‘nature of marriage and its importance for family life and for bringing up children’ (both quotations Moran 2001: 78). The repeal of the Section 2A in Scotland drew on very similar ‘compromises’ and was accompanied by the introduction of guidelines that reaffirm the hetero- and familycentric ethical paradigm that had led to the drafting of the Section in the first place.

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Even if the Labour Government and the Scottish Executive worked towards the repeal of Section 28, Moran argues, these ‘compromises’ show that their family and sex education policies largely converge with the family values agenda of the conservatives (cf. Bell and Binnie 2000, Stychin 2003). Education plays a significant role in the reproduction of the nation, and the conceptualisation of the ‘national community’ has a strong impact on dominant conceptualisations of the public sphere (Balibar and Wallerstein 1993, Epstein and Johnson 1998, Calhoun 1993). The move to silence discourses on lesbigay sexualities in the context of schooling therefore indicates an attempt at the exclusion of queers from the nationalised public sphere, that is, the public sphere context officially sanctioned by nationalist discourse. Such an interpretation is implied when Jeffrey Weeks argues that the major aim of Section 28 was to insist on ‘a return to the narrow interpretation of the 1967 Act’ (Weeks quoted by Moran 2001: 77). The discourses around both Section 28 and the Sexual Offences Act 1967 can be read as key invents in the UK history of regulating sexualities through legal politics. The stubborn resistance of UK legislators over many decades to recognise same-sex or non-heterosexual relationships and family practices is a further expression of this policy-orientation. The Legislation of Queer Relationships The practice of UK family law has privileged heterosexual unions above queer relationships on many levels (VanEvery 1991/1992, Carabine 1996, Bailey-Harris 2001). Until very recently same-sex partnerships were not recognised by the law. As a result they were denied a range of significant rights, such as immigration rights, pension rights, inheritance rights and tax privileges.5 This practice symbolises a conscious denial by the state to grant basic protection to non-heterosexual partnerships and families (Hunter 1995a). It is against this back drop that partnership rights have been high on the agenda of lesbian and gay campaigning groups over recent decades (Weeks et al. 2001). The question through which legal form the state ideally could indicate recognition of queer relationships and families has been subject to an ongoing issue of debate. Recent legal developments have led to the implementation civil partnership laws, which enable same-sex partners in the UK to claim rights similar to married couples if they decided register their relationship (Barker 2004, 2006). The first step in the direction was undertaken in London, where since September 2001 same-sex couples could officially register their partnership. The act was primarily symbolic and did not equip couples with any significant rights. With the Civil Partnership Act 2004 finally a national piece of legislation allows same5 In the debate about same-sex partnership rights in the USA next of kin rights have been of paramount importance, for example, to secure partners’ hospital visitation rights or their effective voice in decisions on medication. In the UK there are no legal constrictions on the status ‘next-of-kin’ which would limit it to a married partner of biological family member. However, this does not mean that lesbian, gay, bisexual or queer people do not have at times to confront attempts by homophobic hospital staff to exclude them from patient care (cf. Auchmuty 2004: 114).

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sex couples to enter an official partnership status, which grants many of the rights married partners can claim. Yet UK law still reserves civil marriage for heterosexual unions. The position that only same-sex marriage rights would safeguard formal equality and entry into full civic citizenship is still quite vocal in the lesbian and gay movement (Hegarty et al. 2006). While it is difficult to dispute that the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples and the introduction of a special law for samesex couples indicates a persistence of a heteronormative bias in UK legal and social policy, some critics have suggested that the real problem of the civil partnership act lies in its exclusive concern with the validation of long-term monogamous romantic couple relationships (Barker 2006). Within such an approach it will remain impossible to recognise the true diversity of lesbigay relationships and families. I will discuss the arguments around marriage and civil partnership legislation in more detail in Chapters 3 and 4. Here it is sufficient to say that UK legislators had to be pushed hard in order to consider any recognition of same-sex relationships whatsoever. The step which they were finally ready to take meant only a partial integration of the relationships which come closest to the model of heterosexual companionate partnership. The heteronormativity of UK legislation is evidenced with regard to many more levels of family and relationship law. Lesbian, gay and other parents in a current same-sex relationship are very likely to lose custody rights to their ex-partners, if they claim a heterosexual identity or are living in a heterosexual relationship (Bamforth 1997, Griffin and Mulholland 1997, Griffin 1998, Alldred 1998). Judges do not seem to have been influenced in their decision by the increasing body of research that demonstrates that children raised by non-heterosexual (and in particular lesbian) families or individuals cannot be said to suffer disadvantageous development, despite strong societal pressure and processes of stigmatisation (Golombok and Tasker 1997, Saffron 1998). That the role of parenting is both heterosexualised and biologised is revealed in the fact that in cases in which non-heterosexual ex-partners go through legal conflict about child care, residence and contact rights are usually granted to the biological parent (Griffin and Mulholland 1997, Griffin 1998, Gavigan 1995). Although singular recent cases indicate that some judges are ready to assume a different position on this issue (McCandless 2005), the hegemonic definition of parenthood still emphasises biological kinship over primary care giving (Arnup and Boyd 1995, Cooper 1995). There has been significant legal development regarding the rights of queers to adopt. During the 1990s most of the gay men, lesbians and bisexuals who applied for adoption faced huge difficulties, even if the polices of agencies and the attitudes of individual case workers may have made a difference in this experience (Weeks et al. 2001). The introduction of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 created the legal possibility for same-sex couples to jointly adopt. Yet social discrimination against queers who entered the application process persisted. Only recently the government took initiative to tackle this problem by passing regulations which make it illegal of adoption agencies to discriminate against gay and lesbian couples (Wintour et al. 2007). The public debates about the legislation on new reproductive technologies in Britain have also been hegemonised by neo-conservative ideologies on family and

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sexuality (Smart 1995, Steinberg 1997, Richardson 2000). In particular with respect to donor insemination (DI) worries about the reproduction of gays and lesbians have structured the debate. The report by the Warnock Committee on Human Fertilisation and Embryology published in 1984 expressed a clear policy orientation towards privileging two-parent families with regard to the access to DI technologies. Consequently, infertility services should not be made available to single women, lesbians, gays, widows, unstable couples, and so on. In the debate in Parliament about the Human Fertilisation Embryology Act 1990 (HFEA) the position that reproduction should be limited to heterosexuals in general and heterosexual families in particular was expressed even more forcefully. The disapproval of the idea of queer reproduction and parenting among others led to the demand to consider the child’s need for a father (Cooper 1995, Sheldon 2005). Even if the law did not result in an effective full-scale exclusion of single and/or lesbian women from DI (because not all clinics adopted such a policy or women opted for informal arrangements, such as self-insemination) (cf. Haimes and Weiner 2000), HFEA established a discursive and disciplinary regime around the practice as a result of which paternalistic and heterosexual notions of reproduction, child rearing and family practices were reinforced. Positing a both anachronistic and exclusive normative vision, the law aimed to regulate access to new reproductive technologies to safeguard a notion of parenthood derived from the heterosexual nuclear family (Sheldon 2005). My critical reading of the discourses around Wolfenden and the Sexual Offences Act 1967, Section 28, and conflicts within family law clearly show the problematic construction of queer sexualities with regard to the state, citizenship and the body politics. In the UK, legislators and politicians have been stubbornly resistant to acknowledging the validity of queer relationships and family lives. Recent concessions and changes in the law do not alter a profound commitment of the New Labour government to heterosexual family values (Bell and Binnie 2000, Epstein, Johnson and Steinberg 2000, Stychin 2003). The politics of nonrecognition, exclusion from discourse and the denial of basic protection or access to rights, resources and services derives from the definition of the national community of citizens in heteronormative terms. As I have argued in the first part of this chapter, the definition of the public/ private distinction is always contested. Social movements around gender, race/ ethnicity and sexuality have challenged exclusive definitions of the public sphere. In the remaining part of this chapter I argue that against the back drop of these struggles it is appropriate to acknowledge the existence of multiple public spheres, which are related to each other in conflict and struggle. At the same time, I caution that attempts by social movements to create counterpublics do not result in the genesis of a unified socio-discursive space. Hegemony and conflict are at an inevitable part of the political process. Queer Counterpublics, Hegemony and Conflict State discrimination of alternate sexualities and intimacies through law and social policy has not gone unchallenged. Section 28 was subject to heavy contestation.

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Plans to introduce the clause were met with fierce resistance by the lesbian, gay and bisexual movements in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The fight against this law created strong alliances which, in terms of numbers and militancy, exceeded the scope of gay activism throughout all the previous years (Power and Barnett 1993). Weeks comments not without satisfaction on the paradoxical effects of Section 28: ‘It is not too much an exaggeration to say that Ms Thatcher, despite her rhetoric and actions, presided over the biggest expansion of the lesbian and gay community in its history’ (2000a: 171). The struggle around Section 28 is a prime example of an attempt by a social movement to change the modalities of discourse through the creation of counterpublics in order to influence the political process (Carabine 1995). Activists have not only challenged the boundaries between the public and private as they were drawn up in the proposals for Section 28. They also interfered with diverse publics (such as the media, the debates in Parliament, and so on). Moreover, they created or extended new public spheres (around campaigning groups, demonstrations, switchboards, lesbian and gay centres, the production of leaflets, publishing, and so on). Ken Plummer suggests understanding late modern gay and lesbian culture and politics through the model of a plurality of intersecting public spheres. These gay and lesbian public spheres may be seen as (a) developing their own visible and positive cultures, which (b) leak into the wider public spheres and cultures, whilst also (c) providing alternative, subaltern cultures. In doing this they shift the margins and the boundaries of the wider society. (2001a: 245)

Plummer’s model develops a critique of a monolithic conceptualisation of the public sphere, which has first been argued within feminist political theory. Marion Iris Young (1990a) successfully demonstrated that the ideal of an impartial public shores up exclusive conditions of access and interaction in dominant public sphere contexts. The assumption of a homogeneous public sphere thereby reinforces power relationships around gender, race, class and sexuality. According to Young, proposing a universalistic vision of culture and values results in a reductionist conceptualisation of politics. Young’s original critique was part of a larger enterprise to inscribe a discourse of difference into the representation of democracy. Nancy Fraser (1997) pushed Young’s argument even further, when she argued that already to claim that certain groups are excluded from ‘the’ public sphere would mean to subject to a regime of cultural domination which rests on a class-, race- and genderbiased representation of publicity. Fraser develops her argument as a critique of the shortcomings of Habermas’ (1969) influential historical work on the genesis of the bourgeois public sphere in Europe. From a detailed historical discussion she concludes that the bourgeois public was never the public. On the contrary, virtually contemporaneous with the bourgeois public there arose a host of competing counterpublics, including nationalist publics, popular peasant publics, elite women’s publics, black publics and working-class publics (Fraser 1997: 75).

Fraser calls these different public spheres ‘subaltern counterpublics’. They are defined as ‘parallel discursive arenas’ through which ‘members of subordinated social groups

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invent and circulate counter-discourses’ (p. 81). The twentieth-century US feminist movement provides her chief example for a ‘subaltern counterpublic’. Feminist subaltern counterpublics have evolved around journals, publishing companies, book stores, film and video companies, conventions, conferences, research centres, social centres, festivals, and so on. Fraser’s description hints at the necessity of a material or institutional basis for a subaltern counterpublic to emerge (cf. McGuigan 1996, Dawson 1995). Yet ultimately her model is based on a text-based notion of discourse. It is illustrative of widely shared common sense in the literature that a public is primarily established through the circulation of discourses (Warner 2002). Public sphere theory has proved to be quite helpful for the analysis of problems within lesbian and gay or queer social movement politics (Berlant and Warner 1998, Clarke 2000, Hubbard 2001, Warner 2002). A theory of multiple and intersecting public spheres can be particularly useful for thinking about normativity and hegemonic conflict in the context of sexual politics. I am convinced that a public sphere model is advantageous over the concept of ‘community’ which has been so prominent in writings about sexual politics. This is because the relation which is established in being part of a mediated public lacks the strong connotations of similarity, homogeneity, shared interest, emotional bonding, kinship, and so on, which commonly is associated with the term ‘community’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992). ‘The ideal of community, I suggest (....), privileges unity over difference, immediacy over mediation, sympathy over recognition of the limits of one’s understanding of others from their point of view’, Young summarises this line of critique (1990b: 300). In contradistinction, a public is generally conceived of as a link between strangers (Warner 2002). The notion of a public sphere emphasises discursivity and is prone to be more susceptible to the issue of difference. Yet even if the concept is pluralised, a risk remains that public sphere theory relapses into stereotypical notions of (cultural) difference (Holt 1995). Such a tendency is evident even in the work of Nancy Fraser, who is so strongly committed to infusing political theory with a sophisticated understanding of the problem of difference. Fraser is careful to use the term ‘public sphere’ in plural whenever she is discussing specific examples of counterpublic activities. She is adamant that the concept of a ‘public’ presupposes a plurality of perspectives that involves internal differences and antagonisms. Moreover, the political strategy of creating publicity has a tendency to entice inter-public sphere debates, she argues, which forecloses the risk of closure of any particular public. Fraser further emphasises that it is possible for individuals to partake in several public spheres. Despite all these attempts to keep the momentum of a dynamic and deferential theory of difference, Fraser’s discussion at times produces more stale or fixed notions of categorical difference, too. This happens, for example, when she defines counterpublics as ‘parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses, which in terms permit them to form oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs’ (1997: 81). The phrase ‘parallel discursive arenas’ implies separate and closed social entities. The central analytical terms are identities, interests and needs. All these concepts have been very prominent in community discourses and identity politics. Furthermore, Fraser refutes Habermas’ model of the bourgeois public sphere primarily by mans of a culturalist argument

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about difference. This is evident in her critique of the normative character of certain forms of habitus and styles of interaction. By collapsing identity, political interest, social and economic need, and cultural difference into each other Fraser’s model of multiple counterpublics runs risk to relapse into a rather orthodox theory of multiculturalism (Holt 1995). Partly, the problem derives from the fact that Fraser refers to these parallel or coexisting public spheres as ‘subaltern’ counterpublics. Warner (2002) rightly points out that there is no reason to assume that everybody who partakes in a particular counterpublic inhabits a subaltern social position (p. 121). It is questionable, for example, whether the label ‘subaltern’ is really appropriate for Fraser’s chief example, second-wave US feminism. The privileged positioning of the hegemonic constituencies in this movement with regard to class and race are out of question (hooks 1981, Josephs and Lewis 1981, Mohanty 1988). A public of such a variety, Warner maintains, is not limited to people marked by subaltern identities or social positions. Yes, counterpublics are certainly subordinated, yet this status does not necessarily reflect people’s social identities, but their wilful decision to enter a particular oppositional discursive space. I think a further clarification of terminology is required here. Both Fraser and Warner are using the term ‘counterpublic’ without normatively defining oppositionality. Fraser (1997) points out that some subaltern counterpublics may in fact be utterly reactionary and authoritarian. Warner (2002) includes the US Christian fundamentalists among his examples of counterpublics. The ‘counter’ in the term counterpublic derives its meaning primarily from a disadvantaged position with regard to other dominant publics. It is defined as a position marginalised, subordinated or stigmatised from the mainstream point of view. Despite being defined in such a formalistic manner, the notion of ‘counterpublics’ continues to evoke a sense of politically progressive resistance. Inasmuch as queer counterpublics are concerned, many writers clearly value their oppositional cultural and discursive potential, which is directed against heteronormative styles of intimacy, publicity and citizenship (Berlant and Warner 1998, Hubbard 2001, Clarke 2000). However, if we consider the unbounded character of public spheres, their implicit diversity and their mode of circulating discourse by addressing a potentially infinite number of strangers, a clear-cut definition of a particular public as oppositional or ‘counterpublic’ appears to be a rather difficult task. Warner himself (2002) has repeatedly pointed out that public spheres are shaped by struggle. These struggles within a public sphere extend to the question about what kind of ‘face’ the public is going to present or in which direction it is supposed to be going. I find the emphasis on struggle the most innovative aspect of Warner’s contribution to the debate on public spheres. The stress on political, cultural and ethical intra-sphere conflict opens up the question of hegemony for the public sphere analysis. If we focus on diversity, struggle, conflict, antagonism and division, it becomes quite obvious that it is difficult – if not impossible – to label certain public spheres as being either normative or counter-normative. Even if the concept of counterpublics invokes the notion of individual – if not collective – agency, questions of whether this kind of agency can be said to be ‘resistance’ remains open to further qualification. This insight is at odds with the tendency to idealise certain counterpublics under the

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signifier queer. There are certainly differences between public spheres with regard to political orientation, sexual practice and cultural identity. Yet even the ones which appear to be radical cannot be assumed to be beyond the regimes of power and normativity. In this chapter I have shown that UK legal practice and political discourses work to suppress queer identities, sex and affection in the public sphere. Policing the public/private distinction has been an important element in regulating gender and sexuality. The politics of containing queer sex, relationships and identities in the private reveals the heteronormative character of citizenship. Queers have only been granted partial or secondary citizenship, the degrees of which are dependent on their conformity. By challenging heterosexist culture and state practice, diverse sexual movements engage in the contestation of modes of publicity. At the same time, political debates around public sphere representation continue to create conflict about political strategy within these movements themselves. In Chapters 3, 4 and 5 I will explore in closer details how questions about non-monogamy are tied up with counterpublic discourses in the gay male, bisexual and polyamorous movements. However, before I will enter this analysis, I set out in the following chapter what has been at stake for me personally in the project of researching non-monogamies.

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Chapter 2

Researching Non-monogamies: Stories on Positionality, Intersubjectivity and Power

I used the [time for] general announcements to introduce my research and explain the character of this group discussion. Although I tried to encourage women to contribute their views, the constriction of my focus on gay and bisexual male relationships did not help to raise women’s interest. Finally, it was a fairly small group of men, who started to discuss these issues in a separate room, while a much larger (mixed) group opted for the other discussion. I understood these women’s decision as a logical response to my rather awkward incorporation of women’s experiences in my research. (Excerpt from my research diary)

This book is based on qualitative research into gay male and bisexual non-monogamies, power and sexual politics. I designed the study around a combination of methods, namely interviews, focus groups, documentary research, participant observation and discourse analysis. Qualitative research methodology fosters an understanding that is principally multi-method in focus (Denzin and Lincoln 1994b). Researchers working with poststructuralist theories have understood their implicit emphasis on the fragmented and contingent character of social realities as a call for the need to develop complex research strategies conducive of the use of multiple research methods (Howardt et al. 2000, Klesse 2004). Most of my empirical data has been gained in qualitative in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. I conducted forty-four in-depth interviews with gay men and bisexual men and women with experiences in non-monogamous long-term relationships. My sampling strategy drew on snowball-sampling and theoretical sampling steps. I further organised four focus groups with gay male, gay and lesbian and bisexual groups that I had approached by letter, asking for support for my research project. I discuss my research methods and my core methodological assumptions in more detail in the Appendix. In this chapter, I engage with questions that do not frequently appear in published research texts. The chapter deals with (some aspects of) my personal research experience. My main focus is on how power relations have structured the intersubjective dynamics between me as a researcher and the research participants. How did my personal, theoretical, and political understandings and my diverse identities influence the direction I have taken in this research? How did my social location and my various identifications structure and at times complicate the research process? Embedded in a reflection of recent discussion in the literature on research methodology, I address the question how commonalities and/or differences with regard to the categories of gender, sexuality,

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race/ethnicity and nationality affect the researcher/researched relationship. Deploying both methodological and epistemological theories and personal experience stories, I explore the intersubjective dimension of researching non-monogamies. Power and the Research Process The widespread reception of social constructionism, poststructuralism and postmodernism on the debates on social science methodology has set the stage for pluralistic and relativistic epistemological positions to emerge (Goldberg 1997). In the light of a growing scepticism towards universalistic or objectivistic knowledge claims, calls for a critical and self-reflexive writing practice have gained momentum (Steier 1991, Denzin 1997, Denzin and Lincoln 1994a). Feminists have played a significant role in the creation of a self-reflexive research culture (Mies 1983, Stanley and Wise 1993, Acker et al. 1991, Fonow and Cook 1991). Feminists have attacked the myth of a linear progress of research according to a rigid and rational research design by reframing it as an unpredictable and relational social process. Moreover, the idea that knowledge is always partial, situated and social in character (cf. Haraway 1991, Hekman 1999) makes it plausible to call for an ‘open acknowledgement by the researcher of her or his assumptions, beliefs, sympathies and biases, especially those emanating from her or his sex, race, social class and/or sexual orientation’ (Lee and Renzetti 1993: 177). Only if researchers provide some information on their social location and communicate their interests, values and politics, we can put their knowledge claims into perspective. Against the backdrop of such reasoning, Sandra Harding has argued that contrary to the commonly held view, highlighting the subjective factor in academic writing may actually increase ‘objectivity’, rather than diminish it. Her theory of ‘strong objectivity’ de-constructs the idealised position of a de-personalised, dis-embodied Archimedean point of view at the heart of traditional research methodology (Harding 1991, 1998). Other feminists argue that by disclosing their stakes researchers have the chance to counter traditional power relationships between researchers and researched. The act of self-positioning can challenge the tendency of objectification implicit to classical research epistemologies (Stanley and Wise 1990, 1991, 1993). Feminist debates on methodology have been propelled by a strong concern with power relations (Lennon and Withford 1995, Maynard 1994, Gluck and Patai 1991). Apart from a structural critique of the active collusion of certain research knowledges in oppressive, exploitative or imperialist enterprises and a complex division of labour in research institutions (Yeatman 1995, Stanley 1990, Gunaratnam 2003), this included a problematisation of the acts of representation and interpretation. The term ‘representation’ captures the mental, social and material process of the production of meaning. The ‘critique of representation’ is concerned with the exploration of the cultural, historical and political contexts that enable certain representations to emerge. Representations play a role in legitimising and perpetuating social power relationships. In particular the representation of subordinate groups (from a dominant point of view) frequently involves processes of ‘othering’, which results in the production of stereotyped images and discourses (De Beauvoir 1976,

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Willkinson and Kitzinger 1996). A critical analysis of the legacies of colonial discourse within diverse scientific disciplines reveal the complicated ways in which power discursively structures and interferes with our representations of race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, the body, and so on (Gunaratnam 2003, Denzin 1997). Any production of politically responsible and useful research texts needs to break with stereotyped racialised, ethnicised, sexualised and gendered representations. This calls for a conscious reflection of our own subjectivities as researchers and the ways in which they corrsepond with those of our interview partners (Bhavnani 1994, Haritaworn 2001). This is necessary since these social positions are implicated in the process of interpretation (Uguris 2004). Power is an inevitable dimension of the subjection of research participants’ narratives to the analytical act of interpretation (Holland and Ramazanoglu 1994, Denzin 1994/1999). Researchers usually have an interest in constructing a particular type of (generally academic) knowledge, which is not necessarily shared by all the researched (Glucksmann 1994, Millen 1997). This may imply the application of certain theories for the reading of informants’ accounts. To place these narratives into the context of different theoretical or linguistic systems is an act of translation which inevitably transforms their vernacular (Mason 1996). In some cases, this processing of stories and information results in a situation in which participants do not recognise themselves in the academic texts produced on the basis of their narratives any more. Apart from the risk of alienation on the part of the research participants, the work of analysis can also result in serious interpretative conflict (Borland 1991, Klesse 1997) – who does finally control what is said and which version is disseminated in the publication of the research? I think it is fairly obvious that in most forms of research co-operation, it is the professional researchers who hold this power of control to a much higher degree (Stacey 1991). It is usually also the researcher who gains cultural or economic capital through publication. Looking at the research relationship from this critical angle, it is questionable as to whether it can really be described in such egalitarian terms as common in research textbooks. It also throws some doubt on the idealising and mystifying notions of empowerment at the heart of the intention to ‘giving a voice’ to the oppressed or marginalised (Patai 1991, Patai and Gluck 1991). Interpretation involves selection, emphasis, omission, de- and re-contextualisation. These choices are dependent on the standpoint, interest and the values and politics of the researcher (Denzin and Lincoln 1994b). Scientific writing is narrative production and as such necessarily fictitious (Denzin 1994/1999). Research texts are interpretations of interpretations and have therefore been described as second- or even third-order constructs (Geertz 1973, Denzin 1989, 1990). Diane Reay (1996) stresses the necessary imperfection and incompleteness of any interpretation: ‘There are many possible readings of interview transcripts. From where I am positioned, certain aspects of the data are much more prominent than others’ (p. 70). Yet the problem raised by differences in social positioning exceeds the issue of perspectival relativism (Megill 1994). Social divisions around race, ethnicity, sexuality, class and disability are constitutive of social structures, cultural formations and subjectivities. This means they do not only receive significance at the point of interpretation. They permeate the whole research process. Amongst others they impinge on research

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design and beyond this on all our interaction with our research contacts. In the following, I reflect on how aspects of my own location have influenced the direction of the research process and my relationship with research participants. I discuss how my personal subjectivity has both structured and been constructed in the process of researching non-monogamies. Intersubjectivity, Identity and Politics My research has focussed on how power relations both structure and interfere with gay male and bisexual non-monogamous relationship practices. This emphasis is not only an accidental feature of my research design. It also tells something about my interpretative stance that has been shaped by my ethical values. The wish to challenge hegemonic power relations has been a strong motivation of mine throughout adult life. Due to this concern, I have become involved in diverse groups and campaigns within leftist and anti-racist politics. My thoughts and theoretical leanings have been strongly inspired by debates within the social movements struggling around the social divisions of class, gender, race/ethnicity and sexuality. This has also impinged on the direction of my academic research. Autobiographical issues have played a significant role not only for the choice of topic but the research process in general (cf. Stanley and Wise 1993, Stanley 1993/1999). When I pondered on the first draft of my proposal for a research project into gay male relationship practices in 1997, I decided to focus on the issue of nonmonogamy, because I myself had been committed to non-monogamous relationships (with female and male partners) for many years. In the first draft of the proposal I concentrated primarily on power as normativity and decided to explore the political and cultural effects of the same-sex marriage campaign for people with a nonmonogamous life practice. At the time, my female (primary) partner criticised it for being too idealistic and uncritical about non-monogamous relationship practice itself. This was an important critique which helped me to develop a more comprehensive approach in my study as it developed. The sad aspect of it was that her critique was mot merely theoretical, but a reflection on our own non-monogamous practice. At this time we went through serious conflicts about our non-monogamous arrangement which, basically, she wanted to modify and I wished to maintain. These difficulties and disagreements became increasingly painful over the years. Our consensus about having a non-monogamous relationship faded. When we were negotiating this issue, my partner often criticised me for insisting on a male privilege. We could not resolve these problems as a result of which she broke up with me in early 2000. Although we decided to give our relationship a new try (under more exclusive conditions) some months later, the pain of this conflict kept overshadowing our relationship. Our compromise did not work for her and she decided to leave me again in September 2001. Other sexual and intimate long-term relationships, too, have been going through rough and difficult times in the subsequent years. My boyfriend broke up our partnership when our discussion about how close we wanted to live together reached a deadlock in 2005. Another long-term relationship of mine collapsed into trauma and destruction in just at the same time. I found myself in a situation when

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all the three relationships which had been most significant in my romantic, intimate and sexual life for the last fifteen years had come to an end. The problems which unsettled all these relationships were closely linked to the question how we were managing our non-monogamous practice. Arrangements that worked for some of us for some times – maybe even for many, many years – did not provide the basis for a satisfying or bearable relationship at other times and in other circumstances. As a consequence of my personal experiences, I have become more sceptical of the notion of ‘consensus’, which I had rather uncritically endorsed in my first research proposal. Consensus stands in for the idealistic imagination of a status of rational agreement and emotional equilibrium which cannot account for the emotional flows and counter-currents and the temporal contingencies and divergences which characterise the dynamics in multiple relationships. Moreover, the hegemonic representation of consensus is based on an imaginary relationship which posits the highly abstract liberal assumption of a sovereign subject un-restrained by power relations.1 The difficulties in my own relationships made me – and my partners – painfully aware of power processes around non-monogamy. Many of the questions in this research have also been questions of my personal life. Changes in my own life altered the way I felt about certain aspects of my research and expressed themselves as a new emphasis in that project. Identity Management and ‘Bisexuality’ as a Research Topic Personal identity issues frequently are interwoven with the development of research agendas – even if this is not always acknowledged. This does not mean that identity is necessarily directly articulated in research, but our identifications may leave their mark or surface in sometimes indirect and unforeseeable ways. The original title of my research was ‘Gay Male Non-monogamous Partnerships in the UK’. Its primary focus was the exploration of male same-sex non-monogamy in the context of lesbian and gay politics. Only in the course of the research I decided to open my perspective to include what could be called ‘bisexual relationships’. Yet I felt necessary to integrate a certain focus on bisexuality from the very beginning. Recent theories on identification posit that sexual identities are constructed, culturally specific, unstable and not necessarily indicative of sexual practice (Rutherford 1990a, Hall and du Gay 1996, Whisman 1996). The terms Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) or Women who have Sex with Women (WSW) popularised in 1980s and 1990s AIDS discourses make this phenomenon most explicit (cf. King 1993, Rodríguez Rust 2000a). If people define their relationship as gay or if their relationship is perceived as gay by others, this does not necessarily imply that everyone in the relationship is gay-identified. In fact, the whole act of labelling a relationship gay, bisexual or heterosexual, and so on involves a whole range of linguistic and theoretical problems (De Cecco and Shively 1983–1984/2000, Rodríguez Rust 2000d). Consequently, it

1 I am grateful for fruitful discussions on this topic with Matthew Weait and members of the Group for the Study of Law Gender, and Sexuality at Keele University. See Chapter 6 for a more detailed discussion.

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was only sensible to assume that one or the other bisexual-, heterosexual-, or otheridentified man would appear in my sample anyway. As convincing as all these considerations may be, they do not fully account for the reasons why I did want to include bisexuality in my research. I also felt much more comfortable doing this project (as a bisexual-identified man), if I included an explicit focus on bisexuality. I believed to have more legitimacy to do this research, if it contained a focus on my ‘own’ identity category. This emotional reasoning reveals how much I was preoccupied with issues of legitimisation which were ultimately tied up with anxieties about acceptance. Being aware of the disapproval of bisexuality in wide parts of gay male and lesbian culture, I feared that some people may question my research only on the ground of my personal identity or sexual practice (cf. Eadie 1993, Hemmings 2002). By including a focus on bisexual men, too, I hoped my research would gain legitimacy – at least in the eyes of those, who draw strong boundaries between gayness and bisexuality. I suppose this issue should not have troubled me so much. The assumption that people should restrain themselves to study their ‘own’ collectivities had been challenged in both feminist and lesbian and gay studies (cf. Plummer 1981, Harding 1991). The inside/outside metaphor which structures our representation of sexualities had been deconstructed in queer theories (Fuss 1991). The fact that these concerns played such a salient role in my methodological choices reveals to what a strong degree my emotions were shaped by identity political rationalities. This was the case although I had spent a significant amount of time and intellectual labour in deconstructing the assumptions behind identity politics in a previous academic project of mine (Klesse 1997). Gender Worries Bisexuality finally assumes a significant role in my research. There has been a range of reasons for broadening my research agenda. Let me first comment on the personal reasons that (as so often) are also bound up with political ones. The inclusion of bisexuality in the early stages of my research can be described as rather half-hearted. By focussing primarily on male same-sex relationships (inclusive of the experiences of self-identified or behavioural bisexual men), my consideration of female bisexualities was limited, indirect and conditional. Because I had never intended to confine my research to the couple unit, dealing with male bisexuality would inevitably bring up female sexuality within the scope of my research. There was a huge likelihood that bisexual men in multiple relationships would also maintain significant relationships with women. In fact, this was exactly what my personal experience looked like. I always considered interviewing women in such relationship constellations. While I had already allocated some place for the participation of women in my research, I had made it dependent on quite specific conditions. Oddly, women were supposed to be in a relationship with a man (who also was supposed to maintain relationships with other men) in order to qualify them for participation in my research. This, of course, inscribed a profound androcentrism at the very heart of my research project. Originally, I felt that it would not be a good idea to make women’s experiences a primary focus of my research, because I believed that (as a male researcher) I would not be able to provide a comprehensive perspective on women’s sexuality

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and relationships (cf. Williams 1996). I was convinced that few women would be prepared to participate in research into sexuality conducted by a sole male researcher. This supposition was one of the major reasons for constricting my focus on male same-sex relationships despite my attempts to carve out some space for bisexuality as a research topic. My doubts about the (im)possibility of close co-operation with women in such a research project were shaped by my experiences of the political culture in the extra-parliamentary leftist opposition in Germany throughout at the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which feminist separatist ideas were quite influential. In the course of my research I realised that my worries were exaggerated, if not unfounded. When I participated at the UK annual bisexual conventions (BICONS) in 1999 and 2000, I was surprised how many women were interested in my study. Many were disappointed about its narrow focus and some politically disapproved of it. Because of my increasing discomfort with the awkward incorporation of women’s perspectives in my research, I decided to look at bisexuality more comprehensively and as a topic in its own right. It was the only way to acknowledge the diversity and complexity of bisexual relationships. It further meant realising that any meaningful work on bisexuality has to consider women’s perspectives as a central part of its inquiry. This decision further enabled me to explore in more detail the concept of polyamory, an under-researched relationship philosophy which was very present in bisexual movement debates, but virtually absent from gay male culture (Haritaworn et al. 2006, see Chapter 5). Although I did correct the course of my research, my initial ambivalence with regard to women’s participation resulted in a lasting bias of my evolving research sample. Although women make up about the half of my bisexual-identified research participants, women who exclusively or primarily maintain same-sex relationships are not strongly represented. A further problem of the revision of my research design in the light of a concern with the ‘inclusion of women’s perspectives’ was that it reinforced an approach marked by a dualistic perception of gender. Jin Haritaworn (2007) rightly points out that methodological strategies are frequently based on a gendered epistemology, which does not consider the realities of transgendered subjects at all. Being a ‘Kinky’ Academic – Doing Sex Research My decision to broaden the focus of my research and to study bisexual nonmonogamous relationships unconditionally and in their own right has been driven by theoretical, political, methodological and personal considerations. Identity issues have played a significant role. They influenced research design and process and also surfaced in the interaction with the research participants. Identification is always a relational process. It demands both self-identification and recognition by others. It is a process of self-location as much as it is one of interpellation (S. Hall 1992a, 1996, Calhoun 1994). Identity was permanently evoked by people I met in the course of my research. It was as if my research topic transferred identity onto me. Whenever I told people about my research question, they seemed to assume that I either was gay, bisexual, queer or simply a pervert (depending on the moral and political outlook of the person in question). Writing on sexuality and in particular on marginalised sexualities tends to render researchers ‘morally suspect’ from the mainstream point

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of view (Plummer 1981, Myers 1992, Lewin and Leap 1996b). Let me illustrate this issue with one example. One day, I was invited to a breakfast party at the house of the mother of a friend of mine (who is an academic herself). When she heard about my research topic she shouted ‘Yuck!’ twice and then started to point out the ‘scandalous’ character of my research to other party guests. I was quite annoyed with the fuss she made which I perceived as an inappropriate reaction. Although she has since apologised for her behaviour, which she says was meant as a joke, I find it difficult not to read her strong reaction as an indication of at least some ‘uneasy’ feelings about my work. Usually, people would not show their irritation or disapproval in such an obvious way. However, I did encounter quite a lot of rather awkward responses. Although I was rarely directly challenged because of my research interests, people were frequently surprised and shocked or withdrew from the conversation. Sometimes I could notice some disturbance flicker in the faces of my conversational partners. I could feel how they suddenly looked at me differently (I am referring to this brief moment when eyes tighten in a concentrated act of trying to re-place you).2 Sometimes people were so stunned that they could not come up with any line of response at all. Whatever the concrete reaction, talking about my research in a new social context usually felt like an act of coming out. Of course, identity was not always referred to in acts of negativity, but also in gestures aimed at creating the sense of a common understanding by politically progressive and/or ‘queer’ people: a smile was often enough to signal a shared understanding. Usually I would talk about my personal investments in my research anyway. In these cases, people did not need to speculate about my sexual identity. This has generally been the case with my interview partners, who would often go on to ask me in detail about my personal life. Differences, Power and Research Relationships Apart from inspiring my research in the first place, having been in non-monogamous relationships for most years of my adult life was also an enabling factor in my research. People who wanted to find out more about my study in order to make an informed decision on whether to participate usually asked me why I was interested in non-monogamy. I think these questions aimed primarily at finding out about my political stance. The information that I have been in non-monogamous relationships myself did not necessarily establish a shared identity, but it may have convinced people that it was rather unlikely that I would write in a dismissive or moralising way about their sexual lives. However, people were frequently even more concerned to find out about my sexual identity in terms of gendered preferences. The first thing people were eager to know was whether I was gay (or depending on the context) bisexual myself. Due to the broad perspective of my research, communicating my bisexuality could, of course, establish either commonality or difference in identity – depending on the identity or sexual preferences of the person inquiring. I do not think I can claim – as it is frequently done in methodology texts (cf. Plummer 2

See Finch (1984/1999) on the concept of ‘placing’.

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1981, Heaphy et al. 1998) – that a commonality of sexual identity has enhanced my research. I am further quite sceptical about such claims in general. I will discuss the problem of taken-for-granted assumptions of commonality based in identity in more detail below. Earlier I mentioned my initial anxiety that gay men would question my legitimisation for conducting this research on grounds of my bisexuality. It is noteworthy that nobody gave my bisexual identity as a reason for not participating in the study. This may indicate that claiming bisexuality (maybe contingent on the fact that I have been in a long-term same-sex relationship) was enough reason for the gay men inquiring not to fear that I would distort their accounts. Again, what I think is at stake here is the assumption of a shared political agenda on the basis of a declared identity (this assumption being justified or not) rather than a shared identity in itself. None of my gay male interview partners took an explicitly dismissive stance on bisexuality, although I occasionally encountered biphobic opinions when I visited local gay and lesbian groups to recruit for my research. In the context of the interviews, my bisexual self-identification may have even enabled certain communicative processes. It may have made it easier for some gay-identified men to talk about past heterosexual relationships or to speculate about the option of becoming erotically involved with women in an uncertain future. When gay men raised such issues, I felt that they did this primarily in order to show recognition of my bisexual location. Most of my interview partners’ comments are probably best understood as a sensitive and person-centred conversational attitude. The fact that I introduced myself as bisexual seemed to establish the theme of bisexuality as a hidden but present point of reference throughout the interviews with gay men. They would frequently relate to it in one way or the other. However, it is difficult to pin down in which way exactly our differences in identity shaped the interview situation. Power Relations and Interviewer Effects The methodological concerns with the identity-related issues discussed above are frequently cast as a matter of interviewer effects. There has been a lot of debate in particular on the effects of gender and racial differences or commonalities for the interview process (Gunaratnam 2003). Janet Finch (1984/1999) has made a strong point about the natural intimacy of the woman-to-woman interview. The commonality of gender, she argues, usually creates an enormous amount of trust. Women are consequently more likely to share intimate information with a female interviewer. Apart from the assumption of commonality in experience, the woman-to-woman research relationship is taken to be more egalitarian (Oakley 1981, Acker et al. 1991). Feminist research and analysis have demonstrated that styles of communication are gendered (Fishman 1995, Spender 1980, Devault 1990/1999). Against this backdrop there has been a strong conviction within feminist studies that research into women’s lives ought to be done by female researchers (Smith 1987, Stanley and Wise 1990, 1993).

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Others, however, have scrutinised the idea that commonality simply would emerge from a shared gender position. They have argued that the particular ease of female-to-female interview exchanges may rather flow from a shared (middle) class culture (Song and Parker 1995). There have also been political arguments against the idea that people should only do research into their own collectivities (Harding 1991). With regard to race and ethnicity, some have warned that such a stance would reinforce the separation of fields of study and result in the marginalisation of Black or ethnic minority researchers (Phoenix 1994, Rhodes 1994, Bola 1996). Within this paradigm, the concerns of Black or ethnicised people are set apart from research into white mainstream society. This leads to a no-win situation for Black or ethnic minority scholars, who get thrown back on issues concerning race/ethnicity – where their voice is usually questioned once again via the accusation of an alleged lack of objectivity. In practice, this may have the effect of their being denied employment in publicly funded research projects. Empirical research has further shown that the degree to which, for example, the mismatch of gender positioning of interviewer/ interviewee matters is strongly dependent on the research context and the subject matter in question (Padfield and Proctor 1996). Sexism, racism, classism and heterosexism play an important role in structuring research relationships. Whoever is privileged in these discourses of power and subordination may use or abuse this power in a research situation. This applies to both interviewers and interviewees. Many female researchers emphasise the difficulties involved in researching sexist men (for example, Stanley and Wise 1991, Ronai 1990, O’Connell Davidson and Layder 1994,) and many Black or ethnic minority researchers complain about having encountered racism by respondents of dominant ethnic/racial collectivities (Bola 1996, Simmonds 1997, Bhavnani 1994). The discussion about matching the identities of interviewers and interviewees thus takes a very different shape when considering either research crossing collective identities from a subordinated or dominant position (cf. Bola 1996, Phoenix 1994). Race has been a salient issue in the literature on self-reflexivity (Gunaratnam 2003). The general assumption has been that racial, ethnic or colour matching would be a precondition for the creation of non-biased accounts of Black people’s experiences (Rhodes 1994, Andersen 1993/1999). I think there are good reasons for such a strategy. Writing by white researchers on Black people’s lives has often been stereotyped, disfiguring or plainly racist. People of colour are therefore frequently sceptical about research undertaken by white researchers (Phoenix 1994, Rhodes 1994, Andersen 1993/1999). Consequently, white researchers find it often difficult to find interview partners of colour willing to participate in the research (Edwards 1993, 1996, Russel 1996, Paulin 1996, Lang 1996). As I will discuss in more detail below, I experienced similar problems in my study. Song and Parker (1995) argue that the methodological debates on identity matching lag far behind the developments within social theory on identity and subjectivity. The demand of a politics of matching would obscure the diversity of experiences, viewpoints and identities within different groups and preconceive their respective effects on interpersonal relations in the research process (cf. Fortier 1998, Ang-Lygate 1996, 1997). Cultural identities have to be conceived of as shifting, contextual and relational. They allow for multiple positioning. They may be evoked,

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elicited and negotiated in complex ways in a research situation. Researchers and participants may construct cultural identities in very different ways, even if they have, for example, a certain ethnic or racial background in common. They may refer to different categories, draw different boundaries or may attribute different significance to race/ethnicity in their lives. Notions of racial or ethnic belonging may be contested on a variety of grounds: geographic origin, generation in terms of migration history, skin colour, mixed origin, ethnic sub-division, caste, religious affiliation, compliance to expectations around gender behaviour, gender embodiment or sexual activity, cultural competencies, interests or orientation, and so on (cf. Erel 2002). More recent work on interviewer effects stresses the significance of the ways in which research relationships are constituted around race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, but assume a much more complicated (inter)relationship. Many argue that the effects of a mismatch of salient identities of researcher and researched is context-dependent and cannot be predicted in any detail (Bhavnani 1994, Rhodes 1994, Padfield and Proctor 1996, Phoenix 1994, Fortier 1998). Moreover, the critical consideration of researchers’ subjectivity cannot be limited to any one single identity category. Rather we should focus on the interplay of the discursive power around gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, age and disability. In the following sections, I will give some examples of intersubjective processes around race, ethnicity and nationality in my research experience. Race/Ethnicity and Racism I carried through this research project as a white person in a multi-ethnic society shaped hegemonic racist practices and discourses. This had certain implications for the research process. I see my racial position as a white person as one of the reasons why a lot of the lesbian and gay groups that organised around shared ethnic or racial identities (or the experience of racism) did not respond to the letters I had sent out in order to convince groups to participate in the research. Because racial or ethnic identity was a criterion of membership in these groups, I did mention my own background in order to create an informed situation on the grounds of which we could have discussed the possibility and/or terms of a potential cooperation. The few groups which responded were all involved in HIV/AIDS prevention work. They had either commissioned or done research themselves or individual staff members held strong views on the necessity of research into queer sexualities to include Black or ‘ethnic minority’ perspectives. The rather low participation of people of colour, which I perceive as one the major weaknesses of my study, can certainly be interpreted as a response to the fact that I did this project as a sole white researcher. My own privileged position with regard to racialised social divisions further explains my frequently felt insecurities when I raised issues around race/ethnicity or racism with Black interview partners. At the same time, I felt that many of them were conscious of our racial/ethnic differences when they talked about issues related to racism. All the South Asian men in my study (whether in individual interviews or in the group discussion with Matai) spoke extensively about the racism they experienced on the gay male scene and how cultural differences and racism tend to complicate many

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of their inter-racial relationships. Sometimes I felt that they were sceptical of how I would position myself with regard to this problem and if I could really relate to it or fully grasp their concerns (cf. Phoenix 1994). Rizwan, for example, criticised racism in Britain and the stigmatisation he continuously experienced at his workplace in a gay male organisation. He further pondered on the cultural and racialised dynamics in inter-racial relationships. When I asked him to expand on this issue, I gained the impression that he did not reckon that I would have much of an understanding of the dynamics of racism. Christian: You were talking about mixed relationships looking at it from a white point of view. If you look at it from a South Asian point of view, is there anything else you would like to add? Rizwan: You’ve done Sociology, haven’t you? Christian: Yeah Rizwan: And you know the concepts of racism? You can’t have racism without power, and the South Asian community in this country doesn’t have any power. So we can’t be racists at all, can we? But we can have prejudices, we can have prejudices.

It seems as if Rizwan understood my question as if I wanted to insinuate that South Asian men, too, would behave in racist ways in white/South Asian inter-racial partnerships. His response shows that he was not sure at all whether I had understood his complex analysis of the dynamics in inter-raciality as a simple question of ‘mutual racism’. The fact that I am a white researcher may also explain the reluctance of most of my white interview partners to talk in depth about issues of race/ethnicity (cf. Padfield and Proctor 1996). With time I became aware that race/ethnicity was largely absent as a topic in most narratives of my white interview partners. This contrasted with my observations at local gay and lesbian group meetings. These groups were predominantly or even exclusively white in their composition. On these group evenings I gained the impression that race/ethnicity was a very present discourse among the group members. On some occasions I had conversations with people who were blatantly racist. Moreover, in all the groups which I visited, people came up with stories about their sexual interest in black-haired, black- or brownskinned people or about their sex holidays in Thailand, and so on. Stories about the dislike of certain ethnic groups on the one hand and about fantasies and sexual experiences with people of a fetishised ethnicity on the other hand were happily shared in the chatty atmosphere in pubs or private houses. As I said earlier, in the one-to-one interview sessions such issues were rarely mentioned at all. Maybe it was that people were more concerned about self-representation and political correctness in an interview situation. Maybe it was that race/ethnicity really did not appear to be an overtly important issue to them when I asked them to talk about their sexual and intimate lives. White people tend to naturalise and universalise their ethnicity to a degree of invisibility (Frankenberg 1993, Dyer 2006). The assumptions associated with such a taken-for-grantedness of whiteness are usually not expressed explicitly. Whatever the reasons, my experiences made me adopt a different and more straightforward interview strategy. I decided to bring up issues around race/ ethnicity in every interview – irrespective of the ethnic or racial background of my

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interviewees. However, the responses of my white interview partners (if they had not a politicised understanding of racism or had not been in inter-racial/inter-ethnic long-term relationships) usually remained brief and superficial. Nationality and Intersubjectivity My nationality was a salient issue in some research encounters, too. The facts that I was not raised in the UK and that I am not a native English speaker played a role in the interaction with some of my interview partners. Due to my accent people usually notice straightaway that English is not my mother tongue. Many people therefore assumed that I may not be familiar with certain terms or histories. If this was the case, they would halt and explain things to me in more detail. In my understanding, their reactions expressed sensitivity and a caring attitude towards conversation. In some interviews the frequency of references to my German background did go beyond such a person-centred conversational attitude. I assume that the salience of my German nationality in these encounters had very different reasons. In most cases, they were born out of a vivid memory of the history of Germany’s role in World War II, its responsibility for the Shoa and concerns about escalating racism and antiSemitism in contemporary Germany. Partly, they derived from certain (idealised) representations of Germanness. When Donald picked me up at the tube station where we had arranged to meet for the interview, he was very surprised to hear that I was German. He had misread my accent for French. Germany and Bavaria (the federal state were I was born) were the major topics of our conversation on the way to his home. Like many of my interview partners he raised the issue of German neo-Nazism with me. Donald asked whether the problem of Nazism in Germany had declined over recent years. From there we got into a discussion about racist violence and the strengthening of neo-fascist organisation in the years since re-unification. Whereas many research participants did inquire about my national background and stayed with this topic for a while, Donald did not stop referring to my German background. When he was so kind and hospitable as to prepare dinner for us in an interview break, he returned to this topic. This time he talked about German cuisine. Because I am German, he suggested, I probably would like to eat a lot of meat and consume huge quantities of beer. Oh yes, these huge beer glasses in Bavaria! I started to feel a bit uncomfortable with Donald’s generalisations about German culture. At one point in our conversation he responded to a statement of mine with a sigh and the comment: ‘Oh … you Germans, you are so intense’. I was both puzzled and a bit unnerved by these permanent references to my nationality. Finally, he explained to me that he once had a Bavarian boyfriend. Now everything seemed to fall in place! Then – just at the end of our interview – Donald told me that he is Jewish. When I asked him whether he had a secular or religious family background, he answered ‘I am supposed to be an Orthodox Jew’ and cut off the interview right at this point. He explained to me that he was tired now and offered me to bring me to the station straight away. Donald’s abrupt termination of our interview left me with a lot of questions. Was he not interested in discussing issues around Jewishness with me, because I am German? Was my German nationality such a salient topic in our conversation not

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because he once had a German boyfriend, but because of the Shoa, a crime organised and carried through by Germans in the name of the German Reich and for the sake of the German nation? Or was he just tired? Donald had mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that he had an acute health problem with his eyes. I did not ask him for a second interview session. This is why I can only speculate about the reasons for his abrupt termination of our interview and whether the continuing history of German anti-Semitism did play a role in it. I tend to assume so. Maybe this is the case, because I once had more explicit conflicts about my German nationality when I conducted life history interviews with Benjamin, a British Jewish gay male activist. At one time Benjamin argued with me, because I – as a German – had criticised Israel’s politics in a discussion of the Israel–Palestine conflict (cf. Klesse 1997). As I said, there are a range of other potential explanations for Donald’s permanent references to German character, culture and habits. The fact that he had a German boyfriend may just have triggered a stream of reminiscences. However, the fact that I am still pondering upon this experience deploying either the one or the other (or both) of these analytical narratives is an issue worth emphasising. It shows that the way in which ethnicity or nationality are constructed or perceived in research encounters should be understood as a relational process that draws both on larger scale cultural and political histories and on very personal life historical themes. The salience of my nationality in another interview encounter was supposedly primarily due to the latter issue. When I met Timo, he explained to me that he wanted to meet me for two major reasons: Firstly, he wanted to help me with my research. Secondly, I was German. That was indeed a stunning statement. He went on to add that, moreover, I was a particularly nice German. In the course of the interview, it became obvious that Timo had a quite peculiar relationship to Germans. He explained to me that his partner Buddy with whom he had been in a partnership for twenty-three years before his sudden death in a car accident was previously married to a German woman. In the years before his death, Buddy entered into a relationship with a gay man from Germany that grew very intense and threatened his partnership with Timo. Timo seemed to insinuate that his partner Buddy did erotically fetishise Germans. Did Timo’s interest in my German background derive from the erotic investment of his ex-partner in Germans? Was this the reason why the fact that I am German seemed sufficient reason to meeting me? After the interview Timo offered me to take me to the station by car. When I put on my jacket and boots (brown walking boots), Timo commented on my style of dress: ‘Oh you look like a real German!’ Pointing at my boots he started to elaborate on a particular stereotype of fascist German hypermasculinity: ‘Mostly these Germans are depicted wearing these high black military boots’. I thought this was a rather wilful association, because my appearance on this day had – if any – more of an androgynous touch – with large earrings, long hair, a colourful shirt with a flower pattern and an intensely red cord jacket. When we were about to leave, Timo opened his arms saying ‘Let me hug you’. I felt that this was a very nice gesture after the closeness of our interview. I happily embraced him, too. I realised that I had misinterpreted his gesture when Timo started kissing me. While I was trying to resolve our embrace, Timo grabbed my German legs and Bavarian backside. He made a few more advances while he was driving me to the station. It took me some time to make him realise my boundaries.

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Despite both of us being white Europeans, I found the ethnicisation of our relationship to be a strong feature in our interaction. Timo’s allusion to the image of the hyper-masculine militarist German further points to a particular sexualised ethnicised imagery. More recent work has foregrounded the manifold intersections of race and sexuality (Weekes 1997, Marshall 1996, Fung 1998, Somerville 2000). I think the story of my encounter with Timo is worth telling because it reveals that processes of ethnicisation and sexualisation may also be at work in white interethnic relationships in an intra-European context. More research and theorisation needs to being undertaken on this interrelation (cf. Garner 2006). Sexualising Research Relationships Timo’s story further shows that sexuality can be a salient factor in research encounters. Sexual attraction is a potential issue in any kind of social research. There are myriad ways in which research relationships may be sexualised. In particular certain qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviewing may involve high levels of intimacy. Both interviewers and interviewees may feel erotic or sexual desire in such an encounter. This desire may be one-sided or mutual. The people involved may ignore it, repress it, over-play it – or decide to articulate or even act on it.3 It has been argued that sexualisation is a particular salient feature in research encounters between gay/bisexual men (Heaphy et al. 1998, Bolton 1996, Kong et al. 2002). This is partly the case because sexuality is a prominent route to establishing intimacy and friendship in gay male culture (Nardi 1992b, 1999, Weeks et al. 2001). Research relationships are much more likely to become sexualised if the research explicitly deals with sexuality. Earlier I mentioned that researchers of sexuality frequently experience sexualisation and stigmatisation. My interest in non-monogamy was not only taken as a ‘clue’ about my sexuality by other academics or acquaintances of mine, but also by some of my research partners. Even if they did not construct me as ‘morally suspect’ or depraved (apart from few exceptions), they occasionally saw me as an easy-going person who was potentially available. I assume that at least some people were unsure whether my call for interview partners for a research into nonmonogamy was nothing more than a cleverly coded sex advert. One male interview partner of mine, for example, stated explicitly in our first telephone conversation that he would be available ‘for an interview only’ – implying not for sex. I guess he felt the necessity to assert that sex would be excluded from our meeting, because he was not entirely sure about the character of my research. My interview partner Sting, too, told me in our first interview break that he had not been sure whether I really wanted to do ‘serious research’. I explained my project again, affirmed its academic character and pointed out that I did not wish to become 3 It is would be inappropriate to discuss sexuality here only from the perspective of ‘desire’. In particular female researchers have written extensively about their experiences of having been exposed to sexual harassment, threatening behaviour or sexual violence by men while doing fieldwork (Ronai 1990, Moreno 1998, Kitzinger 1994/1999). Of course, researchers, too, may harass female or male respondents.

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sexually involved with research participants. The fact that Sting decided to ignore what I said turned the interview session with him into an extremely exhausting and disturbing experience. Although I made it very clear that I did not want to have sex with him, Sting repeatedly transgressed my boundaries. Sitting next to me in his living room, he touched me several times and finally attempted more forcefully to push me down in a lying position on the settee. I left his house completely upset and unnerved. Sting did not let pass the opportunity to grab my backside even in the moment when I left through the front door. Let me explain at this point my position on sex in research situations. When I started to work on this project I took a conscious decision not to become sexually involved with my interview partners. This does not mean that I did not feel attracted to some of them. I took this decision because I felt my research relationships would be less complicated, less ambiguous and more focused this way. At this time one of my partners was also insisting on a more exclusive arrangement. The reasons for my cautious approach were manifold and in some regards quite personal. Yet I also hold the general point of view that sex with research participants involves a range of ethical problems. According to my perception these tend to be glossed over in the current literature on this topic. Some recent publications (primarily from within anthropology or ethnography) have highlighted the erotic dimension of doing field research (Whitehead and Conaway 1986, Kulick and Willson 1998, Lewin and Leap 1996a, Lominé 2000). Drawing on feminist concerns with gender and sexuality and the postcolonial critique of sexualised and racialised ‘othering’, this debate stages a discussion on sexual desire in the research process. The most important arguments in this debate can be summarised as follows. The disciplinary taboo on sexuality and eroticism in the research experience has to be challenged because it only serves the gendered double standard. Whereas transgressions of traditional research ethics by men are silently condoned, women have reported harsh sanctions by representatives of their discipline (cf. Dubisch 1998, Willson 1998, Gearing 1998). The power relations enacted in sexualised research relationships can only be scrutinised if the taboo on researchers’ sexual feelings and experiences is broken (Lewin and Leap 1996b, Kulick 1998). Some discussants claim that erotic subjectivity can also provide the source for potential, partial and situated knowledge (Kulick 1998, Newton 1993/1996, Wafer 1996). Others go so far to suggest that sexual and intimate relationships in the fieldwork period are extremely helpful to the research and may enhance new and different forms of knowledge (Bolton 1996, 1998, Williams 1996, Newton 1993/1996, partly rejected by Murray 1996). Although I have some sympathy with some of the arguments brought forward, I fear that some of important ethical concerns regarding sexualised research relationships are glossed over in this discussion. Certainly, the gendered double standard in academia should be challenged and tabooing sexuality in research settings does not help at all. Since I perceive eroticism as a pervasive dimension of experience which potentially structures all our relationships (the ones defined as non-sexual, too), an emphasis of erotic and sexual knowing subject may indeed work against the hegemonic Cartesian mind/body split. Furthermore, I do not doubt that sexual relationships have helped researchers to progress with their

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research, gain access, cultural competencies or to feel just a bit more comfortable and less lost or alone (Bolton 1996, 1998, Williams 1996, Newton 1993/1996, Blackwood 1998, Morton 1998, Gearing 1998). However, this cannot be our major criteria, if our concern is with the ethical dimension of sexualised research practices. It has been rightly pointed out that qualitative research can foster very close and intimate relationships that may develop into deep friendships. Whereas friendship has been rejected as a source for bias in traditional methodological paradigms, it has been re-evaluated in recent literature on methodology (Sayigh 1996, Oakley 1981). Researchers have been encouraged to value such friendship and to embrace it as an enabling factor in research. At the same time, such closeness and intimacy can open the doors for the potential disappointment of trusting interview partners, who shared their life stories and experiences (Patai 1991, Stacey 1991, Finch 1984/1999). Just like friendships, sexual encounters, too, create a socio-psychic space of vulnerability and are prone to being subsumed to an instrumentalising research strategy (Skamballis 1998). This issue is not sufficiently addressed in the current literature, which frequently idealistically hails sex as ‘the ultimate dissolution of boundaries between individuals’ (Bolton 1998: 140). Since good sex bridges differences and transcends boundaries in an act of ‘merging’, Bolton values sex as being conducive to ethnography’s ultimate aim of diminishing the distance between ethnographer and the cultural context they wish to explore. Ralph Bolton (1996, 1998) argues explicitly for the commensurability of his sexual involvement with informants with an ethical approach to his ethnographic research around HIV/AIDS in the gay male scene in Brussels. He describes his relationships as egalitarian and consensual. He claims that his insistence on safer sex in an environment where this was far from being the norm had an educational character that fostered the goals of the research (pp. 151–153). He further insists that he never had sex with his informants with the purpose of data collection. Without wanting to question Ralph Bolton’s well-meaning intention and sensitivity, I am not convinced that it is possible to disentangle the motivations for becoming sexually involved with a person in a research context so clearly. In parts of his discussion the interest in sex and knowing seems to be much more closely interwoven: Sexual behaviour is not easily observed, and I learned more through participation than by simple observation or direct interviewing. Moreover, information obtained post-coitally (except in the quickie encounters in public places), when people tend to relax and open up about their lives, was always richer, more from the heart and more revealing than the data gathered in a more detached manner. Once one has shared physical and emotional intimacy, sharing other knowledge about oneself seems easier (p. 149).

Sex and data-collection is not clearly separated in this quotation. Bolton ascribes ‘post-coital’ information a privileged epistemological status. The risk of subjecting sex or intimacy to an instrumentalising logic can never be fully precluded. The call on researchers to uncover their ‘erotic subjectivity’ is too easily channelled into a discourse which legitimises sexualised research practices and underestimates ethical concerns. I think the debate could gain a lot from looking at the arguments of the ethical implication of friendship in research contexts, which I have briefly touched upon earlier. This debate has brought about, to a much stronger degree, the complexity

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and ambiguity of the ethical issues involved – without setting up prescriptive rules about behaviour at the same time. In this chapter, I have described how my personal experience, political values and diverse identities have influenced the course of my research into non-monogamies. The research process is always affected by inter-subjective issues that are tied up with our socio-political positioning. I have provided the reader with some basic information on my motivations for embarking on this journey to explore nonmonogamy and for collecting the narratives, which I will present and discuss in the following chapters. I have directed attention to the manifold power relations which structure research practice in general and sexuality research in particular. The social divisions which over-determine and complicate research encounters (such as race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality) do also impinge on the dynamics in non-monogamous relationships. I will apply a similar mode of analysis (which is concerned with positionality in the context of intersecting fields of power) in my discussion of the dynamics of power in and around non-monogamous relationships. Discourses on non-monogamy and the subjectivities of people who position themselves in relation to them deploy sets of meaning that are simultaneously sexualised, gendered, classed and racialised. Their effect on bodies and identities cannot be comprehended through an engagement with any one single category of sociological analysis.

Chapter 3

Sex and Assimilation: Gay Male Non-monogamies and the Question of Equality

I think (...) the evidence suggests that monogamous men see that having promiscuous, open or other relationships is going to cause difficulty for us to acquire rights. But it comes down to those men seeking the approval of them being gay. (…) It comes back, it’s directly related to: ‘Why (…) do you care so much about how the wider community sees the gay community?’ There are so many sanctions made about the gay community, that we’re all promiscuous, yeah. Some of us are and some of us aren’t, that’s fine. (…) Why is the gay community too quick to turn round and say, (…) ‘We’re not all promiscuous’? Why are we too quick to turn round and do this? (…) It’s one of the biggest questions targeted at the gay community: We’re promiscuous and we have crap relationships. I’m sorry; I don’t think that’s true. ‘I am promiscuous, I have multiple partners and I have a very strong relationship. How does what I’m doing hurt you?’ If we could start to do that with half the criticisms that are levelled at us, we’d have a lot stronger voice in the community, because our own community is so divided on the issue. (…) A part of our community has a real problem with it (...) because they want the approval. (Andrew)

Andrew works for a HIV/AIDS organisation in London. In the quote above he reflects on his experiences of organising workshops on gay men’s relationships as part of a comprehensive gay-affirmative HIV-prevention strategy. In the course of my research I interviewed three professionals who run workshops for gay men on sexuality, intimacy and partnership for two different HIV/AIDS and counselling organisations in London. A few hundred gay men attended workshops organised by these two organisations alone every year. According to the experience of Andrew, Bruce and David, the question of (non)monogamy was close to the heart of the men who attended these workshops. They report that there was a significant row about the question of non-monogamy at every single workshop they organised. A significant number of participants aspired to nothing more than a monogamous and faithful long-term relationship. Many had a lot of resentment with regard to the ‘gay male scene’, which they perceived as promiscuous, over-sexed, shallow and ignorant towards the values of true partnership. Andrew suggests that what is at stake in these arguments about non-monogamy is not only an issue of personal disappointment or preferences, but a conflict about politics. If gay men in the workshops clash on the issue of ‘promiscuity’ they often negotiate divergent stances on the politics of ‘visibility’. According to Andrew, a lot of the problems some gay men have with non-monogamy result from a defensive

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political response to the ‘promiscuity’ allegations levelled against the gay male ‘community’. The assumption that gay men are promiscuous has been a salient feature of homophobic discourses since the inception of the concept of homosexuality in the 19th century. This chapter explores how anti-gay promiscuity discourses impact on popular and scientific knowledges of gay male relationships and sexual politics. The chapter falls into three major parts. In the first part, I analyse the context and the parameters of the representation of gay men as over-sexed and promiscuous. In the second part, I explore the dynamics of a conflict about non-monogamy in one of the focus group’s discussions. Some arguments against non-monogamy combine a politicisation of sexual ethics with an integrationist vision and assimilationist agenda. In the third part, I highlight the prominence of the (non)monogamy question in debates about the demand for same-sex marriage rights. I conclude the chapter with the suggestion that a theory of multiple and partially antagonistic gay public spheres, rather than the notion of a gay male community, is helpful to understand the persistence of conflicts about (non)monogamy in gay male politics. Metaphorical Constructions: Anti-gay Promiscuity Discourses The category of ‘homosexual’ emerged in the 19th century in a discursive shift from a moral or legal concern with ‘sinful’ or ‘indecent’ sexual acts to a new understanding, according to which homosexuals (alongside of a range of other ‘perverts’ or ‘degenerates’) were a distinct type of human being. The idea of ‘homosexuality’ as a deep personality trait was the result of a range of intersecting discourses which came to dominate the understanding and the practice prevalent in a range of professions, such as law, medicine, psychiatry and the newly emerging discipline of sexology (Weeks 1977/1990, Foucault 1990, Bristow 1997). These disciplines produced an authoritative discourse, according to which male and female homosexuality was fraught with moral deviation and sexual excess. Sexual stereotypes played a role of paramount importance in the construction of what Anne McClintock (1995) has called the ‘abjected groups’ of the Victorian bourgeois imagination. Historical research has shown that in the Victorian period, the discursive production of stereotypes regarding a deviant, perverted, excessive, or promiscuous sexuality was a common feature to the representation of homosexuals, racialised groups, and the working classes (Gilman 1985, Skeggs 1997, Somerville 2000). According to the research of Sander Gilman, Black bodies – and in the particular Black female bodies – were the primary symbols in 19th century iconography for sexualised deviance. However, the promiscuity allegation worked not only to downgrade Black people, but also the ‘lower’ classes and homosexual men and women. In this interconnected web of a moral economy of bodies, it is difficult to clearly disentangle the categories of race, gender, sexuality and class. The pathologisation and criminalisation of homosexuality was emblematic of a cultural dynamic that demanded the abjection of uninhibited sexuality and pleasure. Representing the ‘Other’ in sexualised terms was an efficient strategy to evoke the connotations of illness and moral deprivation (Gilman 1985). While 19th century sources attest to the stereotype of female homosexuals as being sexually uninhibited

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and aggressive, the discursive fusion of homosexuality and promiscuity has been more unequivocal with regard to male homosexuality. In both medical and popular texts, homosexuality was described as a contagious state of degeneracy, whose central focus was on an unrestricted transgressive sexuality. Even if the medical discourse on homosexuality shifted from a biological paradigm (degeneration, contagion or illness) to a psychological one (perversions, psycho-pathology), the association of male homosexuality with promiscuity persisted. Dominant representations of gayness have remained over-determined by an assumption of an excessive, contagious and promiscuous sexuality. In the common usage of the term, ‘promiscuity’ carries a range of negative connotations, such as indiscrimination, insatiability, irresponsibility and immaturity (Gove 2000). The fact that anti-promiscuity stereotypes are such an important element of anti-gay prejudice has complicated the communication of gay male non-monogamous knowledges and practices. It has contributed to a situation in which it appears to be problematic to claim non-monogamy as an integral part of gay male culture. Researchers committed to challenging homophobic sentiments have frequently seen their primary task in dispersing the myth that gay men are promiscuous and incapable of maintaining lasting intimate relationships. Most of the research into gay and lesbian relationships published since the late 1970s has aimed to challenge stereotypical representations of these relationships as pathological, unstable and non-egalitarian (cf. Carrington 1999). This effort went hand in hand with the demonstration that satisfying, egalitarian same-sex long-term couple relationships do in fact exist (Tuller 1988). At the same time, most research texts do acknowledge one major distinction between gay male and heterosexual relationships: the frequency of non-monogamous arrangements among gay male partners (Yip 1997, Weeks et al. 2001, for a good overview, see Weeks et al. 1996). According to a common pattern of argumentation gay male relationships are said to be healthy – even if non-monogamous. The ‘promiscuity’ allegation is usually countered by a focus on the couple relationship and an emphasis of the qualities of love, intimacy and commitment. Paradoxically, it has been in research motivated by the HIV/AIDS crisis that the full scope of diversity of gay male non-monogamies has entered social science discourse (Hickson et al. 1992, Weatherburn et al. 1992, Davies et al. 1993, Coxon 1995). However, due to its primary concern with epidemiology, this kind of work unfortunately lacks an engagement with the subtleties of meaning, language and the details of everyday practices (other than sexual ‘acts’). Other genres of writing and cultural production (such as film, theatre, novels, poetry, ’zines and pornography) rather than research literature therefore are more likely to describe gay male nonmonogamous culture in a more subtle manner (Gove 2000). HIV/AIDS and the Radicalisation of Anti-Promiscuity Discourses The AIDS crisis has triggered an enormous anti-gay backlash. Metaphorical constructions in government responses and public media discourses, of gay men as promiscuous disease carriers who pose a threat to the nation, mobilised and reinforced already existing anti-gay stereotypes (Watney 1987/1997, Chuter and Seidl 1987, McGrath 1994, Treichler 1987, Weeks 2000a). Public and medical discourses on AIDS

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established an intrinsic link between AIDS and gayness. The earliest acronym for the illness, introduced in 1981, was GRID (Gay-Related Immuno-Deficiency). Although this term was soon replaced by AIDS (Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome), since non-gay people, too, were affected by similar symptoms, the emergent moment of GRID continued to provide the frame for the popular understanding of the illness. According Simon Watney, homosexuality has been caught in a contagious discourse of blame, which ‘resolutely insists that the point of the emergence of the virus should be identified as its cause’ (Watney, quoted in Sharrock 1997: 358). The scientifically unsound representation of AIDS as a ‘contagious disease’ could be instrumentalised for the construction of gayness itself as a contagious disease (cf. Altman 1992, Weeks 1991a). The conflation of homosexuality with contagion mobilised resilient plague metaphors and promiscuity stereotypes derived from the 18th and 19th centuries in order to describe gay male cultures at the turn of the millennium. A similar mechanism works at the heart of the common equation of ‘high risk groups’ with ‘infected groups’. The category of ‘high risk groups’ emerged from early observations of the demographics of the evolving AIDS epidemic. Depending on the context a wide range of social groups was assigned to belong to this category: injecting drug users, Haitians (in the USA), haemophiliacs, prostitutes, gay men, bisexuals, African men and women (and – by extension – the sexual partners of all of these people). Critics raised their concern about the exclusive implications of this linguistic practice in which the notion of ‘being at risk’ was conflated with the stigma of ‘being diseased’. Drawing on racist, nationalist, sexist, classist and heterosexist discourses, the concept of ‘high risk’ groups has helped to construct a normal, innocent white and heterosexual national community in juxtaposition to diverse marginalised groups (Altman 1986, Cohen 1996, Cole 1996). Many pointed out that in the light of medical knowledge on HIV transmission, the category of ‘high risk group’ was misleading, because it is not sexual identity that puts people at risk, but the engagement in certain unprotected sexual behaviours.1 Promiscuity, and in particular gay male promiscuity, became the lynch pin in public media discourses on AIDS, too. By assuming sex to be a merely physical release or pleasure-seeking, gay men revealed promiscuity to be the foundation of their amoral natures. Many of my interview partners were only too aware of how promiscuity discourses are still instrumentalised in hegemonic politics of the anti-gay moral right. Patrick, a supporter of OutRage, complains about the demonising representation of gay men in British tabloids, which construct gay men as promiscuous agents of the AIDS epidemic: Patrick: Yeah, so many anti-gay campaigns are based on promiscuity. Nuts! I mean in that thing [referring to a recent tabloid article – C.K.] (…) it doesn’t mention promiscuity as such, but it implies promiscuity: ‘the homosexual mafia’, ‘perverted agenda’, ‘alternative lifestyles’, ‘sick perversions’, ‘a cult of death’. That’s the word: ‘Homosexuality is a Cult 1 Whereas the concept of ‘high risk groups’ was attacked by AIDS activists in the 1980s, some campaigning groups reassumed its usefulness in the early 1990s in conflicts about the allocation and distribution of funding. For some positions on this debate (which is generally referred to as the debate about the ‘de-gaying’ and ‘re-gaying’ of AIDS), see King (1993), Watney (1994), Bhatt and Lee (1997).

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of Death’! I mean that’s implying that we’re all going to shag each other senseless, infect everybody else and kill the entire nation. That’s what they’re implying. We are going to kill every single child in the world. (…) It is used by anti-gay campaigners, by the mass media, as a way of showing that we’re completely decadent. I don’t see what’s the problem. (...) A bit of decent decadence, there we go!

The ‘invention’ and promotion of safe sex by gay, lesbian and bisexual activists has been motivated by an attempt to respond to the epidemic through the adaptation of protective techniques and behaviours, rather than with a denouncement of sex and a return to monogamy and romanticism (Altman 1986, Patton 1985, Watney 1994). Douglas Crimp countered the raging anti-gay and anti-promiscuity sentiments of the day by crediting promiscuity as an important skill and cultural knowledge, which enabled gay men to find a realistic and pragmatic response to the epidemic ‘Gay male promiscuity should be seen (...) as a positive model’ he suggests in a famous essay, and that it is due to ‘the lack of promiscuity and its lessons’ in heterosexual culture ‘that many straight people will have a much harder time learning “how to have sex in an epidemic”’ (1987: 253). Promiscuity is described as a competence rather than a problem. According to Crimp, it stands for a collective skill, which has stimulated the most pragmatic and effective responses to the epidemic. Yet not all gay men saw it this way. The anti-gay backlash of the 1980s had its repercussions within the gay, lesbian and bisexual movements, too. AIDS, the Romantic Turn and Gay Male Conservatism Certain strands of gay activism have taken an increasingly inimical stance towards gay male promiscuity, public sex and party culture. Sexual ethics have always been contested in gay male and lesbian politics. However, conservative reactions to the homophobic backlash around HIV/AIDS worked with a narrative of ‘collective maturation’, according to which AIDS marked a turning point in gay male culture; a moment when gay men finally realised that they had to abandon their ‘hedonistic’ lifestyles (Patton 1998, Nardi 1997, Seidman 1992, 1997). A new gay male romanticism claimed its ethical superiority to the allegedly irresponsible tradition of 1970s gay male liberationism (Sullivan 1995, 1998, Signorile 1997, Rotello 1997). The divisions between ‘romanticist’ and ‘liberationist’ sexual ethics have led to serious clashes between different factions of the lesbian and gay movement, for example, over the question of the closure of gay male bathhouses in larger US cities (Schulman 1994, Dangerous Bedfellows 1996). Romantic values have become a high ranking item on the political agenda of gay male assimilationism. In intrasocial movement conflicts regarding ‘public sex’, gay male assimilationists have often allied themselves with a new gay male white middle class conservatism, which has gained influence throughout the 1980s (Pendleton 1996, Warner 1999). Kirk and Madsen’s (1989) revision of lesbian and gay politics in the book After the Ball provides a good example. The problem of discrimination, they argue, is rooted in the inappropriate behaviour of gay activists on the fringes. The rights of the ‘silent majority’ of gay men (lesbians are rarely mentioned in the text) are best secured by a politics of self-policing. Their infamous proposal of a ‘code of conduct’ demands of

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gay men not to show affection or to talk about sex in public and to verbally ‘punish’ the ones who do (p. 357). Similar conflicts about public sex have surfaced in the UK. Andrew Sullivan’s popular book Virtually Normal (1995) also caused significant debate in the UK. Some gay groups welcomed the introduction of CCTV surveillance of Russell Square in order to keep cruisers out of the area. Occasionally, angry accusations against indecent and promiscuous non-conformers appear in the gay press. In an article titled ‘Not in My Backyard’, Adrian Crouch (1999) airs his anger about gay men cruising in his neighbourhood in the Pink Paper. In drastic words Crouch describes the ‘morally reprehensible’ behaviour of his fellow gays: Try to explain to a 9-year-old child why three men are stripped naked and buggering each other stupid. Try defeating homophobic neighbours, who find semen filled condoms on their doorsteps. Try looking your mother in your face as you walk past an old man too arrogant to stop blowing some guy on a bike. It’s little wonder the majority of heterosexuals would prefer us back in the closet. I don’t blame them. (p. 12)

The cruisers are described as the invaders of a heterosexual family space and heterosexual middle class neighbourhood. The title ‘Not in My Backyard’ reinforces the impression of a militant middle class protectionism. Not entirely without threatening sub-tones, Crouch concludes his article with an appeal to his fellow gays at least to be discrete: ‘Otherwise you’ll get what you deserve, police attention and the continued bigotry of heterosexuals’ (p. 12). Crouch implies that gay men have to blame themselves for the continuing homophobia, because of their indecent sexual behaviour. He worries about the negative impact that public sex may have on the representation of gay men as a collectivity. His vision of ‘public sphere inclusion’ is turned into an assimilationist obligation on the parts of gay men: they have to behave themselves sexually if they ever want to gain recognition in wider society (Clark 2000). As I will demonstrate in the next section, at least some gay men participating in the focus groups have had similar concerns regarding gay male promiscuity. Debating Promiscuity in a Focus Group with Gay and Bisexual Men The gay and bisexual men who attended the focus group discussions held very different views on the question of non-monogamy. There were clearly divergent degrees of ‘understanding’ for (some) gay men wanting to engage in casual sex in each group setting. In some groups, casual sex was talked about as a taken-for-granted feature of the gay male lifestyle. In others, non-monogamy was subject to heated debates about ethics and politics. While in some groups people jokingly shared anecdotes about their experiences at public sex venues, in others the disclosure of some men to be non-monogamous appeared to be quite confessional. These differences between focus groups notwithstanding, ethics of public and casual sex were discussed controversially in all the focus groups. The group discussion with the men of The Inner Circle was strongly polarised along the opposition of monogamy versus promiscuity. Many discussants used the

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term ‘promiscuity’, irrespective of the speaker’s opinion on the question of nonmonogamy. Although the dominant discourse constructs promiscuity as stigma, its negative connotations are nevertheless not intrinsic to the term itself (Gove 2000). The arguments brought up for or against casual and recreational sex were personal, ethical and political. Neil was most vocal in condemning gay male promiscuity as damaging, irresponsible and immature. His argument starts with a quite personal reflection on his own life experience. Neil: I know that when I was younger I went through a stage when I was very, very promiscuous, I slept with hundreds of men. And if you’d talked to me at the time, I’d have talked about not following straight rules and stuff like that. But in reality what it was basically about was a lack of self-esteem and trying to think ‘oh the next person will make me feel good about myself’. (…) It was basically because of the fact that I had – this is just speaking personally – various problems to do with my childhood, which I was trying to fix or sort.

Neil concludes with some regret that he was wasting his time hanging out on the scene and not caring about his career or looking for solid friendship or partnership. From here Neil’s argument extends to a more general critique of gay male life. At this point his personal narrative taps into a discourse on gay male sexual culture which has strongly conservative overtones. Many gay men, he argues, abuse sex to avoid the ‘serious’ issues in life. This again forecloses the possibility of personal growth and development. Neil: I think when it comes to sex, a lot of people do choose to be permanent kids, and sometimes promiscuity can be part of (…) just being a teenager. There’s very few straight people in their thirties or their forties, who are in that frame of mind or state or really terribly interested in that frame of mind.

Serious adult relationships, Neil claims, are not about sex, but about intimacy, nurture and kindness and shared responsibilities. According to Neil, promiscuous and casual sex is immature and banal. Neil deploys elements of a discourse which is common in the popular literature on personal growth and self-help culture (Klesse 2007b). The normative effects of his arguments evolve around the values of intimacy and partnership, and an ideal work biography. However, there is also a political edge to his argument which centres on a concern with positive images. Neil: I think that if gay men want to be taken seriously by widestream society then we need to take ourselves seriously. (…) Why should you take a gay man seriously if he’s done lots of cruising and stuff like that. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do that, or that it shouldn’t be available to him (…) but I do think that one needs to think about how one presents oneself to family and friends.

Although Neil constructs his critique around the question of self-representation with regard to family and friends, his argument is also about the perception of gay men in ‘widestream society’. The obvious implication of his argument is that cruising gay men do political damage to the gay male community.

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Although Neil is challenged by some group members, he also finds significant support for his claims by other discussants. Bill is one of the few people in the group who are ready to defend promiscuity as a value in itself. Bill: And I think that it [that is, promiscuity – C.K.] has its positive aspects. Because as we become more accepted and more visible, then […] maybe we can teach that being more fluid about our relationships can be a positive thing, rather than just having the sort of ‘wife and two kids’ and a mortgage and a very sort of shutdown life. (...) But ordinary homosexuals break out. It’s one way… [to show] our difference, you know, we are more promiscuous (...) and we can teach. We can say ‘this is a way forward, be more open about relationships’.

Bill welcomes promiscuity as an important feature of gay male culture. His point of view is supported by Mark, who argues that the basic model for gay male relationships is derived from friendship. In its ideal form friendship is a non-exclusive relationship. The fact that gay male relationships have been conceptualised around the inherently ‘promiscuous’ friendship form has resulted in the emergence of specifically gay male collective forms of attachment and socialised practices of sexuality. Mark and Bill were the only participants who endorsed ‘promiscuity’ as a cultural value in its own right. Others welcomed the lack of binding relationship scripts as a unique feature of gay male culture in this moment of history, but refrained from any ethical comment on the question of non-monogamy per se. Most participants articulated views that could be described as different versions of a relativistic argument. For them both monogamy and non-monogamy were valid options. Neil’s and Bill’s positions clearly marked the outer poles of the spectrum of opinions in the group. At the same time they were the most vocal participants. Roland, who usually moderates the group, tried to reconcile the divergent views with a contingent defence of non-monogamy based on a commitment to the universal value of intimacy. I find it worthwhile to explore his position in more detail, since Roland seemed to manage to create some common sense in the debate based on position which embraced the values of both ‘sexual freedom’ (autonomy) and ‘love’ and ‘intimacy’ (bonding). Roland: Would we have more of a consensus – I don’t think we necessarily disagree (...) if we came back to the subject about (...) our emotional lives and about how we express that in our friendships and in our relationships with other people. So that when we say yes, you can have all sorts of patterns of relating to people sexually, but actually we are all yearning for places where we can exchange love, deep knowledge and deep mutual respect, the ability to have your thoughts reflected back to you by somebody that knows in depth and to find one’s own selfishness shown up by the fact that someone else, who’s around enough, that you can’t avoid it. Whereas if you’re dealing with lots and lots of different people at a low level, you’re still able to avoid, to some extent, commitment, growth and these sorts of things.

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Roland considers non-monogamy to be a valid option, as long as such a ‘lifestyle’ does not obstruct a person’s commitment to loving and stable relationships – the only kind of connection which may enable self-knowledge and personal growth. As discursive regimes or modalities of aesthetic attachment, intimacy discourses play a central part in the validation of sexual and relationship biographies. Within psychotherapeutic and psychological discourses, ‘intimacy’ is perceived as one of the most important humanist values in the context of interpersonal relationships. Lauren Berlant has suggested that the notion of the couple is implicated in most hegemonic understandings of intimacy as an emotional skill and value. ‘[D]esires for intimacy that bypass the couple or the life narrative it generates have no alternative plots, let alone few laws in which to clarify and cultivate them’ (1998: 295). Intimacy is generally presented as something that is impossible not to want. By capitalising on this universal appeal of intimacy, Roland manages to calm the storm of disagreement and to reconcile the polarised positions within the group. The centrality of intimacy in the debates about sexual ethics attests to its role as ‘a nodal point’ for the articulation of public opinions on sexual relationships and sexual acts (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). As a powerful asset in an interrelated regime of relational ideologies, the ability to claim that an ‘intimate relationship’ has been established has a significant impact on the question of whether such a relationship or encounter is perceived of being of any worth. Moreover, it has an effect on the question whether the person who engages in this relationship is considered to be a mature and decent citizen, whose voice in the political debate in public sphere should be taken seriously. The Same-sex Marriage Debates Over the last decades there has been a reorientation of the lesbian and gay political agenda away from a concern with identity and community to a politicisation of samesex relationships (Weeks et al. 2001). One feature of this emerging ‘relationship paradigm’ has been a tendency to incorporate the language of familialism in gay and lesbian political rhetoric and ideology (Weston 1991). The emergence of a lesbigay discourse on ‘families of choice’ indicates the engagement of queers in a battle over the meaning of family, kinship and relationships. The emergence of strong political campaign for legal recognition of same-sex partnerships and families in most Western countries is part of this wider cultural development. The question of whether legal recognition should take the form of civil marriage rights or access to civil union schemes has been a highly divisive issue in many movement contexts (cf. Sullivan 1997, Baird and Rosenbaum 1997, Wintemute and Andenœs 2000). A few countries currently afford same-sex unions the right to participate in marriage (Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands and Canada), but there has been significant development regarding either national or regional legislation about civil partnerships (Heaphy 2007). Mainstream campaigning groups have tended to put the demand for same-sex marriage high on the agenda of the struggle for civil equality. Authors like Andrew Sullivan have classed access to civil marriage as the ultimate criterion for full citizenship status. ‘The right to marry is understood as a given, almost definitional, of both human autonomy and political citizenship’ (1998: 75). On the basis of a

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definition of marriage rights as human rights, Sullivan reads the denial to gay men and lesbians to partake in this institution as ‘the most public affront possible to their public equality’ (1995: 179). Before the UK Civil Partnership Act 2004 (C.P.A.) came into force in December 2005 there were few provisions for same-sex relationships in UK legislation at all (Palmer 1995, Bailey-Harris 2001). The C.P.A. now provides a set of rights that come close to the ones tied to legal marriage (Glennon 2006). The debate about the introduction of the act was framed in a discourse according to which the C.P.A. is supposed to ‘promote and support stable relationships’ (Women and Equality Unit 2003) and realise a ‘parity of treatment’ (Baroness Scotland) between civil (same-sex) partners and married (heterosexual) spouses (Barker 2004, 2006). Although the act has been widely praised as a milestone in UK legislation on same-sex relationships, recent research indicates that many gay men and lesbians perceive civil partnership regulations (at least if conceptualised as special laws for same-sex partnerships) to fall short of establishing true equality in treatment (Clarke et al. 2006, Harding and Peel 2006). The experiences in other European countries which introduced civil partnership legislation (such as the Netherlands) provide reason to speculate that the struggle for full legal equality with the ultimate aim of obtaining civil marriage rights for same-sex couples to continue (Hegarty et al. 2006). Others have been critical of the act for different reasons. They argue that the codification of a romantic model of conjugality in the C.P.A. fails to embrace the full diversity of same-sex relationships. These critics suggest that the C.P.A. revolves around implicitly heteronormative relationship ideologies (Barker 2004, 2006). These voices indicate that intra-social movement tension, too, is likely to persist. Non-monogamy has been an important issue in the conflicts about marriage rights. Claims about gay male non-monogamy have permeated the arguments of both supporters and opponents of the demand for same-sex marriage rights. Marriage – A Civilising Institution? Apart from the stress of the civil or human rights aspect and an insistence on formal equality, many proponents of same-sex marriage have emphasised the cultural and socio-psychological benefits that marriage will bring for lesbians and gay men. Since marriage will provide role models, some argued that it will have traditionalising effects on gay and lesbian lifestyles. Some of these arguments are especially targeted at gay men. In particular, conservatives have tried to sell the idea of samesex marriage with the argument that marriage will ‘domesticate’ or ‘civilise’ gay men (Sullivan 1995, 1999, Rauch 1996/1997). Since the act of marriage signifies an endorsement of love, commitment and intimacy, marriage is said to open up a space for a deeply humanising experience for gay men. Marriage will provide an opportunity for gay men to reclaim their dignity by consciously turning away from idle hedonism and irresponsible promiscuity (Rotello 1997, Eskridge 1997, Signorile 1997). In the light of these arguments, marriage is presented as a means of moral and legal regulation of gay and lesbian culture. ‘Society has strong reasons to encourage the formation of stable domestic units by both heterosexual and homosexual couples’ suggests Martha Nussbaum, but ‘if gays cannot legally get married, their efforts to live in stable committed partnerships are discouraged, and a life of rootless or even

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promiscuous non-commitment is correspondingly encouraged’ (1999: 202–203). While Nussbaum values marriage as a soft tool of regulation through encouragement, Jonathan Rauch sees its value as a means within a politics of stigmatisation. ‘If gay marriage is recognized, single gay people over a certain age should not be surprised when they are disapproved or pitied. That is a vital part of what makes marriage work. It is stigma as social policy’ (Rauch, quoted by Warner 1999: 111). In both arguments marriage is construed as a strategy to regulate lesbian and gay relational and sexual cultures. Opponents have pointed out that a politics which seeks equality through access to an exclusive system of privileges will cause further marginalisation of the unmarried, the uncoupled and those more visibly defined by sex (Smith 1994a, Bell and Binnie 2000). You cannot embrace the cultural institution of marriage, argues Michael Warner (1999), without reifying the values of life-long commitment, monogamy, domesticity and love. The politics of same-sex marriage fosters conformity and inevitably works against relationship and family diversity (Browning 1996/1997, Card 1996, Rahman 1998). Some lesbian and queer feminists have taken a more optimistic stance on the impact of same-sex marriage practices on relationship and family diversity. They have argued that the participation of lesbians and gay men (and other queers) in the institution may counter the heteronormative notions of gender differentness at the heart of traditional marriage scripts (Hunter 1995b, Graff 1996/1997). According to this perspective, bringing gender dissidence into the cultural space of marriage will ultimately transform this institutionalised practice. However, these voices have remained marginal to the general debate. Most critics see marriage steeped in heterosexual gender ideology to a degree which makes it unrealistic to deconstruct its symbolism from ‘within’. They consider it much more likely that marriage rights will increase the pressure on cohabiting partners to marry. Marriage status for some translates into the continuing marginalisation of the ones who refuse to marry. The problem of recognition therefore persists. The Equality Argument As we have seen, not all proponents of same-marriage rights perceive marriage as a moral institution. The most common argument for same-sex marriage has been couched in the language of classical liberalism. According to the liberal paradigm, in order for gay men and lesbians to be considered equal, it is necessary for them to have the same rights as heterosexuals to marry their partners (Eskridge 2001). Opponents have rejected this approach as short sighted. Their critique usually works on two levels: (a) a rejection of a political approach of claiming rights and (b) a problematisation of marriage as a legal construct and cultural practice (Ettelbrick 1989/1997, Lehr 1999, Cooper 2001). The politics of claiming rights has been criticised for a variety of reasons. Firstly, such a strategy focuses too strongly on the state. Secondly, demands for radical change – if translated into legal discourse – are reframed as the claim for individualised entitlements. Thirdly, rights-based movements depend on acceptance by the majority and consequently may be ready to conform to dominant values or preserve structural power relations for strategic reasons. A political strategy calling

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for ‘rights under the law’ consequently forecloses more radical and transformative political strategies. Finally, claiming rights chimes in well with developing a political voice as a minority. Rights-based politics therefore reinforce essentialist notions of sexual identity (cf. Hunter 1995b, Rahman 1998, Jackson 1998). Critics have further argued that state-sanctioned marriage provides a regulative tool for the selective distribution of privileges, rights and benefits that create inequalities. State marriage results in gaining a wide range of material, social and personal privileges regarding personal taxation, social security benefits, national insurance, inheritance taxes, mutual financial obligation, rights of succession, property claims in the case of divorce, societal approval, access to procreative technologies, adoption, parental rights, and so on (Bailey-Harris 2001). Critics have pointed out that these rights and privileges should not be restricted to people in a particular relationship or family form. Many of these benefits could be granted either to individuals or they could be extended to a multiplicity of relationship or household forms (Schenk 2000, Rankine 1996/1997). Many have argued that the lesbian and gay movements are better advised to challenge the inequalities that derive from privileging certain relationship and family practices, rather than to embrace with marriage a particularly classed and racialised family ideal. From this perspective, marriage discourse is problematic since it is tied up with normative imageries of the nation (as a community made up of married white dual-headed families) and of ‘proper place’ (of the family home as the ultimate space of bourgeois domesticity and privacy) (Cooper 2001, cf. McClintock 1995, Stacey 1996). Marriage, Equality and Ambivalence The debate about marriage in the lesbian and gay movement has been very heated at times. Pro- and anti-marriage arguments have been strongly polarised and often tend to carry a significant amount of ideological ballast. Same-sex marriage appeared to be the most controversial issue in most of the focus group discussions. Yet my in-depth interviews with gay men interestingly produced a rather different picture. Although many respondents did not feel comfortable with the idea of marriage, few straightforwardly rejected the campaign for same-sex marriage as a political mistake. It was as if the militant critique of marriage that has been so forcefully argued in public political and academic discourse was absent in the reflections of gay men, most of whom have been committed to non-monogamous relationships for most of their lives. It was in particular against the backdrop of this feature of my sample that I was struck by the virtual absence of a critical discourse on the politics of ‘spousal recognition’ in my interview partners’ narratives. Their position is probably best described as ambivalent. In the following, I will demonstrate that this ambivalence results from the hegemonic influence of a liberal framework of rights in the current moment of sexual politics in Britain (cf. Barker 2006, Harding and Peel 2006). The most salient feature of my interview partners’ discussion of the politics of same-sex marriage was an endorsement of the value of equality. Christian: Do you think the campaign for gay and lesbian marriage is important?

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Rizwan: I think it is. (...) I think for me it’s about equality. It’s an equality issue. (…) We’re equal to all heterosexuals. Why can’t we have the same rights? (...) So, I think for me it’s about partnership, (...) about recognition through the law. Not necessarily through the Church, the Temple or the Mosques – just by law.

For Rizwan, formal equality in the sense of having the same rights as every heterosexual is the most important issue at stake in the marriage debate. Due to the strong anti-gay sentiments and the heterosexual and procreation-centred notion of marriage in most organised religions, Rizwan thought that the legal recognition of same-sex relationships will most likely take the form of partnership rights rather than of legal marriage. The introduction of C.P.A. shows that Rizwan was right on this point. Apart from the inhibition of a gay-rights agenda by organised religion, Rizwan suggested that it would certainly help the gay rights cause if more monogamous and stable gay male relationships were visible. Rizwan paired his demand for equal treatment with a normative appeal to other gay men to present or conduct their relationships in a particular way. Other interviewees were much more wary of such a normalising twist at the heart of the same-sex marriage campaign. However, most of them were ready to subordinate their concerns to their firm commitment to the value of equality. Bommi, for example, believes that being gay or bisexual opens up a space for non-conforming lifestyles. After having experimented with alternate ways of being in relationships, first as a bisexual, and later as a gay-identified man, all his adult life, marriage appears too be too limited to provide an attractive option. That notwithstanding, having the choice to get married, for Bommi, symbolises the central value of equality: Bommi: I think you need to separate conforming from equality. I mean, I’m very much about having equality in my workplace and pension rights and travel rights (...) Equality (…) the ability to be able to get married if I chose to, would be important. I don’t think I would take up the option of marriage now. And that’s partly about the lifestyle. The whole point about being gay is that you haven’t got to conform to society. You haven’t got to get married, you haven’t got to have kids, you haven’t got to take on, as a man, a dominant role, you can be passive with another man and … so in that sense, I don’t like conforming.

Many gay men in my study clearly rejected the idea of same-sex marriage. They often saw marriage as an intrinsically heterosexual institution. The aspiration to marry would undermine gay men’s difference. It would mean copying heterosexual lifestyles and values. In a rather different vein, some men, who called strong religious values their own, argued that marriage was not made for gays. Paulo, who is proud of his traditional values informed by Portuguese Catholicism, argues that the institution of marriage is based on reproduction. Because he does not morally approve of samesex couples striving for reproduction or parenting, gay men should not seek the right to marry. Paulo’s commitment to equality is compromised by his identification with a particular set of Catholic cultural values. The discussion group with South-Asian gay and bisexual men from Matai primarily explored same-sex marriage from within the paradigm of religious values, in particular with regard to Sikhism and Islam. From a Sikh perspective, Wijai argued that marriage is a sacred institution. Because

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homosexuality would fall outside of the morality circumscribed by this religion, gay men should neither want to marry, nor follow religion. Wijai’s position was highly controversial and several men contested his thesis of an irreconcilability of religion with homosexuality. Although some of the young men in the focus group described a life as an out-gay man as a valid option for themselves, few considered it a possibility that same-sex marriage could find approval in an explicitly religious context in the near future.2 This debate attests to the conflation of marriage with religious values in different cultural contexts. At the same time, this fusion of marriage with religious meanings is a reason for secular, agnostic or atheistic gay men and lesbians to reject marriage as a personal option, too (Clarke et al. 2006). Matthew insists on the necessity of clearly disentangling the legal dimension of marriage from its religious or cultural connotations. He asserts that it is necessary for society to legally recognise same-sex partnerships. At the same time he does not want gay men and lesbians to take on the traditional and religious values that are associated with this institution. Matthew: I think what’s important is partnership. (…) For me marriage isn’t really an issue. (…) I would like lesbian and gay partnerships to be legally recognised in areas such as inheritance and pensions, partnership rights. And … I don’t feel we necessarily need to copy or become part of heterosexual marriage (...) Well I guess there’s two aspects of it. There’s the religious aspect, religious in the sort of traditional aspect. And then there’s the legal aspect. And, erm … I don’t feel the need to share in the religious and traditional aspects of it.

The majority of the gay men, who saw marriage as an essentially heterosexual or out-moded institution, favoured the option of civil partnership rights outside the frame of marriage. They suggest that same-sex marriage is by far not the only strategy for gaining legal recognition and associated rights and benefits for samesex relationships. Apart from same-sex marriage the major legal alternatives have been described as (a) the ‘opt-in’ system of a registered partnership with defined consequences in certain areas of law or (b) a statute-defined qualifying relationship which usually is conceptualised either around the cohabitation model (‘living together as ...’) or around a definition that does not imply the need for a sexual 2 The main concern in this focus group session was with heterosexual or other-sex marriage. Most of the young men found themselves confronted with the expectation of their families to get married to a female partner. Many found it difficult, if not impossible, to refuse marriage or to disclose their sexual identities. Some of my interview partners, such as Ali and Irfan, talked about having been threatened or physically abused by family members when they were suspected or found out to be gay. ‘Getting married is a family obligation or duty. To not marry is to “defy the expectations of family and community”’, argue Patel and Maharaj (2000). Since in South Asian diasporic cultures the family trends to be positioned differently with regard to the public/private distinction, coming out and/or the refusal to marry may not only result in being ostracised within the family (‘the private sphere’), but also in the wider ‘community’ (the ‘public sphere’). Against the backdrop of these cultural dilemmas, most South Asian men in my study came up with a distinctive perspective on the same-sex marriage debate. See also Safra Project (2003) with regard to lesbian and bisexual Muslim women’s issues related to marriage.

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relationship (for example, ‘associated person’, ‘home sharer’ or ‘close personal relationship’) (Bailey-Harris 2001: 607, Eskridge 2001). Proponents of same-sex marriage rights often describe such options as poor alternatives that ultimately perpetuate the exclusion of same-sex partners from one of the most valued institutions of society. Furthermore, if constricted to same-sex partners, such laws may result in specialist laws establishing a second-class marriage for queers.3 By contrast, others have argued that a demand for access to registered partnerships or statute-defined qualifying relationships for all (irrespective of gendered partner choice) creates the opportunity for fruitful political alliances with those heterosexuals who are critical of marriage (Cooper 2001, cf. VanEvery 1995). Some of my interview partners are very well aware of the fact that most registered partnership models lay out qualifying criteria that effectively exclude their own partnership(s) from any (future) provisions. Patrick: I think it would be nice to have that option (…) it wouldn’t be an option for Boris and I, because any partnership rights (…) would be based on people having lived together as partners for a certain amount of time (...). So it’s not an option for us, but I do think there is a case for … partnership rights. I mean even for basic things like succession of property (…) And up until gay partnerships are recognised in that respect, there still won’t be equality. I do think that if we were living together as a couple, we would like to have partnership rights. But we’re not so… it just wouldn’t enter into the equation.

Patrick does not believe that he will gain any partnership rights for his ten-year relationship with his partner, with whom he has never cohabited. Moreover, most proposals for statute-defined qualifying relationships tend to privilege the couple form. Even the ‘Unmarried Partners Act’ proposed by the more radical campaigning group OutRage! suggests limiting provisions, entitlements and obligations to two people, that is, the couple unit (Tatchell 1999, 2000). It struck me that none of my gay male interview partners criticised the normativity of the couple form at the heart of the campaign for same-sex partnership rights. This may be due to the fact that all gay men in my sample were either single or part of a non-monogamous couple arrangement (rather than a multiple partner network) at the time of the interview. As I will show in the next chapter, people who described themselves as polyamorous were much more likely to reject the ‘compulsory monogamy’ at the heart of most proposals for the legislation of same-sex relationships. Let me briefly summarise my discussion so far. Although few of my gay male interview partners envisioned living in married same-sex relationships themselves, all of them expected the state to provide legal protection and legal support for same-sex partnerships. At the same time, most of them had ambivalent feelings about the idea of same-sex marriage. Although many considered samesex marriage as an assimilationist cultural practice, they defended the demand for marriage rights as a principle of an uncompromised legal equality. My findings are very much in tune with those of Jeffrey Weeks, Brian Heaphy and Katherine Donovan (2001). Most respondents in their study equated same-sex marriage with 3 Harding and Peel’s (2006) multi-national online survey suggests that such a position is particularly prominent in the USA.

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assimilation, perceived it to be a hetero-patriarchal state-sanctioned institution or feared that the legislation of same-sex marriage would reinforce the discrimination of non-married relationships or would have preferred a legislation which does not constrict the transferral of rights to conjugal partners. My respondents, too, were ready to subordinate their worries about a normative politics of privilege to a principled demand for formal equality. Their dilemma is illustrative of the current hegemony in sexual politics of a form of political rationality which is derived from a liberal philosophy of rights. Deconstructing Community Recent research has emphasised the significance of the concept community for understanding gay male relationships and sexual cultures. Drawing on the theoretical work of Mark Blasius, Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan (2001) argue that ‘community knowledges’ are vital resources for gay men and lesbians to construct their relationships against the grain of heteronormative hegemony. Blasius (1994) claims that gay men’s and lesbians’ life practices are inspired by a ‘gay and lesbian ethos’ which evolves around the questions ‘How shall we live?’ and ‘What relationships shall we have?’. This lesbian and gay ethos is both public and collective in that it is based on the act of ‘coming out’, which he sees as the foundation of the lesbian and gay community. According to Blasius, this ethos presents itself as a form of community knowledge, which enables gay men and lesbians to choose a particular lifestyle based on autonomy, choice, informed consent and egalitarianism. There are a variety of problems with this thesis. Blasius does not consider that gay men and lesbians may have multiple identities (based on culture, race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexual tastes), a fact which ultimately complicates the notion of a shared commitment to a homogeneous set of cultural practices and ethical orientations. Blasius’ theory rests on a disavowal of differences among and between gay men and lesbians (Young 1997). The conflicts about non-monogamy and the battles about the rights and wrongs of a politics of same-sex marriage that I have discussed throughout this chapter are at odds with the assumption of any consensus regarding the question ‘How shall we life?’. The notion of a ‘community ethos’ obscures rather than highlights the diversity of experience, multiplicity of political voices, and prevalence of conflicts articulated in gay male spaces. Moreover, it rests on an utterly idealistic assumption regarding the role of community in queer people’s lives. Blasius claims that the lesbian and gay community is not created through exclusion and control. He insists that the lesbian and gay ethos is essentially different from the authoritarian self-policing codes promoted by Kirk and Madsen (1989) in their political manifesto After the Ball. This is implausible since Kirk and Madsen explicitly couch their plea to stop other gay men from behaving ‘indecently’ in public as a concern with the perception of the ‘gay community’ in the wider public (pp. 348–353, cf. Clarke 2000). If the gay community ever wants to gain reputation with the straight majority, they argue, it will have to conform to mainstream cultural values. Because the problem is seen to come from the fringes, the gay community has to purify itself for the sake of acceptance. The appeal to a ‘gay community ethos’ is central to their positive images campaign.

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I do not deny that the concept of community has been extremely influential in the sexual politics of the gay, lesbian and bisexual movements (cf. Altman 1971, Weeks 1977/1990, 2000c). The concept of community has provided a powerful language for self-identification, belonging, cultural vision and solidarity. However, at the same time community processes also stand for social, moral and political pressure, control and exclusion (Young 1990b, Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992). My interview partners applied the term ‘community’ to a broad variety of social and cultural contexts. The communities they referred to ranged from groups formed around religion, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, sexual tastes and preferences, political movements, college mates, subcultural styles and musical trends. People often felt part of or moved in the discursive context of different (partly overlapping and partly antagonistic) ‘communities’ or cultural contexts. In many cases people felt that the values, lifestyles and identities that are favoured in one of these social contexts stand in opposition to the cultural norms and practices in others. Many found themselves negotiating either for themselves or with their partners, lovers, friends, co-activists and (sometimes) families the diverse moralities, life plans and political and cultural visions that are circulated within and across the boundaries of these different ‘communities’ (cf. Erel 2007). Irfan is particularly critical of the pressures around notions of authenticity and the exclusive regulation of boundaries that are associated with claiming communities based on identity. His scepticism towards communities emerges from his experience of being a part of various minorities. Christian: Do you feel that you are part of any communities or of some sexual community? Irfan: Of a community? Erm … I don’t really feel I associate myself with any one particular community. (…) I’m sure everybody’s unique, but I feel very … I’m Asian and in a really white culture. I’m Muslim and in a Christian country. I’m gay and living in a heterosexual society. I’m Scottish and living in England. Erm … and even in my profession, 80% are female. So I’ve always really been in a minority. (…) I’ve never really had that sense of wanting to have to belong to some place. (…) But belonging to a community? I would say that I feel I belong to the gay Muslim community, the gay Muslim Pakistani community. Yeah, I belong to the gay Pakistani Muslim community, as I do to the straight Pakistani Muslim community, or the Muslim community, or the community of physiotherapists or, you know, to the community of men. But I’ve never really associated myself with the gay scene as such. (...) Being part of the community for me is not something important.

Irfan foregrounds the ambivalent role of ‘communities’ in his life. He discusses in detail his difficulties with the Pakistani and the South-Asian communities in Britain. His major concern is what he perceives as a pronounced homophobia that pervades British South Asian diaspora space. Only recently he has found a place for himself in this context through his involvement with Al-Fatiha – a LGBTQ Muslim group. He further explains his distance to the gay male community with the strong Islamophobia he has experienced as an out-Muslim gay man among gay people (Haritaworn and Tauquir 2007, Puar 2006). Racism in the gay and lesbian scene has been a salient issue for all racial and ethnic minority gay men I have interviewed in the course of

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my research. Rizwan, a South Asian interview partner, who is working for a gay organisation, describes his experiences as follows: Rizwan: Let’s talk about how I’ve seen racism in the gay community. (…) When I first came onto the gay scene people saw me as someone, who is passive, who wouldn’t talk much, who was very exotic, and (…) they could tell their friends that they’d had a Paki boy, yeah? That’s racist. (...) I mean you only need to look downstairs [his workplace – C.K.] (…) Although, I mean for me, I (...) don’t want to notice it, but you can see that I’m the only Asian worker, who works here. I am the only Black worker. But you can see the white men looking at me and thinking ‘what’s this Paki doing here and why has he got our job’ and all this? [laughs] (…) They don’t say it, but you can feel it. You can feel it.

The pervasive racism and white cultural hegemony definitely marks the limits of the gay community discourse for Rizwan (and for many other racial or ethnic minority research participants) (cf. Ng 1997, Tagaki 1996, Gopinath 1996, Puar 1998). Rizwan is rather annoyed when I ask him whether he feels part of a gay community. Reminding me that the appropriate question to ask would have been which part of the community he would feel close to, Rizwan affirms his racial and cultural identity as a South Asian gay man. Apart from that, Rizwan is extremely sceptical of the concept community in general. ‘What’s a community?’ he turns back at me several times during the interview. Of course, the meaning attached to the term ‘community‘ differs according to the understanding of the individual using it. Its concrete application to the social and cultural networks of larger sexual movements such as in the ‘lesbian and gay community’, the ‘bisexual community’, the ‘queer community’, the ‘Black lesbian and gay community’, the ‘South Asian lesbian and gay community’, the ‘Jewish lesbian and gay community’ or the ‘Muslim queer community’, and so on, evokes a whole set of distinctive connotations regarding the respective collectivity. Partly, these hidden meanings refer to the question of the boundaries of the community, that is, questions of belonging or non-belonging and the nature of the relationships to other groups, collectivities or movements. Where to draw the boundaries of a particular community has created continuous conflict in probably all the social movements around gender and sexuality.4 ‘Community’ is a loaded term. In particular in Britain it has been imbued with the ideologies of official multiculturalism that have reproduced culturalist stereotypes about racialised/ethnicised groupings throughout the last decades (cf. Sahgal and Yuval-Davis 1992, Patel 1999). With both regard to race and sexuality, the term ‘community’ is charged with problems of assumptions of organic wholeness and homogeneity (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992, Young 1990b). There are a variety of shortcomings of the community discourse: It cannot take account of the diverse social positioning and multiple identities of the people who associate themselves 4 With regard to the exclusive processes around race/ethnicity, some have suggested forging sexual communities around diasporic identities (Ratti 1993). Others, for example Jasbir Puar (1998), have less enthusiasm about the attempts to create transnational queer diaspora affiliations. The concept of diaspora, too, Puar cautions, can easily be associated with nationalist politics or foster cultural hegemonies (cf. Gopinath 1996, 2005).

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with gay movements. Many gay men think of themselves as being affiliated with different communities, each of which may have its own internal divisions and boundary conflicts. Moreover, since the term ‘community’ suggests shared interest and close affinity, it has a tendency to obscure antagonism, conflict, internal divisions, hierarchies and hegemonic domination. This is why I perceive a concept of multiple public spheres, which I developed in Chapter 2, as being more suitable for theorising these dimensions of sexual politics. Even if attacks on gay men’s ‘promiscuity’ or public sex may consciously appeal to ‘the community’, this discourse is ultimately governed by assumptions on how political inclusion works within public sphere contexts. As I argue throughout this book, public sphere theory may therefore be more useful to decipher the terms of politicised discourses on non-monogamy. The next chapter will explore how the spectre of promiscuity preoccupies bisexual identities and politics. Debates about non-monogamy in bisexual politics, too, are frequently concerned with the question which shape the emerging bisexual public sphere is going to take – and which impact this may have for a politics of integration and recognition.

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Chapter 4

Gender Troubles: Bisexuality and Non-monogamy

Well, you see I don’t see anything wrong with being married to more than one partner and having other partners that I’m not married to, because it’s from the idea (…) [of] taking each relationship on its own merits and doing with each person what feels right. And certainly at the moment it would feel right for me to be married to Charles, but it wouldn’t feel right for me to be married to Sam because my life isn’t intermingled with him enough. Whereas, say with Silvia, if things work out with her, we could end up all living together (...) and then we might be in some kind of 4-way marriage, that sort of thing. So I don’t see there being inherently a contradiction. It’s just that the push towards [marriage] by gay and lesbian groups at the moment, is very much, ‘Look, we’re normal, we’re just the same as you, but we love people of our own sex’, and you know, going towards the marriage with kids and a dog and a table from IKEA ideal (...) Because people can’t see having more than one relationship without someone being hurt. That’s the problem. If people could see that, it would be very much easier. (Marianne)

Research into bisexual relationships in the UK is scarce (George 1993, 2002). US-based research suggests the relatively high frequency of non-monogamous relationship arrangements among bisexual-identified men and women (cf. Blumstein and Schwartz 1983, Lever et al. 1992/2000, Rust 1996, Rodríguez Rust 2000c, Weinberg et al. 1994). Bisexual non-monogamies are extremely diverse. Nonmonogamous relationships and families differ in terms of numbers of partners, degrees of closeness and commitment, legal relationship status, constellations of genders, social identities, household forms, parenting arrangements, and so on. Relationship forms include open couple relationships, polyamorous or polyfidelitious relationships, casual sexual encounters, swinger partners, fuck buddies, cuddle buddies, sexual friendships, open marriages and group marriages, among others (cf. Hutchins 1996, Pallotta-Chiarolli 1995, Paul 1997). The frequency and complexity of bisexual non-monogamies is one way to explain the existence of an intensive and lively debate about non-monogamy in the bisexual movement. In this chapter I explore a range of further explanations for this phenomenon. I begin with an analysis of how bisexual men’s and women’s non-monogamous relationships are framed in dominant discourses on bisexuality. I further explore lines of conflict in movement debates about non-monogamy and link them to an analysis of bisexual politics and modes of community conceptualisation. In this context I also deal with positions on same-sex and other-sex marriage. My overall concern is with the normative aspects of the discourses articulated in these debates.

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The Construction of Bisexuality and Non-monogamy Non-monogamy is a troubling issue for many bisexuals, because dominant discourse constructs bisexuals as non-monogamous by necessity. The assumption that bisexuals have to be non-monogamous or promiscuous flows from the traditional Western construction of sexuality in a dualistic scheme. If homosexuality and heterosexuality (thought as opposites) are perceived as the only ‘real’ and valid forms of sexual orientation, then bisexuality can only be thought of as a ‘mixed’ form of sexuality consisting in parts of homosexuality and heterosexuality (cf. Däumer 1992, Ault 1996/1999, Rordríguez Rust 2000c). The homosexual and the heterosexual ‘sides’ of an individual are perceived to be in permanent or at least potential conflict (Rust 1996). Marianne, one of my interview partners, argued that the dominant definition of bisexuality demands people to be, at any particular time, behaviourally or actively bisexual. According to this discourse, people can only call themselves to be truly bisexual if they maintain relationships with people of both male and female genders at the same time. Consequently, authentic bisexuality is only possible in the context of a non-monogamous life practice. Marianne: And you know, people either think that if you’re bisexual, you automatically want to have more than one partner. There are a lot of people who have trouble with the idea of having a monogamous bisexual, and it all depends on the definition of being actively bisexual. Some people say you can only be actively bisexual if you have a partner of each gender. But most of us think that’s a load of rubbish.

Although Marianne claims that many bisexuals in the movement would reject this definition, I have gained the impression that it still has quite a strong hold among many self-identified bisexuals. In group discussions at the Bisexual Conferences (BiCons) which I attended, several people declared that they would find it difficult to maintain a bisexual identity if they did not have concurrent relationships with people of both male and female genders. Monogamy with a partner of either sex tends to destabilise (certain) bisexual identity narratives (cf. Eadie 1996). Some research suggests that identity problems are particularly pronounced in the case of the absence of same-sex relationships in bisexuals’ lives (Blumstein and Schwartz 1977/2000, Hüsers and König 1995). The HIV/AIDS epidemic has reinforced the stereotype of bisexual promiscuity. In different sets of discourses both (behavioural) bisexual men and women have been constructed as ‘disease carriers’ that are responsible for spreading the virus from (high) risk groups to other ‘communities’. From the mid-1980s onwards, increasing worries about the possibilities of a ‘heterosexual AIDS epidemic’ fed into the representation of bisexual-identified men and non-disclosing MSM (Men who have Sex with Men) as the vectors of transmission between the ‘gay male community’ and the heterosexual population (cf. King 1993, Weinberg et al. 1994, Rodríguez Rust 2000a). The association of risk with particular gender and sexual identities (male and gay/bisexual) also influenced many bisexual men’s decisions with whom to practice safer sex or with whom to have sex at all (Boulton et al. 1996, Stokes et al. 1996, Davis et al. 1996). Risk perception regarding the likelihood of HIV transmission also affected the ways bisexual women have been framed in lesbian

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AIDS discourses. The representation of lesbian sex as being principally safe – even without protective measures – provided the backdrop to a construction of bisexual women as a threat in that they might introduce HIV to a not-yet-affected lesbian population (Gorna 1996, Wilton 1997, Richardson 1987, 2000). The assumption that bisexual women would not take (sufficient) precautions in protecting themselves from the risk of HIV transmission is part of this imagery. Yet my interviews suggest that bisexual women do discuss HIV/AIDS and safer sex with their sexual partners and with friends and acquaintances in their wider social and sexual networks. Cath, who first came out during the heyday of the AIDS epidemic in the USA, stresses that safer sex is not only assumed, but openly discussed in the queer- and bi-identified scenes she affiliates with. She quotes a friend of hers, who kept saying: ‘I am part of the generation for which the hottest sound of the world is the snap of latex glove!’ Franca relates the story that she had to push a non-understanding medical professional at a sexual health clinic in London quite hard to supply her with gratis latex gloves, rather than simply with condoms, since condoms only would not provide sufficient protection for HIV transmission in the wide range of erotic practices she engages in. However, the association of bisexuality with an increased risk of HIV infection is only one trope in a complex set of discourses on bisexual non-monogamy. The hegemonic definition of bisexuality as essentially non-monogamous affects bisexuals in many different ways and presents one of the most pervasive anti-bisexual stereotypes. The Gendered ‘Double Standard’ and Differentialist Promiscuity Discourses Theories of biphobia tend to identify the assumption that bisexual men and women are promiscuous as an important trope in anti-bisexual discourses (Hansen and Evans 1985, Rust 1996, Udis-Kessler 1996). Robyn Ochs (1996, 2000) defines biphobia as prejudiced behaviour, discrimination and marginalisation. Like homophobia, biphobia draws on a set of stereotypes. A heightened sexuality, including essential non-monogamy or promiscuity, is a strong feature of biphobic discourses. The theorisation of promiscuity stereotypes within theories of biphobia usually does not pay very much attention to the fact that different people (depending on their bodies, identities and group associations) are affected differentially by stigmatisation through promiscuity discourses. As I have shown elsewhere in more detail, the specific meaning of the term ‘promiscuity’ is strongly determined by context, with the social location of both addressee and the person using the label being of high importance (Klesse 2005, cf. LeMoncheck 1997). Accusing a person of being promiscuous is part and parcel of a highly gendered, classed and racialised discourse on sexuality. Although certain masculinities, too, have been subjected to differentialist promiscuity allegations, it is due to the nuanced prominence of gender in anti-promiscuity discourses that I will focus in my discussion on the effects of such discourses on women’s lives. Feminists have highlighted that women are particularly vulnerable to the strategic deployment of anti-promiscuity discourses. Within the context of a ‘double standard’ of sexual morality, promiscuity discourses play a central role in controlling and policing women’s sexual behaviour and identities. The deployment of labels

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such as ‘promiscuous’, ‘slut’, ‘slag’ or ‘whore’ activates associations of impurity, unchastity and dishonour and functions as an attack on women’s reputations (cf. Wolf 1997, Holland et al. 1998, Cowie and Lees 1987, Lees 1993, Pheterson 1986). The promiscuity accusation is deployed to render offensive and unacceptable any form of female sexuality that does not subject to men’s desire to control. Often it aims to legitimise male sexual violence and abuse (Tanenbaum 1999, Edwards 1981, Smart 1987, 1995). Because women play a significant role as cultural symbols in the representation of the ‘nation’, ‘race’ or ‘community’, women’s sexual behaviour has been policed for the sake of interest-bound nationalist, ethnic or racial projects (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989, Yuval-Davis 1997, Cohen 1996). Furthermore, the cultural values promoted within religious discourses and movements often tend to discourage female sexual autonomy and agency (Herman 1997, Buss and Herman 2003, Sahgal and Yuval-Davis 1992, Bhatt 1997). Although any woman may be subjected to promiscuity discourses, they have historically been most frequently used against particular groups of women. Material power relationships and the interplay of discourses on gender, race/ethnicity and class in the construction of sexualities have led to a particular strong sexualisation of black and other racialised femininities (Marshall 1994, Bhattacharyya 1997, Willey 2006). Similarly, in the imaginary of dominant groups, Jewish women and working class women have been represented as being sexually immoral and transgressive (Theweleit 1978, Peiss 1983, Pheterson 1986). Female Bisexual Non-monogamies, Agency and Constraint The sexualisation of bisexual women in biphobic representation has material effects in women’s lives. Sharon explains that she often avoids coming out as bisexual to straight men, because she has had the experience that this could result in her sexualisation in the eyes of these men (cf. George 1993, Garber 1995, Wilkins 2004, Sheff 2005, 2006). She refers to this phenomenon as the ‘Hot Bi Babe syndrome’: Whereas heterosexual men frequently react with rampant homophobia if they learn about male acquaintances’ bisexuality, many men are enticed by the knowledge of women’s bisexuality, Sharon explains. They perceive them as easy prey, assume their sexual availability, and start to harass. Communicating female bisexual identity thus is complicated by the association of bisexuality with non-monogamy. Because Sharon’s desire is multiply stigmatised in that she identifies as bisexual, nonmonogamous and S/M, she feels that she has to be even more cautious about which aspects of her sexuality she can safely disclose in certain contexts. Even though Sharon has not been out at work, colleagues have bullied her for her libertarian and anti-homophobic views. Most women complained about the sexual double standard. At the same time, they were adamant that they were not willing to let external expectations determine their personal life choices. When I ask Caroline whether these ‘external expectations’ would make it more difficult for her to maintain a non-monogamous lifestyle, she just laughs and replies: ‘Personally no, no. I’m quite good at doing things differently from the rest of the world!’. Similarly, Marianne argues that despite the dominant gendered constructions of sexuality, she does not ‘feel obliged’ to meet anyone’s

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expectations. Despite her personal experiences of being stereotyped as promiscuous, she does not see any gender issues in her personal relationship lives. Caroline and Marianne assert their agency and autonomy against these sexist discourses and pressures. I found it striking that although both women criticise sexism in wider society, they clearly exempt their personal and political environment from this critique. With regard to these social environments, their position can be interpreted as post-feminist in that it assumes that the critique of feminism has restructured sexual ethics and shifted the relation of power between gender at least in certain societal ‘pockets’ – such as the bisexual, polyamorous or queer scenes (Brooks 1997, Haas 2006, Klesse 2006b) Cath contradicts such a point of view. She points out that, in particular, women who identify themselves as non-monogamous tend to be approached for sex by bisexual men in inappropriate social contexts, such as political meetings, and so on. Cath: Especially the fairly young in the community, (...) walking into that awesome bisexual polyamory thing, (...) for the bisexual women there are great stereotypes. And being identified as non-monogamous, inappropriate partners come to speak to me, surely, you know people, who have no connection to me at all and wonder if I want to sleep with them. And that’s something that I’ve heard in X-town from a large number of women, who just get hit on all the time, by men – bisexuals, because (...) that’s part of it: ‘we’re non-monogamous’.

According to Cath, being identified as non-monogamous reinforces bisexual women’s sexualisation irrespective of context and personal relationship. Cath’s critique highlights that the gendered construction of bisexuality in highly sexualised terms translates into specific power dynamics between men and women in bisexual movement spaces. Political Lesbianism and Female Bisexual Non-monogamy The hegemonic linkage of bisexuality with non-monogamy has specific effects on the representation of bisexual women in certain lesbian feminist discourses. Particular variants of political lesbianism that grew out of radical feminism undermined the viability of bisexual feminist positions.1 While in theory it should have been possible for bisexual-identified women to claim a place on the ‘lesbian continuum’, the orthodoxy of political lesbianism demanded to entirely dismiss intimate or sexual relationships with men (cf. Onlywomen Press 1981, Wilkinson 1996). However, irrespective of sexual practice, already the insistence of women to identify as bisexual was enough to call into question their integrity and commitment to lesbian feminism (cf. Gregory 1983, Udis-Kessler 1996, Rust 1995, Stein 1997). These developments have continued to render problematic the participation of bisexual women in lesbian feminist spaces (Bower et al. 2002). 1 I am talking here in particular about a specific branch of political lesbianism that in the UK has been associated with the politics of the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists (cf. Onlywomen Press 1981, Harne and Miller 1996). I am aware that lesbians with a very different sexual political agenda, too, claim the term ‘political lesbianism’ for themselves.

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Emma emphasises her anxiety of being rejected in the lesbian community if she revealed her bisexual or polyamorous identity. Being non-monogamous on top of being bisexual, she imagines, would double political lesbians’ scepticism of getting involved with her. Emma: I’m troubled within the lesbian community that they don’t [like] bisexuals, they fear that bisexual women could go off with a man. (...) But there is also a great deal of insecurity to say ‘Well, I am bisexual’ at all – within the lesbian community. And I think the polyamorous [bit], they would even be more distrustful and it would be even more that ... ‘Well, I think you can’t trust that person at all! They are always liable to go off with men, if they like. They have relationships with other people’. There was a woman that I was involved with, (...) she was very distrustful.

Experiences of marginalisation in lesbian movement spaces have troubled many of my bisexual-identified female interview partners. Bisexual women are frequently suspected of ‘sleeping with the enemy’ and of being prone to leave their lesbian partners for a relationship with a man (Däumer 1992, Rust 1995). Behind these accusations rest anxieties about lesbian identity and community boundaries, claims on territorial space and conflicts over visibility. They work as a means of political censure aiming at an erasure of bisexual identity and visibility in lesbian culture and politics and reveal to what a strong degree lesbian desire and identity may be built upon the repression of bisexuality (Ault 1996a, 1996b, Hemmings 2002).2 The differentialist construction of bisexuality as non-monogamous complicates bisexual women’s lives – whether they are non-monogamous or not. Indeed, the negative views that many hold about bisexuality rests strongly on its association with non-monogamy. This is one of the reasons why non-monogamy is so hotly debated in the bisexual movement. Non-monogamy Debates in the Bisexual Movement The bisexual movement has gained significant strength over the last two decades. In the UK, bisexual organisation dates back to the early 1980s. The London Bisexual Group (LBG) was founded in the early 1980s (Lano 1996). The first ‘national’ gathering of bisexual women in the UK took place in a Camden squat in 1978. The London Bisexual Women Group (LBWG) founded in 1985 (Parr 1996, S. Rose 1996b). Since 1984 a bisexual newsletter has been produced (under changing names) to safeguard networking and enable discussion within the movement. Bi-Monthly appeared from 1984 until 1989, Bifrost from 1991 until 1995, and Bi Community News (BCN) has been published since October 1995. The first bisexual conference took place in 1984 in London. Conferences for the UK bisexual movement (BICONs) are currently organised on an annual basis. Two anthologies on bisexual politics 2 Since bisexual and lesbian identities are strongly polarised in some political contexts, it cannot be ruled out that narratives on the suspicion of lesbians against bisexual women in some cases may also be shot through with lesbophobic sentiments on the part of bisexual women. I am grateful to Toni Fester, who has pointed out the possibility of such a reading to me at a conference.

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have appeared since the late 1980s (Off Pink Collective 1988, 1996). The formation of bisexual politics has also resulted in publications on bisexual research and theory by bisexual-identified academics (The Bi Academic Invention 1997). As for other sexual identity-based social movements, the construction of a bisexual community has been an important aim of political mobilisation (Rust 1995, Hutchins 1996, Hemmings 2002). Although movement groups have been set up in many larger towns in the UK, they are still quite small. Larger projects like the newsletter, the national conferences, and so on tend to be organised by small numbers of activists (cf. Rose 1996b, C. 1998). As a result, the social and political networks that many refer to as ‘the bisexual community’ tend to be rather close-knit. Against this backdrop it is possible for some of my interview partners to speak of the bisexual community as a ‘community of friends’. These characteristics explain some features of the (non-)monogamy debates in the bisexual movement, which I will explore in the following section. Structures of Support and Debate The maintenance of stigmatised relationships depends on emotional and material support. Because queer relationships have been discouraged and stereotyped as pathological, the development of a culture of support has been an essential goal of sexual movements (Peplau 1991, Peplau et al. 1997, Kurdek 1995, De Cecco 1988, Hansen and Evans 1985). The same applies to the bisexual movement. Many of my bisexual interview partners emphasised the support they have experienced in the bisexual community for living alternative relationships. Franca explains: Franca: I think there’s much more of a debate in the bi community about non-monogamy in general, or to have an alternative lifestyle. Most people that come through [it are] having discussions about it or thinking (…) about what type of relationships they want. Well I think in the straight community, especially, it’s not an issue that is usually discussed. (...) I find lots of inspiration from knowing other people in the bi community that have alternative relationships and lifestyles. I find it much more inspiring. Because if somebody else is doing it, there are all sorts of different types of relationships out there that really give me the strength to say ‘well, it’s possible’.

Within the bisexual movement there has been a fruitful and intensive – (although, as I will show later, often also controversial) debate about non-monogamy. Articles on the topic have appeared in the bisexual newsletters. Bisexual activists have contributed to or edited a range of books that at least in parts have a strong bearing on the non-monogamy debate (Klein and Wolf 1985, Lano and Parry 1995a, Off Pink Collective 1996, Anderlini-D’Onofrio 2004c). Topic-based workshops are an important feature of the yearly Bisexual Conferences (BICONs) (Rowan 1996). They provide a forum for personal and political discussion. Many cover issues around sex or relationships (for example, marriage, S/M, sex parties, safe sex, negotiated sex, and so on). Some specifically deal with non-monogamy (for example, ‘non-monogamy for beginners’, ‘nonmonogamy for non-monogamists’ or ‘polyamory’).

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Similar workshops are run as a regular part of the weekly meetings of local bisexual groups. When I spoke to Simona after a workshop titled ‘non-monogamy for beginners’ in London, she remembered that over the last twenty years she has participated in about forty workshops on non-monogamy. If her memory is accurate, people in the LBG have the opportunity to discuss issues around non-monogamy at least twice a year. At the same time an intensive debate is taking place on the Internet. This debate, too, is indicative and constitutive of identity and community (Kaloski 1997b). Sexual Politics, the Shaping of Public Spheres and Hegemonic Conflict Whereas many research participants stress how much they have profited from this supportive environment, for some there is more at stake than the creation of supportive spaces for discussing sexual identity and relationship problems. For example, Pal thinks that it is time to reach out beyond the boundaries of the ‘bisexual community’ to get new people engaged in dialogue or political activism. He sees creating larger public spheres, where a political debate about sexuality, non-monogamy, polyamory, BDSM and so on can take place, as a central part of his political activism. He has done campaigning work around anti-gay or sex-negative legalisation and polyamory. He likes the bisexual movement to create supportive and sex-positive spaces and at the same time to interfere with politics and dominant discourses on sexuality. As a sex-radical (and an occasional organiser of large sex and fetish parties), for Pal, doing or being is as important as talking. Pal: That’s what I like about parties and allow on conferences some times. It’s very much my space to be and do what we want to do. And I can’t live like that all the time. I try to do it more often and seeing how I can make it a longer term, permanent thing, rather than just jumping between several little worlds, making a sort of like utopian thing for an evening or for a weekend, which is something I am much more used to doing. (...) It’s something I very much want with most close friends around it. And I like the sort of being adventurous really in my sexuality, S/M, and it’s very good to be seeing several people and trying to do things that way.

The publics to which Pal aspires include political and personal debate, community, friendship, eroticised sociality and sexual practice. To him the experience of sex/fetish parties and the bisexual conference spaces are like ‘bubbles’ – (yet) isolated events that give evidence to the possibility of the future emergence of a more cohesive alternate social/sexual space. These ‘bubbles’ (as Pal calls them) can be understood as the seeds of sex-radical bisexual counterpublics in that they are distinguished from ordinary life (shaped by work discipline, compartmentalisation, spatial divisions, control, heteronormativity, and so on) and allow for less regulated ways of being together socially and sexually (cf. Hubbard 2001, Warner 2002). Pal is adamant that the successful creation of sexually diverse embodied publics depends on the nitty-gritty of active political campaigning work, that is, the challenge of sexual discourse in the dominant

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public spheres. Yet disagreement starts already in a narrow social terrain such as the bisexual scene. Whereas some activists have used social movement spaces to campaign around the practical, ethical and political aspects of non-monogamy, others feel that the movement is pushing the non-monogamy issue too strongly. When I asked Robert (in an informal conversation) for his reasons for organising monogamy workshops at the BICONs I attended, he explained that he was not happy about the tendency within the movement to promote non-monogamy. Because non-monogamy is defined in opposition to monogamy, he explained in one of the workshops, it can be promoted only at the expense of people who identify with the latter. Robert seems to be wary of non-monogamous people (or the ideology of non-monogamy) coming to hegemonise the movement. Outside the bisexual movement, Robert argues, non-monogamous people certainly need political support, because they get continuously attacked by the moral Right. However, inside the bisexual movement, that is, at events such as BICON, monogamous people, too, should be granted visibility. The bisexual movement should recognise and celebrate the diversity of bisexual relationships, rather than limiting itself to a politics of non-monogamy. Robert assures me that he does not have an issue with non-monogamy in principle. His major concern is that people who have just come out find a safe, supportive and non-judgemental space to explore a wide range of relationship options. This is especially important because at this stage people may frequently confuse bisexuality with a particular relationship style. Robert’s critique is concerned with diversity and visibility. He feels uneasy about the prominence of non-monogamy in bisexual movement debates and the tendency to claim its superiority over monogamy (cf. Eadie 1996). Robert’s vision of the bisexual public sphere is clearly different from Pal’s and he understands his workshops as a conscious intervention. It is noteworthy that Robert has not been the only one who has suggested that non-monogamists are hegemonising bisexual culture and politics. Some of my interview partners, most of whom are non-monogamous themselves, pointed out that the bisexual community would be dismissive of monogamy. ‘There’s more pressure (...) to be polyamorous than not’, Andy argues. Some believed that such pressure is particularly strong on people who intend to marry. Tony remembers that he had major rifts with bisexual friends and co-activists when he and his partner Caroline decided to marry and to form a monogamous couple. Tony: When Caroline and I announced our intention to get married, we got a lot of criticism for doing that. (...) It felt very bad getting that sort of criticism all the time. It felt very personal. And I know other people, who have formed monogamous relationships, some of whom have married, in the bisexual community, and [they] faced the same sort of criticisms. And I do feel that there’s a certain amount of prejudice (...) against monogamy and against marriage (...) I think there’s a certain amount of pressure in the bisexual community to be polyamorous – to have a lot of sex with a lot of different people.

Tony’s annoyance with this judgemental attitude was one of the reasons he dropped out of bisexual politics for some years. Only since he and Caroline have decided to

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open their marriage has Tony felt more comfortable about socialising in the bisexual community again. In these arguments, the queer critique of normativity is turned back against sexradicals themselves. Whatever we may think of the validity of such claims, it is an interesting phenomenon that the argument of normalisation is used from different ethical and political positions and pitched against each other by different groups of people. While there are conflicts between monogamous and non-monogamous people in the movement, there have also been disagreements about how to challenge the stereotype of bisexual promiscuity. While some want to reclaim promiscuity, others are at pains to prove that many bisexuals are happily monogamous. Others claim that even if people are non-monogamous they are capable of maintaining monogamous and committed long-term relationships. Mostly, the arguments are structured in the way that one relationship practice is defined in opposition to others, for example, non-monogamy as opposed to monogamy or ‘good styles’ of non-monogamy as opposed to less valid ones. I deal in more detail with some of these arguments in the next chapter, in which I explore the concept of polyamory. In the following sections I look at the debates about marriage within the bisexual movement. First I discuss my interview partners’ positions on same-sex marriage. Then I look at the debate on other-sex marriage. This debate is much more heated in the bisexual movement, since many non-monogamous bisexuals are in fact married to (one of their) other-sex partners. While the queer critique of same-sex marriage has argued that same-sex marriage reinforces the outsider status of people who refuse monogamous couplehood, the practice of marriage in the context of bisexual non-monogamy enables us to raise questions about how marriage does not only affect non-monogamous people as a virtual collectivity but also as individuals within non-monogamous relationship networks. Bisexuality, Non-monogamy and Marriage There is vast research literature dealing with the issue of bisexuality and marriage. Most research has been concerned with so-called ‘mixed orientation’ marriages, that is, legal other-sex marriages in which one spouse is bisexual, gay or lesbian. Much of the research has not differentiated between bisexuality and homosexuality (Rodríguez Rust 2000d). The major interest has been with marriages in which the husband is gay or bisexual (Ross 1983, Brownfain 1985, Coleman 1985b, 1982/2000, D. Dixon 1985, Matteson 1985, Wolf 1985, Withney 1990). Usually the focus has been on heterosexual wives’ attempts to come to terms with their husbands’ nonheterosexual identities (Gochros 1985, Withney 1990, Honnens 1996, Buxton 1994). Few researchers have looked at lesbian or bisexual women’s experiences in ‘mixedorientation’ marriages (Coleman 1985a, J.K. Dixon 1985, 1984/2000). Most research suggests that it is usually the man in a marriage who pushes towards opening the relationship. Female partners are said to either compromise on this issue in order not to lose the relationship, to make less ‘use’ of the opportunity to engage in extra-marital relationships or to simply have less opportunities for doing so (Withney 1990, Matteson 1985, Honnens 1996, Gochros 1985, D. Dixon 1985,

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J. Dixon 1984/2000). Bisexual or lesbian women in mixed-orientation marriages are less inclined to seek a solution in non-monogamous arrangements (Coleman 1985a). Moreover, their husbands frequently do not accept their interest in multiple sexual partnerships – a clear indication of the double standard. ‘Non-monogamy is gendered’ is the clear baseline of most of these works (cf. Schwartz and Rutter 1998). What is striking is the scarcity of research into marriages in which both partners identify as bisexual or queer. Weinberg et al. (1994) suggest that many politically organised bisexuals have bi- or queer-identified partners or spouses. Moreover, they claim that bisexual women, too, (with partners of whatever sexual identity) are frequently insistent on an open marriage. Such relationship constellations and dynamics have been ignored in most previous research into bisexuality and marriage. In this section of the chapter, I want to explore further aspects of bisexuality and marriage that have been largely absent from the literature. Most research has focused on the question of how couples negotiate the bisexuality of one of the partners. I am more interested in how my bisexual respondents think about the politics of marriage. The guiding question is how they negotiate marriage (rather than bisexuality), both on the level of movement debates and in the context of non-monogamous relationships. Since I conducted the interviews before the implementation of the Civil Partnership Act 2004 was foreseeable, my interview partners do not discuss this particular piece of legislation. The Same-sex Marriage Campaign Like my gay male respondents whose views I discussed in the previous chapter, bisexual-identified men and women tend to hold strong opinions on same-sex marriage. Their concrete ideas and policy suggestions differed a great deal in detail. Opinions ranged from moderate support of the campaign for marital rights over proposals for registered partnerships or next-of-kin regulations, to outright rejection of legal marriage as an assimilationist politics of privilege. Even if many were sceptical of the moral, cultural and political implications of legal marriage, all of my interview partners were at the same time strongly concerned with the lack of partnership rights for same-sex partners. For Franca, the lack of legal recognition of same-sex partnerships leaves them bare of any protection. However, rather than marriage, Franca prefers the option of registered partnership regulations that should be applicable to all people irrespective of the gendered status of their relationship. Franca, who in many respects pursues a radical queer political agenda, argues that the principle of legal and social equality needs to be realised for all people irrespective of their sexual preferences. The question whether she herself (or anybody else) prefers a non-monogamous lifestyle has to be regarded at a completely different level. Franca: I think it’s different levels. If you want to have your alternative lifestyle and you want to have lots of partners, that’s your business, you can do it, nobody says that you cannot do it. But if you have two people, who want to be committed to each other, and

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The Spectre of Promiscuity they want to get the benefits of this or that and a long-term relationship, it’s very important to know that the law is on your side and you’re protected. And that you get the same benefits that other people are getting. I think it’s very unfair, if you don’t.

Like Franca, Lynne separates the question of non-monogamy from the one of marriage rights. From a Marxist-feminist point of view, Lynne is extremely sceptical of both marriage and the family. However, in distinction to Franca, she thinks that the issue of non-monogamy goes beyond a mere question of individual lifestyle choices. For Lynne, the politics of non-monogamy means a conscious attack on the family and the authoritarian organisation of capitalist society. However, pragmatically it is difficult to find a common agenda on these issues with other lesbians and gay men, who after all do not have much in common politically. Lynne: Erm, well I think that (…) although I don’t agree with marriage, I think that people are right to campaign for whatever heterosexual people have got. (...) The argument for whether you should have some kind of equal rights as a gay person is separate from the arguments about monogamy or … what kind of relationships you have. (...) Non-monogamy is questioning the sort of basis of our society at the moment, which is the institution of the family. Which is, you know, far too radical for most people to contemplate.

A strong concern with equality surfaced in the accounts of many of my interview partners. Many found themselves in a serious dilemma, in particular if they rejected the cultural politics of marriage. Their critique of marriage focused on the perception of marriage as a heterosexual institution, the regulation of sexual and intimate relationships through the state and religion, the reinforcement of the ideology of monogamy and of the normativity of the couple form. Many (but not all) were ready to subordinate their concerns to the value of full equality for same-sex couples. Many (but not all) non-monogamous bisexuals in my study seemed to be ready to agree to some form of legal regulation of same-sex partnerships. They usually did so by either showing moderate support or at least an understanding for the same-sex marriage campaign or by elaborating proposals on how justice could be reached through flexible civil partnership laws. Some were annoyed with the fact that multiple partners are not considered in the same-sex marriage campaign. The suggestion of considering non-monogamous and multiple relationship forms in any future legislation on families, relationships and personal status can be seen as a specific contribution to the marriage debates from polyamorous or non-monogamous people (Lehr 1999, cf. Tatchell 1999, 2000). Ken, for example, explains: Ken: I would prefer it also to include something that’s polyamorous, rather than just samesex, you know, because not all of us are monogamous. And not all the couples out there are monogamous. And there isn’t enough or anything to do with polyamory. And I would like to see something looser-based than marriage, slightly stronger than affirmation.

Emma and Marianne make a strong point for group marriage. For them, group marriage is the really challenging aspect of a campaign for changing family law, not the question of same-sex marriage (see the opening quote in this chapter). Inasmuch as these suggestions refer to the legal institution of marriage rather than to some

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other legal codification, they express an understanding of marriage that clearly has severed its association with monogamy. Some unambiguously rejected the idea of legal marriage, even if it was applied to polyamorous relationships. Simon, for example, rejects any state interference in personal relationships. He further challenges the idea that the state should privilege any kind of relationships. Simon: Marriage as we know it is practically a dying institution any way (...) It seems to me that it’s far more instructive simply to let marriage (...) as it exists wither away, which it is doing quite well by itself and meet people to make whatever arrangements they feel are best for shared property, ownership and extra-kin arrangements and so for. (...) But at the end of the day, say, the triad or a poly marriage, (...) or a gay couple never should be (...) given any extra rights.

Even if the institution of marriage was opened to new constituencies (like same-sex couples, groups, and so on), this would not remove the inequalities consisting in privileging certain relationship forms, Simon points out. What I found interesting about Simon’s argument is that despite his criticism he has been ready to marry twice – each time, as he claims, for the sake of his children. Politics and personal life practice do not necessarily correspond neatly. Whereas some people who practice non-monogamy and do not believe in marriage support the struggle for marital rights as a matter of formal equality, Simon rejects marriage as an exclusive practice, but has practically used the privileges that come with it repeatedly throughout his life. Similarly, Sharon assumes marriage to her boyfriend as the last resort in times of crisis, just after having criticised it for being an outmoded Christian institution in the service of compulsory monogamy. I do not want to say that Simon and Sharon are hypocrites. Rather, I want to highlight that although many of the arguments of my gay-identified and bisexual-identified interview partners do overlap, a concrete difference consists in the fact that bisexual men and women have the possibility to legally marry their partners – at least one of them, on the condition that this is an other-sex partner. Bisexuality and Other-sex Marriage Marriage has been an on-going issue of debate in the bisexual movement. People debate the pros and cons of marriage on e-mail lists, in workshops at BICONs and articles in bisexual publications. I have gained the impression that these debates are to a much stronger degree concerned with the politics of other-sex (or ‘heterosexual’) marriage, than with the question of same-sex marriage. There is, for example, no article dealing with the campaign for same-sex marriage in ‘Bisexual Horizons’, the second anthology of bisexual writing edited by the Off Pink Collective (1996). Rather, the debate about marriage is staged as one about the rights and wrongs of male-female marriage. In one article, Felice Cade (1996) deplores that as a heterosexual-identified married bisexual feminist she feels isolated in the bisexual movement (cf. Angry Fiancée 1997). In her piece titled ‘Against Marriage’, Sharon Rose (1996a) highlights the normalising effects of marriage and

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concludes that ‘getting married is a very public statement about your heterosexuality’ (p. 120). I think other-sex marriage is such a pressing topic in bisexual debates because it raises issues about identity, authenticity and ‘political correctness’. Bisexuals in other-sex marriages often struggle with problems of identity maintenance because through the act of marrying, their same-sex desire gets erased from their public identity (Hüsers and König 1995, cf. Eadie 1993). This issue is particularly pronounced for people in monogamous marriages (cf. Blumstein and Schwartz 1977/2000). However, even if people are in open or group marriages, their relationships still tend to be read as heterosexual and/or monogamous. Simon’s experience provides a good example. In the first part of the following quotation, he refers to his marriage with his first wife Sara. For ten years they lived together in a polyamorous marriage. During these years, they lived first with a female partner of Sara’s and then (until the family broke apart) with two male partners of Sara’s and their two children. In the second part of the statement Simon talks about the experience of his current partner Georgette, with whom he has been negotiating the construction of a BDSM-based polyamorous household. Simon: I always thought that my parents knew about it, but after that (...) when I actually started to split up with [Sara] (...) erm, my father pretended that he’d never realised that we were actually a poly marriage. He always presumed that this is just me and Sara and a couple of friends staying with us, which I find very hard to believe. I am sure that I had told him before, but somehow he managed to push it out of his mind. People I know, (...) like my Georgette, (...) before she met me she had lived for some years with two men, and she said, all the people (...) never hit the fact that the three of them were together, (...) and [one of the] neighbours, she gathered and thought about all sorts of explanations for it, like the younger man was their son and things like that [laughs]. People can ignore all kinds of things if they don’t want to see it.

These stories strikingly demonstrate that multiple partners, even if they live together as a polyamorous group, tend to be perceived as either friends or as a heterosexual family. Hegemonic heterosexuality and familialism strongly circumscribe the limits of intelligibility (Smith 1994a, 1994b). If bisexuals have significant othersex partners and in particular if they are married and/or have children with them, they inevitably get drawn into processes of heterosexualisation. This raises the issue of bisexuals ‘passing’ as straight (cf. Tucker 1996, M. Fraser 1997, Hemmings 1997). We can see here that due to the dominant role of the heterosexual gaze in the ‘passing’ experience, many people may ‘pass’ in public contexts, even if this is not their intention at all (Johnson 2002). The fact that bisexual men and women in certain relationship constellations are likely to be ‘misread’ as heterosexual, is probably not even the most disturbing aspect of this passing experience. For many bisexuals, the question whether legal other-sex marriage means a subjection to the regimes of heteronormativity seems to be much more unsettling. This question is felt acutely, because the assumption that bisexuals do not stand in for their same-sex relationships in order not to lose heterosexual privilege has been one of the strongest reservations about bisexuality in the lesbian and gay movements (Rust 1995, Ault 1996a, Mieli 1980). Bisexuals

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who have both same-sex and other-sex partners will most likely get more validation for their ‘heterosexual’ relationships than for their same-sex ones in mainstream society (Valverde 1985: 116). In such a situation it is difficult not to collude with the dynamics of heterosexism, which is why many bisexuals are confronted with unsettling questions. Do bisexuals who legally marry their other-sex partners capitalise on their heterosexual privilege? Do they privilege their other-sex partners over their same-sex partners? These are the preoccupations that render the debate about bisexuality and marriage in the bisexual movement a rather uneasy one. The Primary/Secondary Partner Distinction and Other-sex Marriage A range of my interview partners emphasise the low frequency of same-sex primary partnerships in the bisexual and polyamorous scenes in the UK. While many do not necessarily see a problem with that, some worry about this phenomenon. For example, Ken has felt quite isolated in the bisexual and polyamory communities as somebody who primarily engages in same-sex relationships. For many years, Ken complains, there has been a virtual absence of, in particular, male same-sex primary relationships. Ken: There are more male-male couples coming out now, thankfully, and I’ve seen them at BICON, but when I first came out as being polyamorous and bisexual, it was very heterosexual based. The main partners were always, you know, female, and the secondary partners were same-sex and less of an emotional degree; and I like the fact that there’s more kind of ... like same-sex couples, where the secondary partner is of the opposite sex.

According to Ken’s interpretation, the problem is primarily one of masculinity. He has come across too many bisexual men who explained to him that they would be able to sleep with men, but only could have intimate or loving relationships with women. He explains the absence (or lack of visibility) of male same-sex partnerships as an effect of bisexual men’s denial of their same-sex desire. Ken: Men still won’t face up to the emotional content, and (...) they know that if they face up to the emotional side of the relationship, then they will have to finally admit that they are bisexual or gay. And they just can’t do that sometimes. That’s the only big thing I have noticed that for men it’s still heterosexist based; (...) even the bisexual scene is basically heterosexist. (...) If you have the ability to fall in love with women and you’re bisexual, then [by rights] you should be able to have the emotions to fall in love with a man.

Ken’s argument evolves around hegemonic masculinity, heterosexism and internalised homophobia. He juxtaposes bisexual women (who would be much more confident with same-sex relations) with bisexual men (who would be rather repressed). While Ken’s argument may explain the invisibility of primary male same-sex relationships, it does not help to understand the similarly low frequency of primary female samesex relationships in the UK polyamory scene. Many of my respondents emphasised the exceptionality of such relationships and the low participation of lesbians in the UK polyamory scene. This does not necessarily imply that such relationships do

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not exist. An alternate explanation could be that bisexuals who are in same-sex relationships, prefer to move in different contexts, such as, for example, the lesbian and gay scenes (cf. Hüsers and König 1995). The virtual absence of large-scale research into bisexual relationships in the UK makes it difficult to judge these observations. Research in the USA tends to confirm the predominance of primary other-sex partnerships in the relationship practice of bisexual men and women associated with the bisexual movement. Weinberg et al. (1994) found that the most common relationship form for their respondents was a primary other-sex relationship with or without secondary relationships with either same-sex or other-sex partners (p. 333). In the case of a non-monogamous relationship arrangement, most respondents defined their same-sex partners (if they had any) as ‘secondary’ or ‘casual’. The primary/secondary distinction was so popular among non-monogamous bisexuals that three quarters of all respondents described their relationships using this classification (p. 81). With only few exceptions married bisexuals applied the classification primary partners to their spouse (p. 93). Similar tendencies were observable in my study (cf. Ritchie and Barker 2006). Against this backdrop and the fact that legal same-sex or group marriage is not (yet) possible, marriage works as a structural marker of a heterosexualised primary/ secondary partner distinction. The act of legal marriage makes the prioritisation at the heart of this distinction most explicit. In the following I will turn to the example of one polyamorous family to explore how legal marriage may affect non-monogamous relationship networks and reinforce the primary/secondary partnership logic. When I visited Tony, Caroline and Mick for the first time in summer 2000, they were living together as a family with Tony’s and Caroline’s children, Barbara, Marble and Samuel (two, four, and eight years old respectively) in a small house in London. Because the house was already too small for the group and there were plans for Leroy, a partner of Caroline, to move in, they decided to get a mortgage for a larger house. A few months later they moved to their new place that they were now also sharing with Leroy. Tony and Caroline have been married since 1994. After two years of an open relationship they decided to form a cohabiting, monogamous, married family briefly after Caroline had conceived their first child, Samuel. Looking back, both partners think that this was a wrong decision. Both identify entering a monogamous marriage as the major factor of an escalating relationship crisis. Caroline emphasises how much she had suffered under the isolation she felt being a married, monogamous mother. She got very depressed, which in turn caused serious problems in their marriage. Only a few months ago – in the sixth year of their marriage – Caroline and Tony decided to open their relationship. Polyamory seemed to provide the only way out of their marriage crisis. Things in their life changed quickly. Tony soon met Mick, a bisexual-identified transman, who soon moved in with the family. Caroline, too, entered new relationships. At the time of our interview she had five male partners. ‘When I say “partner”’, Caroline explains, ‘I mean people I have a sexual and romantic relationship with’. Caroline is quite explicit that she does not like to establish any hierarchies between her partners.

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Caroline: Erm, I also don’t like hierarchical relationships. Some people have primary relationships and secondary ones, and I’m not really comfortable with that idea, because it feels to me like saying that one person’s more important than the other, and I try to avoid that. Christian: So basically if you were talking about your five partners you would consider them of equal (...) significance? Caroline: Yeah, pretty much (...) I think the differences are firstly Tony and I are married, so we’ve made a lifetime commitment (...) and apart from that each relationship is at a slightly different stage and the people are different, have different expectations and different desires and so on, so erm they are very different but I do think of them as equal.

Similarly, Tony does not like to talk of primary and secondary partnerships. At the same time, Tony and Caroline think that their partnership would take ‘precedence’ over their other relationships. They explain this with the length of their relationship, the fact they have children together and that they have made a lifetime commitment through the marriage vow. Caroline sees the possibility that other of her relationships may reach a similar degree of closeness. Thus, she has been discussing the option of a personal commitment ceremony with her partner Leroy. Like many of my interview partners, Tony and Caroline dislike the primary/ secondary distinction, because it introduces obvious hierarchies to multiple relationship networks. The distinction touches on very sensitive interpersonal issues, such as the question of mutual commitment, responsibility, valorisation and the feeling of being loved. It does not necessarily feel nice to be (only) a secondary partner, and the application of the distinction is frequently fought over in multiple relationships. Although Tony and Caroline try to avoid this distinction, I am not so sure whether their solution to talk of the ‘precedence’ of their relationship over others really transcends its logic. At least Tony’s partner Mick has been feeling like a secondary partner all along. Mick: And I think that the relationship I’m in at the moment is also based on the primarysecondary model, even though everyone denies that it is, but I think that it is. That’s what it feels like anyway. (...) Yeah. I feel like a secondary partner, yeah, even though Caroline and Tony both insist that they don’t have secondary partners, that all their partners are equal. (...) Christian: Do you think the fact that he’s married to Caroline brings in an issue of inequality? Mick: Yeah, yeah … That’s exactly my point. If we were all single then no problem at all. Even if he was together with her for longer than he’d been together with me, that wouldn’t be an issue. But the fact that he’s been with her six years or something – no eight years longer than I’ve been with him, plus the fact that they’re married, makes it twice as difficult.

The fact that Tony and Caroline are legally married, rather than the length of their relationship, circumscribes the boundaries of Tony’s relationship with Mick. It fixes him in secondary relationship status. The distinction that is marked by marriage is thereby both symbolic and material.

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The Spectre of Promiscuity Mick: Erm, and as far as I’m concerned (...) I don’t have the same status as his wife and not so much social recognition or anything in terms of tax and inheritance and pension rights, erm, power of attorney and, you know, if I was in a coma and somebody had to decide what to do with me, my mother could always override anybody else’s, erm, wishes, because I’m always going to be single, as long as I’m only going to be with Tony. (...) It’s quite difficult, because (...) I’m living in their house that Tony and his wife and his kids bought (...) so sometimes I felt a bit like a houseguest. The thing is they do everything in the world to make me feel like I’m part of the family, but in my mind they’re one family, erm, and it’s very difficult to get my head around the fact that Leroy and I are a part of that family as well.

For Mick, shared property, the legal rights derived from the marriage contract and the symbolism of the marriage vow denote the strong bonds of Tony’s and Caroline’s relationship. The fact that they have children together aggravates his sense of ‘not really being part of the family’. Mick’s problem is reinforced by the fact that his feelings seem to be shaped by a biologistic concept of parenthood and a legalistic and romantic notion of marriage. Thus, Mick explains, one of the reasons why it does not feel right to him to be a co-parent is that Tony and Caroline are the biological parents and therefore carry the major responsibility for the children.3 For Mick, legal marriage is a powerful marker of family boundaries. Although he generally uses a broad concept of family, for example, when he claims that his family includes all his friends, this family is primarily defined by marriage. A commitment ceremony, such as Caroline intends to undertake with Leroy (which is a common practice in many polyamorous relationships) is no option for Mick, who thinks of poly marriage as a ‘weird concept’. ‘It’s always got these negative connotations of a husband and several wives for me, and I don’t feel comfortable with that’, he explains. I hope to have shown in this discussion that legal other-sex marriage has the potential to trigger very specific interpersonal dynamics in non-monogamous relationship networks. Because it is charged with difficult emotional baggage, the primary/secondary partner distinction is subject to negotiation and conflict in many non-monogamous relationships. Although Caroline and Tony deny that they would apply such as distinction, the fact that they are legally married works against the successful dissolution of this conflict in their family. Legal marriage potentially reinforces the primary/secondary partnership distinction and articulates it on a higher level. Furthermore, against the backdrop of the current definition of marriage as an other-sex couple relationship and the symbolic significance of the marriage vow, legal marriage results in a structural heterosexualisation of the primary/ secondary partner distinction. Other-sex marriage in bisexual non-monogamous contexts inevitably feeds into a range of (hetero)normative discourses. Some of the intrinsic limitations of the current demand for same-sex marriage rights become quite obvious here. ‘The marriage contract is the ultimate institution of coupledom’, 3 Other poly families (such as Simon’s first open marriage) seem to have established more collective styles of childcare in which the shares are equally divided between biological and social parents and married and unmarried partners. A lot more research is needed into the dynamics of non-monogamous or polyamorous family practice, including parenting and childcare.

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argues Robson (1992: 124). As such it is intensely tied to the cultural valorisation of monogamy. Most attempts to draft alternate schemes for either registered or domestic partnerships or statute-defined qualifying relationships do not account for multiple relationship practices (Lehr 1999, cf. Tatchell 1999, 2000, Bailey-Harris 2001). The Civil Partnership Act 2004, too, fails to provide for the possibility of multiple partnerships and thus ignores the diversity of lived relationship practices and family forms. Since the law falls short of granting the right of marriage (which would have created a situation of ‘formal equality’ with heterosexual relationships), and since the concept of the registered civil partnership has been restricted to samesex relationships only, a heteronormative bias remains written into UK relationship legislation (Barker 2004, 2006). Even though this law allows people to gain legal recognition for a same-sex partner (and thus to publicly affirm this way their lesbian, gay, bisexual or queer relationships, identities and desires), this recognition is restricted to one partner only. This is why some non-monogamous or polyamorous bisexuals in my study are quite reserved about the campaign for same-sex marriage. As we have seen in this chapter, bisexuals have been involved in a vocal a debate about non-monogamy for various reasons. Many have thereby contributed to a social and sexual imaginary that reconfigures relationality. The relationship philosophy of polyamory has been one of the creations of this wider imaginary. In the next chapter I will describe polyamory as an approach to non-monogamy, according to which the concerns and wishes of all partners should be recognised and negotiated.

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Chapter 5

Polyamory: Different Kinds of Love Stories

I used to want monogamy and settling down with one wonderful person (...) Later I found that monogamy didn’t work (...). Previous relationships had fallen apart. I didn’t want to start having sex without the relationship. I didn’t purely want commitment to one person. I couldn’t fathom what it was. And then Jimmy told me about polyamory, which is Slap! Bang! in the middle. You’ve got the ability to have many relationships which aren’t just sexual, which are very, very loving. So for me it suits, because I do like love (...) and I do like being in very different stages of love, and when I do like having sex, I like there to be the emotional attachment (...) and kind of emotion connects with spirituality, which is another big thing in my life. (...) So I definitely like and do identify strongly with polyamory, and I’m becoming more into polyamory as it goes along. (Ken)

The public debate about non-monogamy within the bisexual movement has resulted in the proliferation of manifold discourses on non-monogamy. In Chapter 4 I emphasised the potentially endless diversity of bisexual non-monogamies. Nonmonogamous relationships and lifestyles may include open couple relationships, polyamorous or polyfidelitious multi-partner relationships, networks of sexual friendships, casual sex without any loving long-term relationships, swinging, open marriages, poly marriages,and so on (cf. Rust 1996, Rodríguez Rust 2000c, Hutchins 1996, Anderlini-D’Onofrio 2004c, Lano and Parry 1995a). In this chapter, I argue that different discourses on non-monogamy are structured in interrelation and opposition. Different ways or styles of being non-monogamous are produced through the negotiation of inter- and intradiscursive differences. My main focus is on the discursive formations around polyamory. Many (mostly bisexual-identified) interview partners have used the term ‘polyamory’ as a positive alternative to the ‘anti-label’ non-monogamy (cf. Rust 1996: 132, cf. Easton and Liszt 1997: 41–42). Pal explains his sympathy for the term polyamory in the following way: Pal: Breaking it down into being multiple loves, rather than using ‘non-monogamous’, which worked negatively, what you are not, rather what you are. It’s not a word about what you are; (...) it’s more a sort of non-label.

For many, however, there is more to polyamory than politically correct or empowering terminology. For them, the term ‘polyamory’ marks a distinctive discourse on nonmonogamy that is associated with a specific relationship philosophy and particular social/sexual identities.

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This chapter falls into three major parts. In the first part, I argue that the discourse on polyamory has given rise to distinctive socio-sexual identities (cf. Barker 2005). In the conjuncture of diverse social movements and subcultural trends, a social movement around polyamory seems to be emerging in the UK. So far these processes have rarely been written about from a sociological perspective (Haritaworn et al. 2006). In the second part of the chapter, I carve out some of the dominant features of the polyamory discourse (such as love, communication, negotiation, honesty, friendship). In the third part, I describe polyamory as a contested term. In particular I highlight potentially normative effects of the discursive strategy to present polyamory as ‘responsible non-monogamy’. From Identity to Community and Politics In the workshops on non-monogamy in bisexual community spaces described in Chapter 4, people often introduced themselves with the line ‘I am poly’. This brief statement seems to provide sufficient information to place a person with regard to his or her relationship practice or ideas on non-monogamy. In the glossary of her popular guide on polyamory, Deborah Anapol defines ‘poly’ as ‘the relationship orientation of people who love and want to be intimate with more than one person at a time’ (1997: 179). In my understanding, Anapol uses the concept ‘relationship orientation’ as an equivalent to the more common concept ‘sexual orientation’. The notion of ‘sexual orientation’ tends to connote a deep truth about a person’s socio-sexual personality and is frequently bound up with essentialist theories of sexual identity (cf. Blumstein and Schwartz 1990, Whisman 1996, LeVay 1996). While for some research participants, polyamory was nothing more than a convenient label to talk about their relationship life, for others it marked a central part of their socio-sexual identity. Marianne, for example, describes her sexual identity as follows: ‘I identify as bisexual and polyamorous’. She explains that both her identities as bisexual and poly are extremely important to her, because they mark a socially relevant difference that is met with discrimination or marginalisation. Marianne’s description of the slow and painful realisation of her polyamorous orientation contains elements that have been central to ‘coming out narratives’. Marianne: I discovered polyamory a long time before I ever did anything about it. Erm … I heard the word from a friend of mine (...) and … erm, he told me about it, because he figured that I probably was polyamorous, because of the way I kept falling in love with my friends and being confused and stuff. ‘No, no, no, I’m definitely not – I’m monogamous – I’m just not very good at it’. And I resisted it (...) It was bizarre. It was like, most people have a great crisis about their sexuality, about being homosexual or bisexual. (…) I had no crisis at all about that, whereas the mono–poly thing I had a huge crisis over. I remember, like in the space of 24 hours I realised I was in love with Charles and with Darrell. I wanted to be with both of them and I really couldn’t choose; and thought I must be poly and thought ‘oh my God’ and had a huge great crisis about it. (…) It was weird. I wouldn’t recommend it!

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Marianne talks about her sexual identities in terms of deep personal structures or natural inclinations. The first hints of a possible difference, its signification as possible sign of a polyamorous orientation, resistance, disorientation and crisis, then acceptance followed by the act of coming out can all be read as structural elements of a classical coming-out narrative (B. Martin 1993, Plummer 1995, Kaloski 1997a). Marianne further compares her coming-out process as a bisexual and as a polyamorous person. Whereas coming to terms with her bisexuality was not too big an issue for her, accepting herself to be polyamorous was a much more difficult process. The deep crisis she has had to go through in order to affirm her polyamorous identity may explain the salience that polyamory has as a part of her sexual identity. I would like to emphasise that not all of my respondents attributed an essentialist quality to their polyamorous (or non-monogamous) identity (cf. Eadie 1996). However, the fact that polyamory was so salient in many of my interview partners’ identity narratives underscores the necessity of broadening our understanding of sexual identity beyond the simple question of preference in terms of gendered object choice (Sedgwick 1995, Hemmings 2002). The Origins of a UK Poly Community For Marianne, identifying as poly also means identifying with the poly community. ‘Yes, I do feel part of the poly community’ she explains. She goes on to deplore the limited scope of the social networks around polyamory and the smallish character of the UK poly community: ‘one of the problems is that the poly community is very much only on-line’. Polyamory is still a relatively unknown term in the UK. Only few people seem to be familiar with the concept. Even people who are very active in poly politics have explained to me that they do not use the term frequently to identify themselves because people usually do not understand what it means. Cath explains this phenomenon with the fact that the use of the term ‘polyamory’ is constricted to people engaged in a rather intellectual debate about non-monogamy. Cath: I think its a very intellectual movement and I think that there are people, who [have been] what I might call polyamorous for years and years and years and who don’t have access to that term.

Cath, who has lived in both the USA and UK, points out the existence of extended poly communities in many larger US cities (cf. Rust 1996, Sheff 2005, 2006). Since polyamory communities have grown there since the 1970s, many poly families are already raising the second generation of children. Furthermore, in the USA, as Cath and others point out, the theory and terminology of polyamory are far more advanced. It is indicative that most of the popular and academic literature on polyamory has been published in the USA (cf. Anapol 1997, Nearing 1992, Munson and Stelboum 1999a, West 1996, Easton and Liszt 1997, Anderlini-D’Onofrio 2004c). Many point out that while it would make sense to talk of a polyamorous community in the USA, the small number of poly-identified people would render such a term inapplicable in the UK. Pal illustrates this point by comparing the degree of polyamorous social and

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political organisation with the advanced infrastructure of the gay male and lesbian communities. Pal: The people, who are doing it, just don’t know other people that are. All the people don’t see it as an option, just because they don’t know who else is doing it. They may well have thought of it. There is no (...) – like generally there’s a fairly visible gay community, lots of places, so you can find it, if you looked. And there isn’t that for poly at all. (...) It’s not even [worthwhile] doing a thing, even starting having a sort of activism without a sort of community. [laughing] I don’t think you have a community, if no one knows each other.

As a primarily virtual or on-line community many polyamorous people in the UK strongly rely on the Internet for socialising and theoretical or political debate.1 Many point out how important it has been to them to know that there are others ‘out there’, who are working through similar issues and share a common understanding. In Marianne’s point of view, the Internet has been of enormous importance for spreading poly ideas and poly rhetoric in recent years (cf. Ritchie and Barker 2006). Although Marianne describes the poly community as primarily a virtual community, people come together on a regular basis. At the time when we conducted the interview, people from the UK list arranged a meeting for dinner once a month. The meeting usually took place in London, but there have been gatherings in Brighton, Oxford and Cambridge, too. That the efforts of networking and organising have been fruitful is evidenced in the fact that last year’s ‘Poly Day’ in London in October 2006 was attended by about 200 poly-curious and non-monogamous people. According to Marianne’s description, the UK polyamory community strongly overlaps with other communities and subcultures. Marianne: Erm there’s a … in the UK there’s a strong overlap with the S/M community and the bisexual community. If you’re into S/M and you’re bisexual and you’re poly, you’re likely to just keep bumping into the same people at all the events. Erm … I don’t know why. I think it’s just … It’s partly because it’s quite a small community and it’s mainly on-line people. Because I mean we’re talking maybe 20 or 30 people that you will just keep bumping into. (...) I mean there are also a lot of pagans, a lot of people, who like Science Fiction. Erm it’s … it’s quite funny. There’s like a set of criteria almost. Are you into S/M? Are you bisexual? Are you into Science Fiction? Are you a Pagan? And the amount of people, who fit in all of those, is quite surprising.

Marianne describes the UK polyamory community as a formation at the conjuncture of diverse subcultures, such as the BDSM, bisexual and pagan movements, and the Science Fiction fan scene. There are certainly some more movements and subcultures that have influenced UK polyamory debates. Some of my interview partners have been part of the commune movement in the UK (cf. Lano 1995a, Weeks 1991b). Some publications dealing with polyamory have emerged from discussions on sexuality in 1 For information on diverse polyamory mailing lists and other Internet or print resources, see, for example, the following sites: http://www.polyamory.org/SF/mail-lists.html, http://www.polyamory.org/SF/groups.html and http://www.aserve.com/holly/supportfaq.html [all sites last accessed: 28.02.05].

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the contexts of the green, eco-revolutionary and anarchist movements (cf. ANSLIM 1992, Merrick 1999). Marianne’s emphasis of the significance of paganism in the UK polyamory movement is indicative of a broader influence of spiritualist or esoteric discourses. The pamphlet ‘sexyouality’ by Merrick (1999) strikingly illustrates that polyamory discourses draw upon a range of quite distinct philosophies. It presents a quite peculiar blend of anarchism, ecological activism, spiritualism, new age philosophy, primitivism and sexual liberationism. A closer reading of the articles collected in the fanzine reveals that radical anti-capitalist or queer critiques remain marginal, whereas spiritual, pagan, new ageist, or Christian ideas are circulated in the mainstream. In particular in the USA, new age philosophies play a dominant role in the debate on polyamory (cf. Anapol 1997, Anderlini-D’Onofrio 2004a, 2004c). Some critics have pointed out that the prevalence of racialising Orientalist and primitivist tropes in esoteric poly discourse poses a serious problem for the movement (Haritaworn et al. 2006, Noël 2006). Building a Social Movement While the UK poly scene can be described as quite heterogeneous with respect to the involvement of people from diverse subcultural tendencies, it seems to be less diverse with respect to other criteria. Marianne describes the poly community as predominantly white and middle class in composition. With many others, she agrees that in terms of sexual identity most poly-identified people are bisexuals or heterosexuals (or ‘heteroflexibles’, as Gerard puts it). Only very few gay men and lesbians in the UK, according to these voices, actively take part in the virtual or faceto-face poly community activities. However, despite the fact that primarily bisexual and heterosexual people seem to make up the UK poly movement, there is no inherent link between polyamory and any particular sexual identity (cf. Munson and Stelboum 1999a, Easton and Liszt 1997, Anapol 1997). This is emphasised by Alan, the only gay man in my study, who explicitly supported the concept polyamory. When I ask him whether he sees an implicit bisexual dimension to the polyamory debates, Alan rejects such a connection: Alan: Well it depends on how you define the poly part, doesn’t it? (...) I mean I’m close enough to the bisexual community to understand (...) the distaste in which many bisexuals hold the idea of polyamory – something, which I’ve never understood.

According to Alan, it would be wrong to construe the polyamorous movement as an integral part of the bisexual movement. Similarly, in an article on bisexual politics in the USA, Hutchins (1996) suggests a strategy of coalition politics with the lesbian and gay, S/M, and polyamory movements. While acknowledging a certain overlap of activism, Hutchins addresses the polyamory movement as an autonomous political force (cf. Noël 2006). Due to low social and political organisation among polyamorous people in the UK, some activists have started to think about setting up social and support networks. Pal explains:

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The Spectre of Promiscuity Pal: And, erm, I think we want to [make] a start and we’ve got a web site (...) we’re looking at perhaps doing a starters pack we could send to people ‘Now, this is an introduction to poly’. What you got then, you can get more people, who are interested in getting involved, and hopefully they will all then start producing their own views and find a space for that. So, we just want to make a start.

The short-term strategy is to break people’s isolation, to enable them to exchange their views and to help people find partners. The ultimate goal, according to Pal, is to build a polyamorous community. Further political concerns revolve around the repression of certain sexualities in criminal law, the pathologisation of nonmonogamy in therapy and counselling, and questions of media representation. What’s in a Term? The Concept of Polyamory Although the term ‘polyamory’ has been around for a few decades, it has only gained popularity in European contexts in recent years. Polyamory is a hotly contested term. Its concrete meanings have been an issue of ongoing debate among people who claim it as an identity. Charles talks about the difficulties within the UK polyamory scene in coming up with a consensus on a definition for the purpose of getting an entry included in the Oxford English Dictionary. Charles: There seems to be a lot of discussion about exactly what it means, because it seems to be a manufactured word. You won’t find it in the dictionary, but at the moment they’re looking for new words for the Oxford English Dictionary. They’re trying to get polyamory in as one of the new words. They’re having a big problem actually trying to nail down exactly what a definition of it is, because there’s a lot of disagreement about [it]… I suppose it’s good to distinguish it clearly, just in one word. If everyone wants to agree, it would be multiple relationships. It’s good to make polyamory more specific, about more emotional relationships. (...) It’s loving relationships. I suppose it may not have to be physical relationships even.

Charles emphasises the conflicts about the meaning of polyamory. He believes that the definition ‘multiple relationships’ probably is the least controversial. He then goes on to suggest his own interpretation, in which he describes polyamorous relationships as emotional, loving and not necessarily sexual relationships. His definition converges with that of his partner Marianne. She explains the etymological roots of the word as follows: Marianne: Polyamory is … well it’s a new word really. (...) It comes from the Greek word ‘poly’ meaning many and then the Latin word, the Latin bit is ‘amory’. I guess they went for the mixture of Greek and Latin, because the all-Greek version would be polyphilia, and philias are usually things like necrophilia and paedophilia, things that are associated by the public with being bad. And of course there was already the word polyandry and polygamy, meaning many husbands or many wives. So I guess that’s how the word came about. But people, who identify as polyamorous believe in the idea of more than one relationship, meaning more than one love relationship. And they don’t even have to be sexual.

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Love is central to the discourses on polyamory. This is clearly revealed in an analysis of the etymological roots of the term. Marianne’s speculations about the reasons for the combination of Latin and Greek elements are also quite interesting, because they point to a concern with the creation of a ‘nice’ word that cannot easily be subsumed to a canon of pathologising sexological terms. The notion of non-sexual partnership endorsed by Charles and Marianne is a dominant feature of polyamory discourses. While Charles suggests that this definition is not necessarily shared by all polyamorous people, it was a quite common theme in my interviewees’ explanations. Polyamory – a Love Story With the Latin part of the word polyamory meaning ‘love’ and the Greek part meaning ‘many’, polyamory literally translates into ‘many loves’ or ‘more than one love’. With slight differences in phrasing, it is possible to find this kind of definition in almost all publications on polyamory (cf. Lano and Parry 1995b, Anapol 1997). As I have shown above, the emphasis of love correlates with a de-emphasis of sexuality. As a discourse endorsing love, polyamory can easily be integrated with other philosophies of love. Thus, it is the significance of love within polyamory that makes it possible for Marianne to reconcile non-monogamy with her Christian beliefs (cf. Goss 2004). While certainly not all polyamorous people are religious, some Christian groups promote this concept, and some authors claim that the term originated in certain spiritualist contexts (Anapol 1997: 5 and 127, AnderliniD’Onofrio 2004a). Irrespective of belief, some of my interview partners clearly welcome the deemphasis on sexuality in the definition of polyamory. Andy, who is very confident with his sexuality and who strongly politicises bisexual identity, explains that he would prefer the term ‘polyamorous’ over the identity label ‘bisexual’, because ‘bisexuality’ puts too strong an emphasis on sexuality. Andy: It’s always got this sexual bit there, hasn’t it? And ... my sexuality isn’t always about my sex life. My relationship also, as I said before, can be sexual, but polyamory is more to do with affection.

For Andy, polyamory provides the means for a more accurate representation of some aspects of his identity and the description of some of his relationship ties. Most polyamorous people used the term ‘partner’ to refer to their multiple relationships of varying degrees of intimate closeness or commitment. As I have discussed in Chapter 4, some people made distinctions between primary and secondary (or tertiary) partners, whereas other straightforwardly rejected such a distinction as a hierarchisation of their relationship network (cf. Anapol 1997, Labriola 1999, Ritchie and Barker 2006). According to hegemonic patterns of understanding, partnership tends to be perceived as a sexual relationship – or at least a relationship that originally was based on sexual attraction. It has recently become more common to acknowledge that many partnerships cease to have a strong (or any) sexual dimension as time proceeds. There has been increasing discursive support for people to continue to framing their romantic relationships as ‘partnerships’, even if sexual interaction

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has been fading (Weinberg, et al. 1994, Cline 1998). Among others, this tendency becomes obvious in the discussion of partnerships in relationship manuals and self-help literature (Marshall 1995, Marcus 1992, George 2000). However, within hegemonic discourses, ‘partnership’ has remained defined by the assumption that there should be sexual activity between partners. Marianne points out that the notion of a non-sexual partnership is something that most people, who are not familiar with polyamory, tend to have difficulties to understand. Marianne: I mean sometimes when I try to explain polyamory to my friends, they don’t get it, because they say… I mean especially, if it’s relationships that aren’t sexual, they say ‘oh but they’re just close friendships’. And I’m trying to explain that ‘no, they’re not just close friendships – they’re closer than a close friendship – they’re people that I love’. And you know, some of my friends that probably are truly monogamous, they just don’t get it. Erm, it’s funny really.

Marianne argues that although sex is an important side to her life, having many sexual relationships is not the point of polyamory. Many people who are polyamorous would have fewer sexual partners than people who practise serial monogamy, she claims.2 Philosophies of Friendship Love tends to be the defining element of polyamorous partnership. However, I do not think that Marianne’s friends were completely wrong when they evoked the notion of friendship in order to grasp the idea of polyamory. For many of my interview partners, polyamory involves particular philosophies of friendship (cf. Lano 1995b). Cath explains that what she values most in polyamorous relationships is the possibility of all partners to maintain intensely intimate relationships. To having an explicit agreement about non-exclusivity opens up the possibility to realise the full potential of different relationships. Polyamory contains the promise ‘that people, who are not sexually close, house mates, close friends, get the whole thing, all the way up and all the way down’, Cath explains. Within polyamory, friendships are taken seriously and can demand as much affection, attention and consideration as sexual relationships. Cath is in particular fond of her female friendships. According to her experience, it is in female friendships and sexual relationships that closeness and intimacy are most intense. Cath: Amongst my female friends (...) we also care for and talk about a lot, the private details of our lives. What makes the foundation of our friendship is in some way how

2 ‘The term “serial monogamy” refers to exclusive coupling with one person at a time’, suggest Munson and Stelboum (1999b). It implies that a person who practices serial monogamy does not maintain these exclusive relationships for life. The ones who practice serial monogamy thus may have a small or a large number of lifetime partners. Whatever is the case, the beginning of a new relationship always marks the end of the already existing one. According to Munson (1999), this is the core of the differences between polyamorous people and the ones who practice serial monogamy (p. 210).

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much information we have about each other. We are ... trusting, we are ... close, we’ve been in intimate touch.

Cath repeatedly juxtaposes her experience of great intimacy with female friends and partners with the lack of emotional openness in her current relationship with her male partner Pal. All of Cath’s previous partnerships have been with women. Her experiences with female friends, lovers and partners have set the standards for what she perceives as a close intimate connection. Research into gendered patterns of friendship suggests that hegemonic masculinities do not encourage disclosing intimacy both in other-sex and (heterosexual) male same-sex friendships (Duncombe and Marsden 1993, Rubin 1985, Allan 1989, Nardi 1992a, Seidler 1985, 1989). For Cath, it is in particular friendship between women that seems to provide the model for what she perceives as the true promise of polyamory (Munson and Stelboum, 1999a). Female polyamorous practice can draw upon a long tradition of endorsing female affection and friendship in lesbian and bisexual feminism (cf. Raymond, 1986, Rich, 1983, Weise, 1992), which is evident in the extensive discussion on the culture of ‘romantic friendships’ between women in 18th and 19th century anglophone cultures (cf. Smith-Rosenberg 1975, Faderman 1985, 1991, Moore 1996). The idea of intimate friendship (both sexual and non-sexual) has a central place within polyamorous discourses. One of the qualities usually associated with friendships is their generally open and non-exclusive character. Rothblum argues that ‘friendships are polyamorous and this permission to love more than one friend is in contrast to the way we conceptualise romantic relationships’ (1999: 75). Similarly, Weston (1991) has evoked the notion of a continuum between friends and lovers/partners to describe the closeness or interrelationship of these concepts in contemporary queer relationship and kinship discourses (pp. 117–122). The logic of a continuum between friendship and partnership informs Cath’s primary partner’s, approach to polyamory too. Pal: I am very much coming from becoming very, very close friends and then having those friends being very intimate, much more intimate and sort of sharing a life with them, but I really don’t like the idea of having a mould for a relationship in the way of doing it.

For Pal, friendship symbolises a relationship without such a fixed mould, a relationship, as he goes on to explain, in which you negotiate with each individual in which direction things may develop. In Pal’s description the boundaries between friendship and relationship are ambiguous. Ideally, they are worked out creatively between the individuals involved. Friendship makes such processes possible because it is usually engaged in voluntarily and, despite the closeness and interdependence it is predicated upon, it is conceptualised in a way that respects individual autonomy (cf. Allan 1996, Rubin 1985, Nardi 1999, Weeks et al. 2001). Using the ambiguity of the boundaries between friendship, partnership or lover relationship is an important aspect of polyamory. For Sharon and her partner Mark, to have sex with friends (even the ones that are not defined as ‘partners’) is not exceptional. The sexualisation of friendship may work in different directions: Sometimes long-standing friendships can turn into more sexual relationships;

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sometimes sexual attraction marks the beginning of a later, not necessarily sexual, friendship. Tales of friendship are interwoven in the narratives of many of my polyidentified interview partners. Polyamory appears to be a particularly friendshipcentred discourse. ‘Responsible Non-monogamy’ At least potentially, polyamory covers a wide range of relationship and sexual practices. Some authors stress this diversity within polyamory. ‘The term “polyamory” includes many different styles of multiple intimate involvements, such as polyfidelity, or group marriage; primary relationships open to secondary affairs; and casual sexual involvements with two and more people’, argue, for example, Munson and Stelboum (1992b: 2). With some imagination this list of polyamorous arrangements and possibilities can be endlessly continued or differentiated: Open group marriage, closed group marriage, triads, V-structures, intimate networks, poly webs, primary, secondary and tertiary partners. The different ‘types’ of poly relationships have been discussed elsewhere (cf. Nearing 1992, Anapol 1997, Bosky 1995, Labriola 1999). In the following, I am more interested in exploring the discursive process in which polyamory is distinguished from other forms of non-monogamy. This discussion will show that the frequently claimed diversity of relationship forms under the umbrella of ‘polyamory’ does not necessarily reflect a ‘peaceful coexistence’ based on the mutual respect derived from a radical pluralism3 Earlier in this chapter, I argued that many people use the term ‘polyamory’ as a positive alternative to the concept of non-monogamy. Because polyamory avoids a self-definition through negation, it symbolically undermines the normative authority of the opposite term, that is, monogamy (cf. Rust 1996). However, for many polyamory is much more than a politically correct linguistic alternative to non-monogamy. For them, polyamory circumscribes a specific, that is, pronouncedly ethical style of non-monogamy (Pallotta-Chiarolli 1995, Anapol 1997, Bloomquist 2000). Lano and Parry explain the interrelationship between polyamory and ‘responsible nonmonogamy’ as follows: Responsible non-monogamy means a non-monogamous lifestyle or arrangement in which all the partners concerned are aware of and consent to the form of relationship – thus it is distinguished both from traditional monogamy and polygamy and from the practice of serial monogamy together with secret affairs which is the mainstream of present society. The term polyamory: ‘more loves than one’ has become a generic term intended to cover all forms of responsible non-monogamy, and helps to emphasise that there is more than just sex at issue in non-monogamy. (Lano and Parry 1995b: v).

Lano and Parry claim that polyamory covers all forms of ‘responsible nonmonogamy’. This aspect of the definition emphasises the ethical aspect of polyamory. ‘Responsible non-monogamy’ is given, the authors argue, if all partners are aware of and share a consensus on the non-monogamous aspect of their relationship 3 For a discussion of an ethics that could be termed ‘radical pluralism’ or a ‘benign theory of sexual diversity’, see Weeks (1995), Rubin (1984/1992) and Seidman (1992).

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arrangement. This explanation touches on two extremely important themes within polyamory discourses: honesty and consensus. While the ethical ideal of consensus can only be worked out in a process of negotiation, honesty is the precondition for such a process to be possible at all (cf. Jamieson 2004). I perceive honesty as the basic axiom of polyamory. Tony stresses the centrality of honesty to polyamorous relationship practices. Tony: Well, there’s a sort of a mantra amongst what you could call the polyamory community. And that’s honesty, honesty, honesty! You’ve got to be honest about everything and say how you feel about it. But there’s little you can do because they’ll know anyway. Erm … so always the first consideration is to try to be as honest as possible, even when you’re saying things that you don’t like.

Other central elements of polyamory that are discussed in both the literature and the interviews are communication, negotiation, self-responsibility, emotionality, intimacy, compersion,4 all of which are closely linked to the dominant theme of honesty. Even if the definitions of polyamory as ‘responsible non-monogamy’ differ in detail, they have one thing in common. The presentation of polyamory as ‘responsible non-monogamy’ inherently evokes other forms of non-monogamy (or monogamy) that are less or not at all responsible. A range of interesting questions emerges from this perspective: Which non-monogamies are constructed as ‘responsible’ and can therefore claim to be truly polyamorous? Which non-monogamies are rendered problematic in this polyamory discourse, and what are the mechanisms through which this is achieved? What kinds of non-monogamy are assumed to play the role of the ‘other’ to the ethical project of polyamory? In the following section I demonstrate that the alleged diversity of non-monogamies under the roof of polyamory is not necessarily one shaped by mutual respect based in a radical pluralism. Polyamory and Its ‘Others’: Different Styles of Non-monogamy It is generally argued that the advanced ethical character of polyamory derives from its strong emphasis on love, intimacy, commitment, consensus and honesty. As I have shown earlier, the emphasis on love often tends to go hand in hand with the de-emphasis on sexuality. In this context it is quite interesting to see that from some perspectives polyamory does not appear as a distinctive (that is, ‘responsible’) form of non-monogamy, but not as non-monogamy at all. From Marianne’s point of view, being polyamorous and being non-monogamous involves quite different approaches. In particular when she compares her personal approach to Lara’s (her

4 ‘Compersion’ is a term closely linked to the language that has evolved around the practice of polyamory. In a website of the Polyamory Society it is defined as follows: ‘the feeling of taking joy in the joy that others you love share among themselves, especially taking joy in the knowledge that your beloveds are expressing their love for one another’ (http:// www.polyamorysociety.org/compersion.html [last accessed: June 25, 2005]). See also Ritchie and Barker (2006).

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secondary partner’s primary partner), she makes quite clear that the crucial issue in this distinction is the different emphasis on sex. Marianne: Basically most people that are poly will have several different relationships, and the idea is that you build each different relationship on its own terms, (...) whereas non-monogamy is much more about open relationships. (...) I mean all these terms are kind of very interchangeable. There’s no set definition. (...) Well, Lara’s idea compared to my idea – she’s much more open to sort of sex with friends and sort of more casual sex, and I guess polyamory’s more about love and non-monogamy’s more about sex really, because I mean there’s different ways of doing non-monogamy. There are things like swinging, which is when (...) you have one partner, who is your partner who you love. And then you have sex with other people ... like at parties, a sort of wife-swapping business.

Marianne juxtaposes her polyamorous approach that consists in ‘taking each person on their own merits’ and investing in a limited number of emotionally close longterm relationships with Lara’s non-monogamous approach that evolves from the notion of ‘open relationships’ and is to a stronger degree defined by having multiple sexual relationships. Casual sex and swinging (that Marianne labels with the derogatory term ‘wife swapping’) are presented as forms of non-monogamy rather than of polyamory. Marianne emphasises that ‘there are no set definitions’ and that these words are to a certain extent interchangeable. Indeed, she herself occasionally uses the term ‘non-monogamy’ throughout the interview to describe her position. In Marianne’s account, non-monogamy and polyamory are not sharply contrasted. There remains some overlapping space for ambiguous or shifting identification. Yet, finally polyamory and non-monogamy mark distinct identities. At least as a tendency, polyamory emphasises love, whereas non-monogamy is based on a sexoriented lifestyle or identity. Despite this distinction, Marianne does not imply that one relationship style would be less valid than the other. For her, these differences are primarily questions of personal preference or natural inclination. Although she herself is not that interested in casual sex, she does not question her friends’ enjoyment of such activities. Even if her usage of the word ‘wife swapping’ for couples, who frequent sex parties, is slightly disparaging, Marianne does not make her dislike of these scenes explicit. ‘We Are Not Promiscuous’ – a Politics of Differentiation Others drew the line between polyamory, casual sex and, most of all, promiscuity in a more categorical way. Most polyamorous people in my study felt uncomfortable with the term ‘promiscuity’ because of its strongly negative connotations. ‘Promiscuity’ is usually associated with immaturity, shallowness, narcissism, relational incapacity and lack of responsibility (Seidman, 1992, 1997, LeMoncheck, 1997). Even polyamorous people who considered reclaiming the term ‘promiscuity’ from a sexradical perspective, such as for example Pal (as discussed in Chapter 4) talked of some people as ‘being promiscuous in a bad way’. Interestingly, Pal illustrates his point of view with a reference to gay male cruising spaces. Other bisexual-identified male research participants, too, contrasted polyamory with gay male public sex culture.

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Emma talks about the widespread anger among polyamorous people in getting mixed up with people who are promiscuous or practice casual sex or swinging. Emma: Well, I mean polyamory and promiscuity is not at all the same. I don’t think it could be contained within polyamory, because a lot of us have been rather suspicious of people, if they don’t have [any] intention of seeing us again, hopefully forming a long term bond with them. But ... I mean there is this whole image that polyamorous people are swingers, are promiscuous, do it with anyone. There is a confusion between the two in the public. [There are the ones], which might have related commitments towards a small group, say three people that they’re together with and never have a relationship outside of that, and to be then between these people, who just pick people for random and stay for a very short time, that’s very annoying for a lot of polyamorous people, but that’s what is concluded. It’s really annoying that the things are mixed up together, that swinging is mixed up with polyamory, is mixed up with casual sex and any thing.

The major differences between people who are into promiscuity, swinging and casual sex and polyamorist people is that the latter have fewer partners and an honest interest in building intimate long-term relationships. Polyamory, for Emma, is about commitment and emotional closeness and not about the ambition of having many sexual partners. Emma evokes the image of a small group of people who are committed to each other and faithful within the group as a typical example of the polyamorous way of life. The model Emma seems to have in mind sounds very much like what within ‘poly speak’ is called polyfidelity (West 1996, Anderlini-D’Onofrio 2004b). Lano and Parry (1995a) define ‘polyfidelity’ in their glossary as a ‘[r]elationship involving more than two people who have made a commitment to keep the sexual activity within the group and not to have outside partners’ (p. 128). In her glossary, Deborah Anapol (1997) comes up with two alternate definitions: 1) [original usage] a lovestyle in which three or more partners who are all primary with each other agree to be sexual only within the group. More primary partners can be added with everyone’s consent. 2) [common usage] Polyamory, Responsible non-monogamy. (1997: 179)

Whereas the first definition assumes polyfidelity to be a sub-category of polyamory, in the second polyfidelity is declared to be synonymous with polyamory or responsible non-monogamy. By collapsing polyamory into polyfidelity, Anapol can be said to engage in a hegemonic strategy, fixing its meaning in a particular significatory context (cf. Laclau and Mouffe 1985). As we will see later, many polyamorous people reject this definition and make a clear distinction between polyamory and polyfidelity. What is at stake in these competing definitions is the question of what presents ‘true’ polyamory and which kinds of non-monogamy can legitimately carry the label ‘responsible non-monogamy’. Both Marianne and Emma (although in slightly different ways) define polyamory in opposition to sex-oriented styles of non-monogamy. Usually, polyamory is set apart from promiscuity, swinging and casual sex. Polyamory is frequently juxtaposed with swinging According to Sharon, swinging describes a non-intimate, random, arbitrary and technical approach to casual sex.

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The Spectre of Promiscuity Sharon: There’s definitely a sort of emotion involved and … pretty much how ever you define or act on polyamory, there’s emotion in it, whereas a swinger, whom I talked to about this, said the whole point is [that] there is no emotion. It’s just about bodies and sex. It’s like give her sex, give her a wank. Not really … that turns me off completely.

When I question Sharon on her opinion of the term ‘promiscuity’, she compares it to swinging and rejects it as ‘far too cold and clinical’. Swinging, for Sharon, seems to be the kind of sex that comes closest to the meanings associated with promiscuity. A similar objection is raised in some of the popular publications on polyamory (cf. Petrella 2007). In both the UK polyamory and bisexual movements, swinging does not seem to be highly regarded (Hemmings 1997). Many of my interview partners shared the reservations about swinging that are widespread in society at large. Apart from a critique of the notion of sex for pleasure, they saw swinging as being primarily rooted in heterosexuality. This became evident in the occasional reference to swinging as a practice of ‘wife-swapping’. This term connotes a male-centred (hetero)sexual interaction based on the exchange of women. There is no place in this language for representing female agency in sex with either men or women. Sexual activity between men is not represented at all. Of course, there is some evidence in the scarce research into the dynamics of swinging sessions that most men are reluctant or anxious to engage in same-sex activities and that there is a high prevalence of homophobia among men in the swinging scenes (D. Dixon 1985, Bartell 1971, Allyn 2000). According to this research, behavioural bisexuality is more common among swinging women. However, this research also indicates that women who engage in swinging often thoroughly enjoy their same-sex experiences and may start assuming a bisexual identity (J. Dixon 1985, 1984/2000, Rodríguez Rust 2000d). In a similar vein, Marlene explained that she discovered her sexual liking for women in the course of a swinging relationship with a befriended married couple that she and her first husband engaged in during the 1970s. Even after the end of their swinging relationship, their friendship continued for more than a decade. The Sex-Radical Critique of Polyamory The rejection of swinging and casual sex in polyamory discourses is not unequivocal (cf. Lano and Parry 1995a: vi, Easton and Lizt 1997: 41). Some of my interview partners have raised objections against the tendency in the polyamory movement to define polyamory against promiscuity, casual sex and swinging. They deplored that the promotion of polyamory as an ethically advanced style of non-monogamy creates divisions within the movement and undermines sex-radical politics. Pal is very aware of major differences with regard to the ways in which people practise polyamory. Pal: Yeah, there tend to be big differences between very different ways of doing things. It’s almost quite difficult to find your own ways and find what you do have in common, because, let’s say; some people do have the idea of commitment, fidelity, being sort of sexually exclusive (...). I see that quite as an extension of a one-way doing of a relationship, referring to a (...) society thing, which I don’t want to be part of. Other people are happy

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with that, because (...) that’s what they want and they have thought about this and that. (...) But sometimes I don’t feel that I have a lot in common with the way they do their lives. The same sort of problems, conflicts come up, (...) some were arguing that I do like to know lots of people with whom to start a relationship. So, yeah, that’s definite open. See, these people seem to think their way is higher evolved. (...) Some people say ‘Why are you people promiscuous?’ (...) It’s sort of quite a debate sometimes between people.

While Pal himself is committed to an ‘open’ approach to polyamory, he notices that others endorse exclusiveness and faithfulness. On a certain level, Pal assumes this to be a matter of personal difference. However, the issue gets more complicated if relationship and sexual choices are politicised in a moralistic manner. Pal deplores the arrogance of some polyfidelitious people who accuse him and his friends of promiscuity. That is why he suspects assimilationist aspirations behind the motivation of people who endorse (group) marriage and faithfulness. Sibyl has even more profound political disagreements with the direction of polyamory activism. She sees a tendency among poly activists to distance themselves from swingers and pleasure seekers. For Sibyl, who takes an explicitly sex-positive stance, it is politically wrong to distance oneself from such groups. If it was not for these political reasons, Sibyl explains, polyamory might in fact provide an appropriate language for describing her current relationship practice. It is due to her political critique of the sex-negativity of some parts of the polyamorous movement that she refuses such identification and consciously opts for a non-monogamous identity. However, Sibyl does not want to foreclose the possibility that in the future more inclusive interpretations of polyamory may be possible. When I took part in a workshop on non-monogamy in London, the concept of polyamory was discussed quite controversially. One of the most outspoken opponents of the idea of polyamory was Benjamin, a gay man in his 60s, who has been very active in the gay liberation movement and successive periods of gay politics in the UK. Benjamin deplores that the term ‘polyamory’ etymologically privileges the notion of love and fails to include spontaneous or casual sexual encounters. For Benjamin, the celebration of polyamory equates with the denial of showing solidarity with people who are attacked for being ‘promiscuous’. While he himself aspires to nothing more than building a monogamous partnership based on love, he does not want to diminish the casual sexual encounters that he has in the meantime. Pal, Sibyl and Benjamin all argue from what could be called a sex-positive stance. However, there are differences between Pal’s, Sibyl’s and Benjamin’s positions on polyamory, too. Pal elaborates his critique from within the paradigm of polyamory. He has personally been very active campaigning around polyamory, but is wary about certain tendencies within a movement he strongly identifies with. Sibyl thinks that current hegemonies in the poly movement render it inappropriate to identify with polyamory. Benjamin’s position is shaped by an even more profound scepticism about the discursive effects of a relationship ideology that is built upon the concept of love. Despite these differences, their positions have in common a weariness that polyamory discourses potentially reinforce the stigmatisation of people who seek sex for the sake of sexual pleasure, have ‘unreasonable’ numbers of sexual partners, or do not look for long-term intimate relationships.

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What is at stake for all of them is not so much the question of their personal life practice or current relationship ideal, but the readiness to politically defend the validity of the diversity of queer relationship forms and sexual practices. According to their critique, progressive social movement politics should avoid adopting argumentative strategies that may reinforce the marginalisation of certain sexual practices and identities. The presentation of polyamory as ‘responsible non-monogamy’ is based on the attempt to challenge the negative assumptions of non-monogamous people as promiscuous, over-sexed, self-obsessed, irrational and pathological (cf. Levine 1998, Seidman 1991, 1997). However, rather than deconstructing exclusive assumptions at the heart of promiscuity discourses, many polyamorous people deploy an argumentative strategy that aims at demonstrating that the promiscuity allegation is not applicable to themselves. This strategy is based on an act of distinction. Polyamory is said to be different from promiscuity, swinging or casual sex. This distinction follows a logic similar to the one that Smith (1994a) has identified as structuring what she calls the ‘desire for an imaginary inclusion’. In her comments on lesbian and gay politics, Smith has argued that while certain strategies of representation seem to promise formal inclusion to respectable ‘homosexuals’ (that is, the ones who do not challenge the heteronormative status quo), they continue to ostracise non-conforming or politically militant ‘queers’. As I have argued in Chapter 1, these modes of representation correlate with processes of ‘othering’ that primarily work through the discursive distinction between ‘good homosexuals’ and ‘dangerous queers’ (cf. Bell and Binnie, 2000). Some of my interview partners feared that exactly such a kind of mechanism may be at work in the juxtaposition of polyamory with promiscuity. The problematic dichotomies they see getting established in polyamory discourses are ‘the good polyamorist’/’the bad swinger’ or the ‘responsible non-monogamist’/‘the promiscuous queer’. Relational Ideologies: Love and Intimacy Throughout this chapter, I have emphasised that I do not think of polyamory as a unified discourse. Most aspects of polyamory are contested in the movement that is referring to it. However, there are certain core themes around which polyamory discourses have been constructed, namely love, intimacy, honesty, communication and commitment. According to Jeffrey Ringer (2001), we can understand such themes as ‘relational ideologies’ that frame and regulate relationship practices in particular ways. As a love- and intimacy-centred set of discourses, polyamory can be presented as superior to other forms of non-monogamy that more strongly emphasise the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Gerard, for example, suggests that while polyamory is a pronouncedly ethical discourse, gay male non-monogamies would simply be concerned with individual freedom. Although he has noticed some gay men participating in the debates about polyamory on the Internet, he questions whether what they have in mind should really be described as polyamory. Gerard: And there’re some gay men. But I don’t think (...) that gay men think of it so much as polyamory. It’s just the freedom to do what they want, which I suppose in a sense

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… polyamory is designed to try and achieve that. But it does try to believe in an ethical thing around it, rather than just a laissez-faire liberalism. You know, it tries to support people emotionally in [this] situation.

Gerard’s generalising statement that the gay men who contribute to the debate on non-monogamy and polyamory on the Internet would be committed to a plain ‘laissez-faire liberalism’ and lack the ethical concern of other polyamory-identified people stages a common stereotype of gay male non-monogamous culture as being void of mutual care. It corresponds with a certain anti-gay current in the discourses on polyamory that deploys the icon of gay male cruising culture as a contrast-foil in the description of polyamory as an emotionally deep approach to non-monogamy. This narrative structure plays on a hegemonic association of gay male sexuality with promiscuity (see Chapter 3). It disavows the fact that love has come to assume an authenticating and legitimising role in gay male and lesbian discourses on sexuality and relationships, too (Weeks et al. 2001). As the prominence of the campaign for same-sex marriage illustrates, an emphasis on love – although differently pronounced in different sexual cultures – cuts across the homosexual/heterosexual dichotomy (Mills and White 1997, Evans 2003). This new salience of love narratives in different ‘queer’ cultures seems to be somewhat oblivious of the critique of love and romanticism in earlier decades of feminist, lesbian, gay male, bisexual or counter-cultural politics. Various strands of feminism have been extremely wary of the normative function of idealising romantic love, in particular in women’s lives (Evans 2003, Jackson and Scott 2004). Within the hegemonic heteronormative gender regime, ‘successful’ romantic bonding – with a male partner of a socially ‘approved of’ class and ethnic or racial background (cf. Haritaworn, 2007) – has been ascribed the power to validate women’s social lives. The manifold feminist critiques of love throughout the 1960s and 1970s saw it as an oppressive ideology at the expense of female personal, emotional and sexual autonomy (Millett 1969/1989, Firestone 1970/1988, Greer 1970, cf. Goodison 1983). Feminists were eager to show that the worth and the richness of a woman’s life has nothing to do with the presence of romantic feelings or a coupled status (Evans 2003). They presented love as a possessive emotion, which envisions the mythical exchange of selves, idealises the absorption of others, or reinforces bourgeois perceptions of property. Others revealed the process through which the notion of true love serves the control of women’s sexuality by being implicated in a gendered double standard of sexual morality (cf. Pheterson, 1986). Here the critique of love went hand in hand with an outright rejection of the culture of monogamy (Greer 1970, Lewis 1982, Gregory 1983, Cartledge 1983). The contestation of monogamy as an integral part of an oppressive discourse of ‘romantic love’ was even more pronounced in the lesbian and gay male movements (cf. Johnston 1973, Schulman 1994, Munson and Stelboum 1999a, Altman 1971, Thorneycroft et al. 1988, Power 1995). While there is a long tradition of a critique of love as a relational ideology, cultural critics have only recently turned their attention to the role of intimacy discourses in normative expectations about sexual relationships. For example, Berlant and Warner have argued that ‘[h]eterosexual culture achieves much of its metacultural intelligibility through the ideologies and institutions of intimacy’ (1998: 553, cf. Berlant 1998).

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Contemporary hegemonic notions of intimacy are heavily influenced by therapeutic discourses (Jamieson 1998, 1999, Klesse 2007b). Normative assumptions regarding the value of intimacy are not limited to heterosexual relationship cultures. Gay male public and recreational sex cultures have been pathologised – both from without and within the gay male movements – for not sufficiently emphasising emotional closeness and intimacy (Seidman 1992). The current celebration of love and intimacy usually bolsters the hegemonic ideal of the monogamous long-term couple (cf. Bell and Binnie 2000, Califia 2000). Polyamory is an interesting case here. The political and representational effects of discourses mobilised in polyamory activism are thoroughly ambivalent. Although polyamory heavily draws upon the discourse of disclosing intimacy (cf. Jamieson 1999), it cannot be said to foster the normative ideal of monogamy. Through the promotion of multiple partnerships, polyamory challenges the hegemony of the core couple as the only valid relationship formation. Many polyamorous people see polyamory as a critical discourse that aims at diversifying intimate and sexual cultures. At the same time, polyamory discourses tend to establish exclusive standards for what should be considered an ethical sexual and relationship practice. Polyamory and polyfidelity discourses enfold their normativity in particular through a celebration of intimacy and love as the foundational values of responsible relationship practice. Thus, polyamory seems to be positioned ambiguously in the conjuncture of diverse normative and counter-normative discourses on sex and relationships. The central role of love and intimacy in polyamory discourses renders them vulnerable to being appropriated by normative and assimilationist ideologies. Although some of my interviewees identified polyamory with a queer sex-radical agenda, this is why I have some doubts whether really one day, as Sibyl has been hoping, more inclusive interpretations of polyamory will gain hegemony. This does not mean that I consider any attempt to create ethical discourses on non-monogamy as inevitably normative or oppressive. Since power relations complicate people’s relationship practices – whether monogamous or non-monogamous – we are in need of an ethical and nuanced understanding of the relational dynamics of power and how they apply to non-monogamous relationship settings. How power issues may affect the negotiation of non-monogamy between partners will be the focus of the following chapter.

Chapter 6

Negotiating Non-monogamy: Difference, Power and Intimacy

Christian: Would you have liked to be in a monogamous relationship? Matthew: Yes I think so. Yes, certainly in the early years. But even now, you know, a couple of months ago I think the answer to that would still have been yes. Now… well… (…) I’m not going to have a monogamous relationship with Imran. So the choice is really do I … do we split up and do I start again … or do we stay together as things are. And I think for me … I actually prefer to stay together as things are. Certainly for the moment. Because we … we’re still in a period of change and I’m not quite sure how it’s going to finish. (…) Christian: Did you ever thought of saying ‘Actually, I prefer to be in a closed, monogamous relationship with you’? Or did you always have the feeling that it was something which wouldn’t work (…) Matthew: No, I think I always realised that (…) his casual sex was non-negotiable. It was something he couldn’t (…) he’s not able or not prepared to stop (…).

In current sociological theory there is a tendency to present same-sex relationships as ‘in principle’ egalitarian. This is evidenced in the popularity of Giddens’ concept of the ‘pure relationship’ in the literature on lesbian and gay relationships. As I explained in the Introduction, the ‘pure relationship’ stands for a bond that is maintained for its own sake and in which partners continuously negotiate the terms and purpose of their ‘togetherness’. It has been argued that non-heterosexual relationships would be the prime examples of a new culture of intimate democracy spearheaded by ‘pure relationships’ (Bech 1997, Weeks et al. 2001, Weeks 1995, 2000b). Yet there are a range of problems with a perspective that posits choice at the heart of its explanatory narrative. The analytical centrality of choice suggests a single, autonomous, emotionally and economically independent, rationally acting subject: ‘Choice is an individualistic and, if you will, bourgeois notion that focuses on the subjective power of an “I” to formulate relationships to people and things, untrammelled by worldly constraints’, argues Kath Weston (1991: 10). If queers are stylised as the forerunners of an advanced culture of choice and egalitarianism, the multi-faceted and complex nature of power relations moves out of focus. This undermines the intelligibility of power relations around race/ethnicity, class, age, disability, gender and sexuality. Complex power relations structure all intimate and/or sexual relationships. In this regard, queer relationships are neither different nor an exception. The same applies to relationships that are non-monogamous or polyamorous. Yet the fact that these relationships are ‘non-monogamous’ renders

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them susceptible to quite specific articulations of power around the practice of nonmonogamy. In this chapter, I explore how research participants talked about conflicts with their partners on non-monogamy. My approach in this chapter is slightly different from the work of other researchers who have looked at the questions of how and by which means partners manage to (successfully) negotiate non-monogamy (Jamieson 2004, Pieper and Bauer 2006, Wosick-Korea 2005, Yip 1997, Weeks et al. 2001). My major interest is in how the process of negotiation may be complicated by wider power relations. People’s differential positioning in interconnected fields of power may result in a ‘differential ability cause’, that is, a differential ability to alter or maintain certain relationship arrangements. The notion of consensus at the heart of idealistic models of negotiation, such as Giddens’ theory of the pure relationship or the optimistic advice given in relationship manuals, revolves around a fictive idea of equal power, which is the ultimate legacy of liberal individualism. In this chapter I illustrate with some examples that the social divisions around class, gender, race/ethnicity and age do have a significant input on the way how people negotiate non-monogamy. Differential positioning within these discursive webs of power inevitably affect people’s experience of and the access to power in intimate and sexual relationships (Lorde 1980/1996, Anzaldúa 1987, Cohen 2001). Since it is impossible to read off power from certain identities, I do not aim to provide any clear-cut models or answers. Yet I hope that my discussion will stimulate further research and theorisation. Negotiation, Relationship Work and the Limits of Consent In Giddens’ model, negotiation appears as the key guarantor of emotional democracy. It is assumed that people honestly communicate their wants and needs, consider whether they want to compromise or not, and finally decide to leave the relationship, if they do not see a chance to find their wishes fulfilled. ‘It is a feature of the pure relationship that it can be determined, more at less at will, by either partner at any particular point’ (1992: 137). Some of the stories my interview partners told me were more ambivalent than that. Giddens’ account of negotiation smacks too strongly of a classical rational choice model in order to be convincing (Lash 1995: 206). It does not pay a lot of consideration either to the irrational aspects of the desiring psyche or plain matters of (emotional or material) dependencies. Similarly, relationship guides on non-monogamy and polyamory generally present an optimistic narrative that implies that readers have the potential to manage disagreements and conflicts through negotiation, self-knowledge and emotion management (Rose 1999, Petrella 2007, Klesse 2007b). These models are clearly insufficient in that they fail to consider that power imbalances undermine the conditions of an ideal contractarian relationship (cf. Pateman 1988). Negotiation processes in intimate and sexual relationships may be impacted by a broad range of articulations of power and inequality, inclusive of the dimensions of distribution, ideology, discipline and force or coercion (cf. Cooper 1995, Holland et al. 1998). The analysis of power dynamics in this context demands a subtle theorisation

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of the interconnection between structural and interpersonal dimensions of power. In the Introduction I argued that due to its strong reliance on primarily Foucauldian interpretations of disciplinary power, queer theory is ill equipped to account for inter-subjective dimensions of power in intimate and sexual relationships. Feminist theories of ‘positive power’ are more appropriate for this task (cf. Squires 1999, Allen 1998). For example, Cooper’s (1995) definition of power as the ‘differential ability to cause’ delivers an important extension of disciplinary theories of power and is particularly apt to reflect on the complexity of people’s positioning with regard to power relations. When It Just Comes Easy … Finding an Agreement In order to avoid gross misunderstandings, I wish to clarify from the beginning that I do not think that non-monogamy necessarily presents an issue of overt conflict and power struggle. A lot of my interview partners told relationship histories that seemed to be (fairly) free of conflict. Lee’s story provides a good example. Lee: I have been in a relationship for 17 years (...) we’ve actually lived together in the same house for 14 years. And (...) right from the very beginning, we said, ‘Look, we’re going to end up going with other guys. Let’s not get worked up over it. Let’s accept it’s going to happen. Be honest with one another, and just let it happen’, which is the way it has happened. And we have one or two rules in our life. If we do meet a guy when we’re out, we never take him back to our own house. And if we end up going back with a guy for sex somewhere, we never stay out all night, no matter what the time is. (...) So we (...) always have had a non-monogamous relationship. But we’ve accepted that it goes on.

Lee and Barry quickly found an arrangement on non-monogamy which suits both of them. They accepted that a desire for sex with other partners as a matter of fact and laid down some ground rules to prevent hurtful experiences. A communication of ground rules is frequently described as a central element in the successful negotiation of non-monogamy (Weeks et al. 2001, Wosick-Corea 2005, Pieper and Bauer 2006). Lee and Barry grant each other the security and comfort of a primary partnership, do not have any long-term affairs and try to be decent about their ‘outside’ sexual activities. Lee points out that sticking to the rules sometimes makes it impossible to have sex with some potential partners (for example, if they, too, cannot provide a space), but he is willing to accept this restriction. Because they are not in disagreement, according to Lee’s point of view, the question of power is not acutely felt in their relationship. Many research participants (both gay- and bisexual-identified) managed to find ways to integrate non-monogamous arrangements in their relationships in way that did not seem to stir up a great deal of trouble. This included the acceptance of further partners (both sexual and intimate, short term and long term) and a joint or separate enjoyment of casual sex, cruising, group sex, orgies, or sex and fetish parties. Some of my interview partners stressed that they found mutually satisfying arrangements, even if the partners’ preferences with regard to (non)monogamy did not converge at all. Patrick, for example, introduces his ten-year relationship with Boris as follows: ‘It is an open relationship. He chooses to be monogamous and I

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choose not to be! But we discussed that right at the outset’. Once everything had been made clear this way, both partners do not consider it necessary to talk a great deal about the non-monogamous aspect of their relationship. Similarly, Marianne’s partner Charles stresses that the arrangement, according to which he is monogamous and Marianne polyamorous, works well for both of them. Even if Charles talks about his initial emotional difficulties of ‘coming to terms with’ or ‘getting used to’ his partner’s bisexuality and polyamory and feels that he had to compromise to make the relationship work, he sees it as his free choice to be monogamous in a polyamorous relationship. Charles: But I think I’m monogamous by choice, because it’s just ... I like an easy life! (...) I’d much rather concentrate on one relationship and being truly happy in that, than going out with … having outside relationships. It’s nice, it strengthens our relationship a lot to know that I have the freedom to have other partners, if I decide to. But (...) right now, the way my mind is at the moment, I don’t think it’s likely. I’m quite happy with the relationship I have. I’m not seeking to add to it or to complement it in any way.

However, not all of my interview partners found it so easy to bridge differences or settle disagreements with regard to non-monogamous relationship practice. When It Doesn’t Work Smoothly … Conflict and Relationship Labour Negotiating the boundaries of relationships or the parameters of non-monogamous practice involved serious conflict and very painful experiences for many of my interview partners. Patricia and Craig, for example, struggled for many years to work out their differences with regard to their sexual identities and relationship expectations. Craig, who identified as heterosexual until very recently and who thinks of himself as an extremely jealous person, experienced Patricia’s strongly felt need to explore her bisexuality through sexual relationships with women as an extreme threat to their relationship. When Patricia finally decided to look for social contacts in the bisexual scene, Craig put a lot of pressure on her and threatened to leave her if she would not stop visiting the London Bisexual Women’s Group. After a period of uneasy compromise and intense clashes over questions around jealousy and autonomy, they decided to experiment with non-monogamy in the sixth year of their relationship. While both were pretty confident that they would work out their difficulties at the time when I interviewed them, Patricia told me that their relationship had finally fallen apart over the jealousy issue when I met her at BICON 2000 in Manchester. Matthew and Imran, too, have had a long period of serious arguments and rows about non-monogamy in their partnership. Although their relationship is declared to be non-monogamous, Matthew has had difficulties coming to terms with the amount of casual sex his partner has (see opening quote to the chapter). After having a rather rough time over the last few years, they have recently decided to give it a new try. They decided to move in with each other and Matthew hopes that Imran will be more discrete about his casual encounters.

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Matthew: I was brought up to believe that relationships should be monogamous and that’s what I expected and I suppose I felt that you wouldn’t be able to have trust and be there for the other person in a relationship unless you were monogamous. And just things with Imran have turned out differently. So I suppose I’m not a sort of natural for open relationships. It’s just the way a particular relationship has turned out, that it is open and now I feel it’s not my ideal but I feel moderately comfortable about accepting it, and there are some pluses for me as well as minuses.

For Matthew, non-monogamy is clearly a compromise. Although he accepted that he will not be able to change his partner, I got the impression that he was really worried whether their arrangement would hold in the long run. In some relationships, non-monogamy (in general or with regard to questions of detail) is subject to profound disagreement and conflict. This puts partners in a position to work through a lot of emotional baggage in a process that could be described as ‘relationship labour’. Non-monogamy may consequently turn out to be quite intensive in terms of the emotional labour necessary to re-create trust and resolve the conflict. This seems paradoxical – at least in the light of Laura Kipnis’ (1998) thesis that the appeal of (some forms of) non-monogamy stems from a resistance to the surplus relationship labour demanded by monogamous long-term relationships. According to Kipnis, the contractual relationship work that is demanded to make (heterosexual) marriage possible is an extension of the capitalist labour regime, the logic of productivity and the performance principle into the sphere of sexuality and intimacy (p. 291). Adultery, she argues, has emerged as a collective fantasy of transgression in Western societies, which expresses a denial to subject to this work regime and the surveillance of the ‘marital panopticon’. My analysis above suggests that parts of Kipnis’ witty analysis ironically may apply to certain regimes of nonmonogamy, too. For example, Kipnis takes inspiration form Herbert Marcuse’s concept of ‘surplus repression’ when she defines as ‘surplus monogamy’ the additional labour that people have to put into maintaining monogamous relationships (p. 291). In the light of my data, it seems to be adequate to talk also of ‘surplus nonmonogamy’. In particular, in the discourse of polyamory, relationship labour is even celebrated and rendered the ultimate indicator of an ethical relationship practice. Serena Petrella’s (2007) critical reading of polyamory advice books reveals that a conceptualisation of relationships as ‘work’ is central to the paradigm of polyamory. According to Petrella, the deliberate subjection to a ‘Protestant work ethic’ has the function of purifying polyamory in order to make it distinguishable from narcissistic hedonism and greedy pleasure-seeking (cf. Hariatworn et al. 2006). This critique applies to particular (and primarily partner-centred) discourses on non-monogamy. Not all non-monogamous people feel the need to negotiate their sexual and intimate lives with their partners to such an extent (cf. Ho 2006). What Has Power Got to Do With It? The fact that some non-monogamous relationship arrangements are marked by a significant amount of conflict does not necessarily mean that this conflict is experienced as a power struggle. Respondents tended to speak of power in that sense

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only when the positions were quite antagonistic and either one or all partners did not want to compromise. Apart from the question of how the conflict is experienced on the level of individual emotionality, writings on the research methodology suggest that most people describe their relationships as egalitarian in qualitative interviews in order to avoid stigmatisation of either themselves or their partners (Duncombe and Marsden 1993, 1996). Some of my interview partners suggested that it was generally inappropriate to relate the perspective of power to the issue of non-monogamy. Such arguments usually drew on a liberationist discourse on non-monogamy. For example, Gerard suggested that polyamory is mainly about freedom and autonomy rather than power. Christian: Have you ever thought about (...) polyamory and non-monogamy (...) in terms of power? (...) Gerard: Well power relations … I think that’s interesting, I’ve never really thought of it in that way. No, I think (...) maybe in some sense monogamy is about power. Monogamy is about (...) to stop you living your life and expressing your emotions (...) in a sexual way. (...) I think polyamory is ultimately about freedom. So in a sense it’s about selfempowerment. It’s about autonomy (...), not about power over other people, but to do it in such a way that it doesn’t hurt other people.

According to Gerard, the demand for monogamy, as opposed to polyamory, is born out of the desire to control and restrict other people’s freedom. Gerard further links this perspective with a socialist critique of the family. He sees monogamous heterosexual family relationships as the bedrock of the capitalist system of labour reproduction. At the same time, Gerard is aware that non-monogamous practice is not necessarily egalitarian in the sense that in a non-monogamous relationship usually ‘one person is getting more opportunity to avail of it’, which may cause jealousy and other painful experiences. While non-monogamy therefore is always open to the misuse of power, what is needed, according to Gerard, is an ethical project to deal with and to diminish these power imbalances. From his point of view, polyamory provides an intrinsically ethical philosophy and project, ‘a framework to try and exercise freedom’, which evolves around the responsibility to look after one’s partners. Of course, polyamory does not provide the only ethical discourse on non-monogamy. In general, my interview partners have stressed the necessity of an ethical approach that revolves around the themes of honesty, responsibility, care, respect and compromise for making non-monogamous relationship practices work. Whether partners experience the negotiation of non-monogamy as an overt power issue is among others to a certain degree dependent on whether all partners meet up to such ethical standards. Gerard’s analysis of monogamy operates primarily on the level of political discourse. It does not rule out that processes negotiating non-monogamy may indeed be structured in power. Many of my interview partners experienced conflicts about non-monogamy in terms of a power struggle. The perspectives of partners on this issue do not necessarily overlap. Thomas, for example, comes up with an analysis very similar to Gerard’s in order to reject the idea that non-monogamy could have anything to do with power issues.

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Christian: Okay ... (...) [do] you think there are power issues involved in living an open relationship? Thomas: (...) I actually think there isn’t actually. (...) Though the only thing is, (...) if there is an issue, I think it’s to do with maybe for the other person who needs to feel that they’re not being forgotten about, yeah? (...) For example, if Franca was going off and sleeping with somebody else, (...) [and] I suddenly would become concerned about exactly what’s happening with her relationship and, you know, trying to fit some sort of limits to it. (...) So maybe in that way I’m putting some sort of power on her. But I don’t think the point of having affairs is (...) a power game thing.

Thomas provides a narrative of his relationship with his partner Franca that implies a smooth and conflict-free management of their non-monogamy. There is only a brief hint that Thomas may at times feel ‘forgotten about’ when France is with another sexual partner. Yet power comes into play, according to Thomas, only when he gets upset and may try to restrict Franca’s freedom. Franca’s narrative is quite different from that. In a quite self-critical fashion she reads their relationship as a permanent power struggle, in which she has continuously changed the rules and pushed the boundaries. Franca made it very clear to Thomas from the beginning that they only could have a relationship if he accepted that she will have sex with other women. Thomas, who feels naturally inclined towards monogamy, accepted this condition, but bargained for a few rules that would make him feel safer in the relationship. According to these rules, Franca was not supposed to have long-term affairs or relationships and no sexual involvement with men. Over the years, Franca increasingly felt that these rules were too restrictive. Franca: Well … I think power has got always to do with the relationship (...) [It] was always a big issue. (...) And I think what happened was I knew what I wanted. I knew he wasn’t very happy about it. But I sort of respected it, and I didn’t push it too much to begin with. I tried to do a bit for a bit. But I know that what happened was that we broke one boundary, we broke the rules, then we changed the rules. And then we moved on again. And then when the time was come (...) we just said ‘ok, let’s change the rules again’ or ‘I’m not happy about that’, and then we’ll try to change the rules. But it was always a question of me trying to break them or trying to (...) change the rules and go forward, (...) but it’s always been a power struggle on that until very recently when this happened. And that’s when he got really upset. (...) He said to me, ‘There are no more [rules]’. (...) All the rules that were there to make him feel safe had been actually broken, (...) and not only one. I had two relationships going and not only one with a woman, one with a man as well. It’s like totally mad. (...) So I mean it’s very scary for him. So he thinks I can always do that, to change my mind.

Franca describes her negotiation of non-monogamy with Thomas as a continuous power struggle. She knew what she wanted from early on and adopted a soft strategy to give Thomas time to get used to things. Yet Franca never thought she would go as far as she did. It never entered her mind that she would insist on having a relationship and it never occurred to her that she might want to get involved with a man. Franca explains her new assertiveness in having these relationships with developments in her relationship and sex life and with the changing nature of her desire. By explaining in detail the personal reasons for her behaviour, Franca wants

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to show that she is not simply messing around with Thomas. Yet she is still convinced that she has exerted power by changing or breaking the rules they had originally agreed upon. Franca’s notion of power seems to come very close to Cooper’s (1995) definition of power as ‘the ability to create effects’ or a ‘differential ability to cause’, here understood as the ability to reach changes of the arrangements around nonmonogamy against the strong wishes of a partner. If You Do What You Don’t Want to Do … Consent as Abstract Fiction Other interview partners stated the issue of power in much more explicit terms. Power, for example, is the dominant theme in Simon’s narration of the process of negotiating ‘a polyamorous household under construction’ with Georgette, a bisexual female BDSM partner of his. According to Simon, Georgette initially had serious problems accepting his polyamorous inclinations. In particular, Georgette has had difficulties with Simon’s request to include another woman in their future polyamorous living arrangement. While Georgette for a long period rejected the participation in such a communal household, she recently has indicated her readiness to have a multiple relationship that includes other women as sexual partners. However, as Simon summarises the process of their negotiation, Georgette explained that it would only be possible for her to bear such a situation if they conceptualised their relationship as a radical dominance/submission relationship. Simon: But since then she accepted it, she has decided that she can, she can accept the idea, if she’s ... if her relationship is a fairly extreme master/slave one, then she’ll be able to accept that whatever I do is right. You know, if she does chop that [certain] limit, its just part of another test of her obedience. Which is, which I think, if it works out, it’s going to be (...) another striking example of my belief (...) about how dominance/submission gives you a very special [tool] for handling problems of poly. [laughs] If it works out ...

While Simon does not deny that such a relationship would be structured in a power relationship, he insists that even master/slave relationships should be understood within the paradigm of egalitarianism. Simon: These are relationships with people who would choose to submit to me voluntarily and because they believe they can trust me to respect their names and rights within a framework, where one of their driving themes is to be dominated. But in many ways they are still ... this is still an equality relationship.

Simon’s explanation is based on a common discourse with which BDSM practitioners have sought to correct pathologising misrepresentations. Since the 1970s, BDSM communities have promoted an explicit ethical orientation that BDSM is ‘safe, sane and consensual’. In this discourse there is a general emphasis is on sensuality and mutuality. Consensus is the central concept of the hegemonic ethos in organised BDSM scenes (Hart and Dale 1996, Taylor and Ussher 2001, Bauer 2005). BDSM ‘ideally exists within a framework involving rules and boundaries that should be mutually agreed upon and respected. This is fundamentally how one differentiates abuse from “classic” sadomasochism’ argues Carl Stychin (1995: 86). Since

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communication is commonly perceived to be a pre-condition for establishing consensus, verbal negotiation is an integral part of contemporary BDSM practice. It is thus not uncommon to encounter the argument that BDSM relationships tend to be even more egalitarian than relationships based on (heterosexual) mainstream erotic practice (Ehrenreich et al. 1986: 125–133, Macnair 1989). The claim that BDSM is distinct from violence and abuse is usually based on the claim that it takes place in the restricted space of negotiated sessions of erotic power play (‘scenes’) and that there is a difference between fantasy and reality (P. Duncan 1996). Master/slave relationships sit uneasily with the common political rhetoric of BDSM activism. This is in particular the case with regard to so-called 24/7 relationships, in which the boundary between BDSM role (‘fantasy’) and everyday life practice (‘reality’) is obscured or drifting towards dissolution. This is why 24/7 relationships – despite assuming a quasi-mythological role in subcultural representation – are often frowned upon in BDSM circles (Bauer 2007). Master/slave relationships and in particular 24/7 relationships carry the potential to undermine or endanger one of the bedrocks of a discourse through which BDSM practitioners seek public sphere inclusion. When Simon argues that a non-monogamous relationship with Georgette would be egalitarian, this may sound paradoxical to the ears of those accustomed to the classical liberal account of consensus, which is based on the abstract fiction of a contract between autonomous individuals. Some may argue that Simon’s story of his negotiation with Georgette is highly specific since it evolves in a context explicitly defined as BDSM (in which the eroticisation of power for mutual pleasure or gratification is the core motive). The association of non-monogamy with dominance/ submission in their relationship can therefore not be applied to other (non-BDSM) relationship contexts. My intention in telling this story is not to suggest that nonmonogamy is essentially about excessive use of power. Nor do I want to come up with generalisations about non-monogamous BDSM practitioners. I do not think that Simon and Georgette’s relationship is representative in any way of BDSM culture in general or dominance/submission relationships in particular. However, I think it is worthwhile to tell this story because it shows a profound ambiguity at the heart of the notion of consensus. It is possible, in my opinion, to make visible through the lens of this story that the construction of consensus as an agreement, in which everybody agreess to do what they want to do is a fiction. It is an idealisation based on the erasure of the grey zones of ambiguity. Simon and Georgette, Thomas and Franca, and Patricia and Craig (see above) face similar problems in their relationships. They all find themselves in disagreement about the basic arrangements with regard to (non-)monogamy. According to the currently influential idea of a new relationship egalitarianism, such conflicts are ideally dealt with through negotiation until, through the free choice of all partners, consent may be found (cf. Giddens 1992). However, is it possible at all to speak of consensus if you consent to things you do not want or you may even hate or fear? Many of my interview partners (inclusive of gay men) related stories about painful experiences in relationships in which they ‘consented’ to things they found difficult to bear. The notion of consent is too idealistic a concept to understand the processes of negotiation in these relationships. It cannot account for the ambivalence and

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fragility at the heart of many non-monogamous relationship arrangements. If approached through a theory of power as the ‘differential ability to cause’, consent ceases to appear as an unproblematic outcome of the free choice of ‘in principle’ equal individuals. In her discussion of feminist sexual ethics, Valverde argues ‘that consent is relative, since people are not equally informed and equally powerful and do not necessarily have many choices (....) [T]he fact is that we are not autonomous individuals with equal amounts of power’ (1985: 200). Common understandings of consensus rely strongly on a theoretical individualism and universalism derived from contract theory that understates difference, inequality and subordination (cf. Pateman 1988). Moreover, the idea that consensus is established in free negotiation between rational agents may be particularly inadequate for the theorisation of sexual choices in that it fails to take account of the irrational dimensions of human desire (cf. Assister 1993, 1996, Valverde 1985). Let me briefly summarise my argument so far: While the practice of nonmonogamy and processes of negotiating non-monogamy are not necessarily shaped by overt conflict, in cases of disagreement non-monogamy may become the subject of hard relationship work and power struggles. I have further argued that it is unreasonable to assume that power is equally distributed between partners. Contrarily, the interplay of diverse aspects of people’s social positioning translates into a situation in which some people may be less likely to realise their ideas about what the relationship should be like. In the following I give some examples of how the question of social positioning is linked to the subjection to an interconnected web of different regimes of power. Differential Positioning, ‘Relationship Defining Power’ and Social Capital Differential social positioning in terms of class, race/ethnicity, gender, age and dis/ ability may result in unequal power between partners when they are negotiating questions around non-monogamy. In general, it is difficult to define in any clear-cut or predictable way how being subjected to certain discourses and material conditions translates into processes of negotiation in a relationship context. How people behave in situations of conflict and crisis and how far they are willing to go in accepting the terms of a relationship they disagree with is also dependent on people’s personal life experience and the dynamics of particular relationship histories. Yet the question how one is able to respond is also tied up with differences in social positioning and their impact on each partner’s access to resources and social capital (inclusive of discursive capital). Weeks et al. (2001) use the concept of ‘relationship defining power’ (developed by Peplau et al. 1997) in the section of their book in which they discuss the negotiation of power differentials. An analysis focussing on ‘relationship defining power’ is interested in how differential access to certain resources may result in a situation in which some partner(s) may have a stronger influence than others on the ways in which certain conflicts may be resolved (or not). While originally the concern was primarily with economic resources and education, Weeks et al. (2001) suggest that it is necessary to adopt a broader definition of ‘resources’ to include

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the cultural and social dimension. They realise this by taking recourse the concept of social capital. Over recent years, various theories on social capital have been applied to the study of intimate relationships (cf. Edwards 2004). Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan step outside a primarily economic rationality by defining social capital to include a reference to ‘the extent to which individuals can access local or community knowledge and support’ (2001: 117–18). I largely agree with the claim that social positioning impacts on access to social resources and the degree of social capital a person is able to claim. Yet a problem derives from the fact that the authors’ conceptualisation of social capital rests on an idealistic understanding of community. The definition of ‘community as social capital’ (cf. Weeks 2000c: 187– 189) sees community only in terms of empowerment. Of course, while affiliation with a particular community may supply some people with powerful resources and discourses, others may be disempowered in the same community context. Moreover, as I have argued in Chapter 3, many queer people perceive themselves to be part of different, partially overlapping and partially antagonistic communities. Difference is permanently negotiated in the self-positioning of multiply marginalised subjects (P. Duncan 1996). The problem therefore is not to establish which person has got more access to any particular set of ‘community knowledges’ due to, for example, their long involvement in lesbian and gay culture and politics. Rather, the more tricky task is to analyse how different kinds of (‘community’) knowledges carry different value in a particular social context (Erel 2007: 263–264). This criticism notwithstanding, a social capital perspective can be quite fruitful for understanding the power dimensions of negotiating the terms and boundaries of a relationship. This is in particular the case, if we follow an understanding of social capital in the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualisation. In Bourdieu’s (1979/1996, 1986) work, social capital is conceived as one form among many through which privilege may be enacted. He describes the transmission, accumulation, and strategic transformation of social capital as an ubiquitous process through which inequalities are both produced and maintained. In the following I illustrate with some examples, how different aspects of an individual’s social positioning can be read as a dimension of social capital, which ultimately impacts on this person’s ability to successfully negotiate non-monogamy in a relationship. Class Matters … When Money Has a Voice Social positioning in terms of class may have an enormous impact on the distribution of ‘relationship defining power’ in non-monogamous relationship contexts. In Chapter 4 I discussed problems related to legal other-sex marriage in a polyamorous family household in London. At the time of my first interview with Mick, he lived with his partner Tony, Tony’s married partner Caroline and their three children in a communal household. Mick was very frustrated about the inequity in and between their relationships that he saw (among other factors) deriving from Tony’s and Caroline’s married legal status. Despite the fact that both Tony and Caroline claimed that they did not make distinctions between their partners, Mick felt strong boundaries between him and the rest of the family. His feelings were reinforced by the fact that he lived in ‘their’ house. Although Mick, too, had brought things to the

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household that were used by everybody and which established a kind of reciprocity, he felt like a ‘house guest’ more than a family member. At the same time, the fact that Mick was a student receiving benefits and had limited financial resources grounded a certain economic dependency. The issue of financial inequality became even more salient when the family decided to look for a larger house that provided sufficient space also for Leroy, one of Caroline’s partners, to move in. Although Mick describes the decision-making about which house to buy as a collective process, he believes that his voice did not have the same weight because he could not afford to contribute to the mortgage. While Tony, too, had no money, his position in the negotiation was improved by the fact that he has dedicated himself to bringing up the children ‘for Caroline’, who has been the main earner in the family. Mick: But I don’t think that my opinion carried as much weight as, for example, Leroy’s opinion, because he’s paying … actually he’s paying most of the mortgage, because Caroline can’t afford so much because she’s got to pay for the kids as well. And yeah, I mean … Tony, I mean, he works his butt off every day for the kids, so his opinion has quite a bit of weight as well. I don’t think Caroline would ever go against his wishes, if there was something he really didn’t like she wouldn’t say ‘oh but you’re not paying for the mortgage are you, so your opinion doesn’t count’, because he does quite a lot of work for her, bringing up the kids. So I’m in a bit of a peculiar situation. I’m not paying for the mortgage and for me this whole thing is temporary (...) I’m realistic. I’m not going to spend the next twenty years in a tiny room. I think I want more out of life than that.

According to Mick’s analysis, the question of who has a say in the decision about where and how to live is clearly dependent on economic resources. Mick felt that his wishes were the last ones to be considered in the discussion about the distribution of the rooms between the poly family members because he could not contribute to the mortgage. Moreover, the fact that the house would not be in his name also reinforced his feeling of not having the same entitlement to space as the others. According to Mick, Tony, who also had no money, is treated differently because he contributes on the different level by being the main carer for the children. Mick’s feeling of having no entitlement and less say in important decisions may well feed into his resignation with regard to his strongly resented ‘secondary partner’ status. When Mick argues that for him their living arrangement is temporary because he wants more out of life and is ‘not going to spend the next twenty years in a tiny room’, he makes clear that his own commitment is not independent from the economic relationships in the polyamorous family, too. For Mick, sharing material resources in a relationship symbolises commitment. Because Mick does not see himself fully included in the relations of mutual economic reciprocity in the relationship network, he tempers his emotional commitment accordingly. Many interview partners spoke about differences in earning when I asked them about power issues in their relationship. In many cases economic inequalities were a more or less stable feature of a relationship. In others they characterised only certain periods in a relationship, for example, when one partner was (temporarily) unemployed or in education. Without wanting to feed misguided perceptions on class mobility, I suggest that these examples illustrate that the salience of classissues may be shifting in an overall economy of ‘relationship defining power’. At

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the same time, financial matters do not define the entire spectrum of power-relevant class effects. Their complex entwinement with matters of representation, discourse and habitus complicate this issue enormously (Sekggs 1997, Bourdieu 1979/1996, Jenkins 1999). Moreover, because differences in class positioning intersect with the divisions and discourses around race/ethnicity, gender, religious affiliation, social and cultural identities, age or dis/ability, the specific power effect of each of these relations is difficult to define. Navigating Public Spheres … Race, Religion and Social Capital Above I have argued that the access to social, cultural and economic resources and the mobilisation of social capital plays a significant role in the balance of power between partners in the sense of a ‘differential ability to cause’. For example, people may mobilise moral support for their position among friendship circles, deploy hegemonic and normative discourses from within a variety of public spheres or use the skills and competences they have gained in various contexts of social experience. Irfan has been in a relationship with Martin for about seven years. He met Martin while he was just in the process of coming out. Martin is his first boyfriend. Over the last four years Irfan and Martin have had serious conflicts about the nonmonogamous aspect of their relationship. Currently Irfan is reconsidering the terms of their relationship. He has been very hurt and disappointed because over the years Martin has broken every single rule they have made to make their relationship work as an open partnership. After having suffered a lot of emotional distress, Irfan has now decided that he will either convince Martin to redefine their relationship as monogamous or leave him. Irfan has always been more inclined towards a monogamous relationship. However, he argues that he could not articulate his wishes for a long time because Martin was able to define the terms of the relationship. Martin is older, has been out for many more years and had gained plenty of experience on the gay scene. Further, he did not have to struggle with issues of religious morality in the way Irfan, as a practising Muslim, had. Christian: Did you ever suggest closing your relationship or was it something you felt he wouldn’t go with? Irfan: I didn’t really think about that. I just took it for granted that that’s the way the relationship would be. Even though at times I felt uncomfortable with it, I didn’t find that I could actually ‘close’ the relationship. (...) I wasn’t thinking about ending the relationship. That was [like] ‘Of course we’d be together, of course the relationship is open’ … I think I was too naïve at the time to think about that and too scared as well. Martin was very much in control of the relationship early on. He was four years older than I am and sexually has so much more experience than I had and had been out and was very comfortable with his sexuality as well. Religiously I had many issues, and for Martin there was nothing there, and for him having sex was no big deal. There was no morality involved with it. Whereas for me, my religion has got some morality, which will then give me a guilt complex as well.

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As an experienced gay man who is very comfortable with his sexual identity, Martin has more social capital to draw upon to define the terms of the relationship. Apart from experience related to age, the question of social capital is linked here to race and religion in the sense that in the early years of their relationship, Irfan suffered from massive homophobia from his family and had to confront heteronormative assumptions at the heart of hegemonic Muslim values. At the same time he felt that he could not mobilise his religious values in the context of this inter-racial and inter-faith partnership (cf. Erel 2007). Despite the fact that Irfan has a sense of a (shifting) power-imbalance in his relationship with Martin, he prefers to think about their negotiations in terms of self-empowerment, rather than in a model in which Martin has exerted power over him. Christian: In which ways do you think power has played a role in your relationship, as an open relationship? (...) Irfan: I don’t. (...) There was never any power politics. There was more competitiveness than power. (...) Martin maybe at first, because he’s had a lot more understanding of relationships, tried to use that to his advantage, and he tried to dominate me or take control or power over me. That wasn’t going to work. I would never have the ability to have power over Martin I think he’s too much a free spirit, … [he] has had too much experience in life for anybody to have power over him. So it’s never really been an issue. The power has only really come to play in my own part, to have power over me growing and empowering myself and actually making decisions, which will affect me myself as opposed to allowing Martin to make these decisions. I feel more able to do that.

A range of factors is important to Irfan’s process of self-empowerment. For example, Irfan has in recent times started to discuss issues around sexuality with other queer Muslim people in the context of Al-Fatiha, a Muslim LGBTQ group. Access to Muslim gay-affirmative discourses and social environments has given him more security and strength to deal with his dissatisfaction in the relationship. At the same time, to self-empower himself in this context does not make him less oppressed. Thus, Irfan has been very wary of the racism and Islamophobia in the predominantly white and (culturally) Christian lesbian and gay movement in the UK. According to Irfan, the power imbalances in his relationship with Martin are shifting. As a result of that Irfan feels that he has more ‘relationship defining power’ or at least the strength to leave the relationship. Irfan’s story reveals that social positioning in terms of race and religion may affect power dynamics and negotiation processes in non-monogamous relationships. Of course, Irfan’s example is not representative. Not every South Asian Muslim gay man, for example, is religious. There are secular and atheist Muslims. Not every religious Muslim would accept that monogamy is a Muslim value. Even my small and limited sample is indicative of a great diversity with regard to people’s stances on religious, cultural, sexual and political values. It would be misleading, therefore, to draw generalised conclusions about a Muslim or South Asian perspective or about inter-racial and inter-faith relationships from my discussion above (cf. Bhatt 1994, Patel and Maharaj 2000, Naz Project 2000, Patel 1997, 1999). Yet it is obvious from Irfan’s story that the emergence of a queer British South Asian or British-Muslim

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discourse and a public sphere around it in which Irfan could participate and socialise strengthened his position with regards to the conflicts in his partnership. Counterpublics, ‘Postfeminism’ and Gender Paradoxes If we focus in the analysis of inter-personal power in relationships on the question of social positionality, we should remain aware that power on this level always is intersubjective, relational and highly context-dependent. The analysis of interpersonal power (inclusive of ‘relationship defining power’) cannot simply draw conclusions from racial/ethnic, gender, class or other identities, but has to consider the complex interplay of diverse factors in a specific intersubjective and societal context. The question regarding in which public sphere context such negotiations take place is extremely important here. In Chapter 4 I argued that the gendered character of anti-promiscuity discourses renders women in general and women of certain racialised and ethnicised groups in particular more vulnerable to stigmatisation for non-conforming sexual behaviour. This makes it more difficult for women to mobilise discourses and values on their behalf in non-monogamous relationship contexts. In heterosexual (or other-sex bisexual) relationships, women’s ability to cause change and alter (or maintain) relationship arrangements is further hampered by many men’s denial to engage in the emotional work necessary to resolve personal problems (Duncombe and Marsden 1993, Jamieson 1998). Gendered patterns of aggression and violence when confronted with difficult emotions (such as, for example, jealousy) are a further problem (Easton and Klesse 2006). However, in certain (counter-) public sphere contexts, women who do have an interest in nonmonogamy may also be able to mobilise legitimising and supportive discourses on their behalf. For example, Franca thinks that she would be exposed to even more criticism for her insistence on non-monogamy in her relationship if the gender constellation of their relationship were different. Christian: Do you think (...) there are particular issues at stake in being in an open relationship, having an open sexual life as a woman? Franca: Yeah, yeah. I think sometimes there is. But at the same time I think I can get away more with it than if I was a man at the same time. Because if I, … with the female friends that I have, if I was a man and I was saying what I do, they would get really upset. They would think I take advantages and my poor girlfriend and all this and that. Although I must say, most of my friends say ‘poor Thomas’ … and they say he’s a saint. And lots of them are lesbians as well. They’d said to me, even though they are lesbians, they said to me ‘Oh my God, you’re doing all this – poor Thomas – he should be canonised’. Lots of them do. But if I was a man, I think, especially female friends of mine would find it very hard to accept or they would really think I’m a really big pervert.

Although Franca does meet moral disapproval and faces judgemental attitudes, she believes that in a public sphere context politicised by feminism and queer critique, a man insisting on non-monogamy against the will or emotional wellbeing of his female partner would be much more challenged for doing so. Franca’s statement is grounded on the opinion that the critique of feminism has restructured sexual ethics,

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at least in certain queer-feminist, sex-radical or polyamorous counterpublics. In such counterpublic spheres, the critique of hegemonic masculinity and male sexuality and the affirmation of autonomous female sexuality have, to a certain degree, undermined the gendered double standard. This can be seen as a paradox in contemporary gender politics (Klesse 2006b). It is not only that women may add weight to their voice if they can mobilise discourses and ethical standards hegemonic in certain public sphere contexts when negotiating with their partners. Inasmuch as their partners refer to the same discourses and ethical representations and are politicised through them, power dynamics may change significantly. For example, when Thomas suggests that the only way that power could enter his relationship with Franca would be if he started to inquire about her sex life and tried to put a restriction on her affairs, he may have such ambivalent feelings about such behaviour, because he is aware that it would be him as a man controlling his female partner’s sexuality. The acceptance of the political critique of gendered power in the context of compulsory monogamy thus creates new dynamics with regard to ‘relationship defining power’. Age Matters … the Power of Being Young and Beautiful My last two examples are primarily concerned with age. Age forms an important social division in society that is often neglected in the analysis of power relations. In a culture that idealises and celebrates youthful bodies, age plays a strong role in normative constructions of sexuality (Featherstone 1995). Gay male sexual cultures have frequently been criticised for a particularly pronounced (sexual) discrimination on the grounds of age (Weeks 1981, Bennett and Thompson 1991). Age differences between partners therefore may affect the balance of power in the negotiation of non-monogamy. Bommi talked about the massive conflicts he had with his last partner about his dedication to both non-monogamy and S/M. Bommi is very aware that the fact that his partner Adam was ten years older made it less likely that he would have the same opportunities in a non-monogamous relationship. Bommi: I met a guy called Adam when I was 21/22 and after a couple of months I moved in with him. And we went out for ten years. (...) He was 12 years older than me as well, so I was 21 and he was about 33. And so I raised it and said I wanted to open up the relationship. (...) He saw that as the beginning of the break up. And what I actually said was, I wanted a long-term relationship with him, and the way to sustain that was to have an open relationship, in that I couldn’t promise myself to him 100 per cent. And I think he struggled with that initially, because he was a bit older than me. I had more to gain from an open relationship than he did.

For Bommi it is obvious and self-explanatory that an older person has less to gain from an open relationship. In a discriminatory context such as the youth-focussed gay male scene, a person’s age is an important factor regulating sexual opportunities. According to Bommi’s narrative, Bommi’s and Adam’s relationship was marked by a strong competition. He claims that Adam strongly resented the easiness with which he could find sexual partners. When Bommi dedicated himself more and more

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to S/M and established himself as a successful top, Adam’s feelings of envy and competitiveness escalated and fed into a strong dislike of S/M. For some time Adam himself tried his chances on the S/M scene, because he thought this would give him the opportunity to meet younger partners. Yet finally, he retreated from the scene and started to demonise S/M as a ‘relationship wrecker’. Bommi: There’s a massive surplus of bottoms, people want to be dominated, and I’ve always dominated other guys. (...) So, generally, where that makes me in short supply, I used to get a lot of younger guys who wanted to be dominated. And one of the things he saw was that if he did the same, he would get lots of young guys going after him. But the thing about wearing the leather is, not just wearing it, it’s carrying it off and being convincing and having that attitude and aura around the whole S/M thing. And he sort of stood there, just looking very uncomfortable and not really into it. And that came across. Whereas, you know, I used to do quite well, and I think that caused a lot of angst.

While Bommi explains his personal success and his partner’s ‘failure’ as a ‘master’ by referring to themes such as charisma or attitude, age difference provides an important sub-theme. Bommi’s narrative evolves around the assumption that it is difficult for an ‘older’ man to have a rich and satisfying sex life. Bommi implies that the fact that his partner Adam suffered from depression during the last years of their relationship reinforced his loss of confidence. Finally, his non-monogamous practice evolved around finding partners among rent boys and escorts. Because Bommi tends to see non-monogamy as the privilege of the young, he has an understanding for Adam’s different perspective on the issue. However, his interest in S/M and his enjoyment of sex was too strong to make it possible for him after four years of struggle to meet Adam’s ultimatum to cut back on the S/M. As a consequence, Adam ended the relationship. Age differences in a relationship tend not only to put older people at a disadvantage in finding sexual partners. It may also undermine their position in negotiating their interest in monogamy. This is powerfully illustrated by a story told by Matt. Matt has been in an open relationship with his partner Doug for fifteen years. Although Matt and Doug define their relationship as non-monogamous and both have sex ‘outside’ their relationship, Matt is currently maintaining a secretive affair with a mutual friend of theirs called Steve. Matt names two major reasons why he and Steve decided to remain secretive about their relationship. Firstly, Matt and Doug have a rule that precludes deep emotional involvement with their sexual partners and the maintenance of longer-term affairs. Secondly, Steve is in an officially monogamous partnership with Liam. The disclosure of their relationship therefore would upset both Matt’s and Steve’s primary partners. Matt explains that a disclosure would in particular juxtapose Steve’s partnership with his much older partner Liam. However, Steve would never risk this relationship, Matt explains, because he only can afford his luxurious lifestyle because Liam is extremely wealthy. While all the other men are in their 40s or 50s, Liam is over 70 years old. When Matt describes this relationship constellation to me, he explicitly makes Liam’s age an issue. Matt is quite outraged about Liam’s presumptuousness in expecting his younger partner to be faithful. In the light of Liam’s old age, Matt finds Liam’s demands that his partner be monogamous foolish and ridiculous. Even if he does not spell it out this way,

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Matt’s statement implies that he thinks Liam should be happy to have a (younger) partner at all and should accordingly be more modest and accept the conditions he is offered. The story reveals that age differences clearly impact on people’s position to negotiate monogamy. At the same time, the power relation between Steve and Liam is further mediated by Liam’s class resources. Although Steve betrays Liam’s wish for faithfulness, he does not dare to upset him by doing this openly. Having sex with Liam provides Steve with access to material resources and a lifestyle he could not afford otherwise. According to Matt’s account, Steve fears losing these resources if he discloses the sexual nature of his relationship with Matt. As my discussion in this chapter has shown, complex power relations structure and frame queer non-monogamous relationship practices. Differences with regard to social positioning in terms of class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion and embodiment feed in often contradictory and unpredictable ways into these complex ‘geometries of power’. Diverse questions, such as which difficulties people face or which opportunities they find in non-monogamous practice, where they put their priorities, which discourses they may deploy to communicate their wishes, what kind of support they are able to mobilise and what kind of resources and social capital they can draw upon, are mediated by these complex webs of power. Differential social positioning affects the negotiation of non-monogamy in cases of inter-partner disagreement or conflict and may result in differential ‘relationship defining power’. Davina Cooper (1995) has made an argument for an ‘ethics of equal power’ based on the normative ideal that all individuals should have the same power to impact on their environment or to fulfil their wants or desires. My analysis suggests that the currents of material and discursive power relations continuously undermine the possibility of such an ethical vision. In the face of the utopian character of this ethical orientation, we need to work towards an ethical frame that both acknowledges the existence of differences and inequalities and provides guidance to deal with them respectfully. In order to develop and enhance a sexual ethics that fosters egalitarian relationship and sex practices, we have to raise difficult questions about the often not-so-ideal queer realities. Wishful thinking and the production of positive images of queer lives is not enough if we really want to challenge heteronormativity and the manifold ways in which it is bound up with other forms of power around race, gender, class, ability and body image. We also need to support the ‘epistemological communities’ that work towards such an ethical practice and that engage in politics that defend the diversity of queer sexualities without subjecting to the normative discourses and exclusive practices linked to the promise of public sphere inclusion.

Chapter 7

Between Resistance and Normalisation: Non-monogamy, Sexual Politics and Ethics

But this last Monday night, at our other dance class, there was a couple, I would think they’re in their sixties, who spoke to me and said: ‘How long have you been dancing?’ So I said: ‘About three months’, and they (...) said: ‘We thought you must have been dancing longer than that’. So I told them (...) that in my early twenties I did a bit of ballroom dancing with women. I said: ‘But I didn’t want to dance with women’, I said, ‘and it’s only in recent times that it’s become acceptable for men to dance together’. And this couple said: ‘Oh, you’re gay, are you?’ I said: ‘Yes, of course we are’. (...) She said: ‘Oh’, she said, ‘That’s nice’. She said: ‘that’s what I like about you two’, she said, ‘you’re just so ordinary, you’re just so normal’. She said: ‘Nobody would have thought that’, she said, ‘You’re just normal!’ And part of me found it slightly amusing, and part of me found it slightly complimentary. And I said: ‘Well, you know, well, we are ordinary’. I said: ‘We’re not lepers or anything’, you know, I said: ‘Oh, and we have lived together for 17 years now’ (…), I said, ‘Everybody accepts us for what we are, and we just get on and do it’. (...) I think it opened their eyes a little that there we were a gay couple, and we weren’t what they perceived to be as a gay couple, because we were so, and I quote, ‘ordinary’. (Lee)

Throughout this book I have explored power issues around gay male and bisexual non-monogamous relationship practices. Lee’s little anecdote about this conversation with an elderly couple in his dance class provides rich material to ponder on the many ways in which heteronormativity structures social expectation and interaction. Lee told me this story to illustrate that he and his partner are ‘out’ as a gay male couple in many environments of their social life and that they don’t usually face negative reactions. Indeed, on this occasion Lee and his partner Barry even received compliments for being gay. ‘That’s nice’ the elderly woman comments. She immediately continues to emphasise, however, that what she particularly likes about them is that they are so ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’. Lee’s emotional response is a bit ambivalent: He feels partly amused and partly flattered by her comments. In his response he affirms the lady’s complimentary judgement that they are so ‘ordinary’ by stressing that they have been in a long-term relationship and cohabited for seventeen years. I think Lee’s response shows aspects of what Berlant (1998) has called the ‘wish for normalcy’ so often voiced by minoritised subjects, a ‘wish not to have to push so hard in order to have “a life”’ (p. 285) and to ‘neutralize the ghostly image of one’s own social negativity’ that emerges from the desire to sublimate ‘the

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constant energy of public self-protectiveness (...) into personal relations of passion, care and good intention’ (p. 286) [see opening quote to the Introduction]. Would the elderly couple’s response have been marked by the same enthusiasm, if they had encountered Lee and his partner in a place different from the respectable middleclass environment of this dance school? What would have happened if they had met Lee in his S/M gear, wearing leather and a harness on the naked skin of his upper body, which was his outfit when I met him at the Pride march 2000 in Manchester and 2001 in London? Given that the elderly couple’s acceptance was made explicitly contingent on the assumed ‘normalcy’ of the two gay men, I suppose their reaction would have been quite different. Heteronormativity and Non-monogamy In this book I have argued that queer relationships in general and non-monogamous queer relationships in particular are built in a context of power and heteronormative normalisation. My analysis of the legalisation of queer sex and relationships in Chapter 1 emphasised that policing the public/private division is a central element of heteronormative discourse. The construction of the public sphere in heteronormative terms opens the possibilities for ostracising queer identities, sex, affection and relationships outside of the narrow constriction of the private sphere (Warner 2002, Clarke 2000, N. Duncan 1996). But also the boundaries of the private depend on the context and have been constructed differentially with regard to (hegemonic) heterosexual and queer sexualities. As a result, queer sexualities (such as S/M, samesex relationships and prostitution) may in fact be regulated by the state across the boundaries of the public/private distinction (Hubbard 2001: 65). Even if the living conditions for queers have undoubtedly been improved thanks to the struggles of progressive social movements campaigning around gender and sexuality, the state has continued to promote heteronormative discourses on what it means to be a proper and valuable citizen and has created the material conditions for a secondary citizenship status for queer people (Evans 1993, Carver 1998, Richardson 2000, Johnson 2002). On the level of public opinion, queer people do not find advantageous conditions to build and maintain queer lifestyles and relationships. If there has been an increase of tolerance for same-sex relationships in Britain, this tolerance has been both fragile and contingent. Moreover, tolerance is a problematic measure for integration since – unlike respect – it is an attitude ultimately based on disapproval and granted from a position of unequal power (Marcuse 1965/1978, E. Wilson 1993, Clarke 2000). Although research into developments in sexual discourse and culture indicate that nowadays there is the possibility for many gay men, lesbians and bisexuals to manage their sexual identities in a way which does not impinge in an overtly negative fashion on their self-image and to integrate diverse aspects of their social lives, these processes have remained incomplete (Seidman et al. 1999). This means that for many lesbigay individuals the issue of coming out has remained sensitive, at least in certain contexts of their social lives (cf. Davies 1992, Davies et al. 1993). Non-monogamous relationship arrangements tend to render coming out processes

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even more problematic. In Chapter 4, I described how many bisexual women fear that they would be more likely to experience sexual harassment if they disclosed their non-monogamy. Many of my interview partners explained that it would be particularly difficult to communicate a range or combination of marginalised sexual identities (such as, for example, bi, BDSM and polyamorous), rather than to just come out with being not heterosexual. All these issues indicate that complex power relations continue to shape the conditions under which queer people construct their sexual and intimate relationships. My assessment of the state of sexual politics in Britain has been somewhat more pessimistic than the ones advanced by other social analysts. For example, Jeffrey Weeks has optimistically argued in his recent writing that the moral conservatism associated with the New Right’s political hegemony throughout the 1980s has been irrevocably doomed (Weeks 2000b). According to his view, traditional models for respectable gender roles, family relations and sexual behaviour has given way to a growing effervescence of diverse sexual desires, identities and relational forms. Such pluralisation, he argues, has come to be an irreversible fact of social life, which the institutions which traditionally have regulated sexuality, such as the state and the churches, will have to accept in the long run (1995: 59). I do not quarrel with the thesis of sexual and intimate pluralisation. My own study illustrates such a cultural trend by documenting an enormous diversity of gay male and bisexual nonmonogamies and polyamories. At the same time, I am highly sceptical of the idea of a rapid dissolution of the normative pressures associated with moral discourses and hegemonic cultural codes. Detraditionalisation theories tend to exaggerate the concepts of choice in the face of persisting disciplinary power relations (Klesse 2006a, 2007a). Furthermore, there is no reason to assume that the promotion of ‘heterosexual family values’ has been off the political agenda since New Labour has come to power (Bell and Binnie 2000, Johnson 2002, Stychin 2003). Heteronormativity, Sex and Relationship Practice I have referred to the concept of heteronormativity throughout this book when analysing certain aspects of the complex regimes of power that continue to overdetermine sexual relationship practice. This concept goes beyond theories of homophobia or biphobia (cf. Adam 1998, Paul 1997, Ochs 1996) in that it describes a form of power that regulates more than the questions of gendered object choice and sexual identities. Berlant and Warner (1998) define heteronormativity as the interplay of discourses and material practices that privilege heterosexuality. Consisting in a ‘sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations – often unconscious, immanent to practice or institutions’, heteronormative power’s disciplinary aspects spread and extend into wider aspects of the social (1998: 548n). This means that heteronormatity extends far beyond the terrain of sexuality in a narrowly defined sense to the regulation of subjectivity, identity, biographical narrative, relationship expectation, and so on. Moreover, rather than privileging heterosexuality per se, heteronormativity evolves around the naturalisation of specific forms of (hegemonic) heterosexuality (Richardson 1996). This means that some articulations of heterosexuality, too, get stigmatised in heteronormative discourses. Race and class

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are major factors in the devaluation of certain heterosexual identities and practices (Skeggs 1997, Cohen 2001, Haritaworn 2007). At the same time, heteronormative discourses tend to render some queer sexualities more problematic than others. As I have tried to show throughout this book, heteronormativity as a representational discursive regime or a social imagery has a particularly strong bearing on sexual and relational practices (Richardson 2000). For example, when Lee stresses that he has been living with his partner for seventeen years in the brief conversation that I have discussed at the beginning of this chapter, he acts upon the understanding that such a statement would reaffirm the elderly lady’s impression of his and his partner’s normalcy and reinforce her acceptance. Against the backdrop of heteronormative assumptions, life narratives and self-presentations based on romance and commitment can claim more validity than others. Non-monogamy, on the other hand, tends to be rendered problematic within heteronormative discourse (cf. Rubin 19984/1992, Warner 1999, Seidman 1997). Applied in a flexible manner, the model of the ‘good homosexual’/‘dangerous queer’ (or ‘good bisexual’/‘dangerous queer’) dichotomy has proven suitable for a deconstructive analysis of many instantiations of anti-queer and anti-non-monogamy discourses (Smith 1994a, 1997a, 1997b). Anti-promiscuity Discourses As I have shown in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, promiscuity discourses play a significant role in hegemonic anti-gay, anti-bisexual or anti-queer representation. Because promiscuity discourses intersect with the differentialising discourses constructing gendered, classed, racialised and sexual differences, some people are, depending on their social positioning, more likely to be assumed to be promiscuous than others. Moreover, the allegation of being promiscuous may have particularly serious consequences in some people’s social lives and thoroughly affect their standing in their social environments. The intersection of gendered discourses on respectability with discourses constituting the ‘nation’, ‘race’ or ‘community’ can render sexpositive positions (or life practices) less accessible (or more costly) to women and members of certain ethnic/racial minorities or adherents of certain religious beliefs. Let me give some examples: For most women in my study, concerns about personal safety and integrity were of paramount importance in their discussion of non-monogamy or public sex. Men were to a much lesser degree concerned with the question of sexual violence and harassment. In the group discussion with Matai, a support group for young South Asian gay and bisexual men, the disclosure by some men that they had been in open relationships or frequented cruising grounds seemed to be more daring than compared to other group settings. The suggestion that non-monogamy would be a ‘white men’s thing’ voiced by one participant indicates the existence of culturalist or nationalist discourses that challenge and undermine South Asian gay and bisexual men’s (and women’s) non-monogamous practices. White men and women do not face this kind of challenge. The major concerns in this group discussion were the cultural expectations and the moral or religious value of heterosexual marriage and the legitimacy of gay sexuality, rather than, for example, the question whether or not to live an ‘open’ or ‘closed’ same-sex relationship. Social positioning clearly affects the vulnerability with regard to being charged with being

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queer and being promiscuous and the ability to access discourses that affirm nonmonogamous alternatives. In my study, a (political) concern or preoccupation with non-monogamy or sex with multiple partners was widespread among my gay-, bisexual- or queer-identified interview partners, irrespective of their personal relationship arrangements, inclinations or lifestyle choices. Most of my interview partners were very sensitive of the derogatory meanings associated with the usage of the term ‘promiscuity’ (in most public spheres) and were highly aware of the fact that promiscuity assumptions and allegations may have a profound effect on social relationships and citizenship status. Love, Intimacy and Commitment ‘Promiscuity’ is a highly value-charged term. It signifies more than the simple fact that a person may have sex with multiple partners. Consequently, Steven Seidman (1997) has cautioned us to carefully distinguish between promiscuity and nonmonogamy. A promiscuous person’s sex is perceived as the selfish gratification of one’s sexual pleasures rather than the expression of loving feelings; as emotionally shallow rather than intimate; and as objectification rather than the articulation of an original and honest interest in the sexual partner’s personality that would include an interest in a possible longer-term relationship. The negative connotations of the term ‘promiscuity’ mainly derive from its definition in juxtaposition to important values at the heart of hegemonic sexual ethics. Love, intimacy and commitment are the central values that ultimately legitimise sexual acts or relationships in hegemonic moral regimes. Research into the changing meanings given to sexual partnership has further emphasised that love, intimacy and commitment are generally seen as the essential qualities that define what it means to be a ‘couple’ (Cline 1998). Due to the centrality of the concepts love, intimacy and commitment in contemporary discourses on sex and relationship, it can be argued that they play the role of what Laclau and Mouffe (1985) have defined as nodal points. According to their poststructuralist semiotic theory, meaning in a discursive field can only be fixed and made intelligible through the practice of articulation that is dependent on the construction of nodal points. As privileged signifiers or points of reference, nodal points enable the structuration of ‘chains of signification’ into meaningful discourse. At the same time, nodal points can be said to control signification and the production of meaning by transforming already pre-existing and available signifiers into parts of their own discourse, which thereby may acquire new and very different meanings (cf. Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000: 8). I argue that it is due to their privileged position as nodal points that love, intimacy and commitment can radically shift the meaning of ‘sex’ or ‘pleasure’ and the value judgements that are modelled upon them. The understanding of ‘non-monogamy’, too, can alter its meaning tremendously, if it is articulated in or linked with a discourse that is structured around the nodal points ‘love’, ‘intimacy’ or ‘commitment’. However, even nodal points only partially fix meaning and are subject to resignification or contestation. The claim of some of my interview partners (and of many sex-positive cultural critics) that the sex which takes place between people

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on cruising grounds and in dark rooms would indeed be characterised by acts of intimacy, is based on a strategy to contest the dominant meanings associated with the term (cf. Seidman 1991, Blachford 1981, Edwards 1994). In this interpretation intimacy is established either through the gentleness of touch or an orientation towards the creation of mutual sexual pleasure. In some forms of casual sex not a lot of information about oneself may be shared with the other partner(s). Anonymous sexual encounters may even consist in a speechless exchange of sexual acts. The representation of this kind of sex as intimate obviously draws on a conceptualisation of intimacy that is very different from the model of ‘disclosing’ intimacy that has been popularised within psychotherapeutic and self-help discourses (Jamieson 1998, Giddens 1992, Klesse 2007b). This defence of public sex cultures both deploys and re-signifies the nodal point intimacy in its own discourse. Love and commitment, on the other hand, are not seen as necessary qualities or motivations for the establishment of ethically valid sexual relationships. Alternatively, proponents of polyamory tend to place intimacy, love and commitment as the nodal points in their discourse by presenting polyamory as ‘responsible non-monogamy’. These two examples show that both the breaking or re-grouping of ‘chains of signification’ and the contestation of the significatory content or relevance of nodal points such as love, intimacy and commitment are important aspects of the political and cultural attempts to challenge heteronormative constructions of sexuality. Both discursive strategies aim at correcting negative representations of certain forms of sex or relationships and shift the paradigms of heteronormative discourse. To certainly different degrees they partly reject, partly shift and partly draw upon central elements of hegemonic heteronormative discourses on sexual ethics. However, by (maybe inevitably) referring to or accepting the signifiers intimacy, love and commitment as the nodal points of their own discourse, these responses remain to a certain degree within the structural limits of what Foucault has coined ‘reverse discourse’ (Foucault 1990, Halperin 1995, Clarke 2000). Heteronormativity, Hegemony and Politics In this book I have promoted the conceptualisation of heteronormativity as a form of hegemony. Specifically, I have argued for the usefulness of an interpretation of hegemony as normalisation. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Anna Marie Smith (1994a, 1994b) suggests that hegemony works through the regulation of frames of intelligibility. Any hegemonic articulation is consequently dependent on the active suppression of its alternatives. Heterosexuality as a hegemonic formation thus renders certain modes of heterosexuality the only valid and intelligible expressions of sexual desire and social identity. The particular value of the concept of hegemony for the critical analysis of gender and sexuality lies exactly in its capability to trace processes of normalisation and forms of power that cut across the dominant categories in which those are commonly understood. Thus, hegemonic heterosexualities create their legitimacy by the suppression of homosexualities and the alternatives that could emerge from heterosexuality as a lived and embodied practice (cf. Jackson 1999, Segal 1994, Hubbard 2001).

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The conceptualisation of heteronormativity as hegemony has further advantages. According to the conceptualisation in the Gramscian tradition, hegemony is always partial, unstable and penetrated by a constitutive ambiguity (Gramsci 1991, Laclau 1994, Cooper 1995). This theoretical emphasis enables us to see that the terms of heteronormative discourse are always contested. In this book I have emphasised the enormous diversity of gay male and bisexual relationship practices, a diversity that eschews any categorisation. Gay men, bisexual men and women and other queers have challenged through their life practice and the creation of political discourses heteronormative assumptions on gender, sexual practice, identity and the boundaries of what is perceived as a (valid) relationship. Queer non-monogamous and polyamorous life and relationship forms have specifically contested compulsory monogamy at the heart of heteronormative discourses. Hegemony and Agency To build and maintain queer relationships and ways of life in the face of the pressures associated with heteronormative forms of de-legitimisation and without access to the symbolic and material resources and the social capital that only a full citizenship status would bestow depends on a significant amount of individual and collective agency (Lehr 1999, Berlant 1998, Berlant and Warner 1998, Weeks et al. 2001). Progressive social movements that have struggled against the social divisions around gender and sexuality have politicised forms of power previously defined as ‘personal’ (and thus un-political) and given rise to a diversity of sexual and relational cultures (Weeks 1995). I think it is important to acknowledge the personal and political agency articulated in the lives of people who have extended both the social space and the social imaginary regarding non-heteronormative modes of sex, relationships and sociality. To disavow such agency (for example, on the grounds of theoretical orthodoxy) runs the risk of feeding into discourses of victimisation that often tend to shape the perception of marginalised groups (cf. Erel 2002, Kabeer 2000). The conceptualisation of heteronormativity in terms of hegemony may help to resolve some of the problems regarding agency that commonly go hand in hand with a theory of heteronormativity exclusively based on the model of governmentality. While there are certainly theoretical affinities between, for example, Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony and Foucault’s discourse theory (in that they both revolve around a concern with the economies of discursive formations), one major difference consists in the fact that theories of hegemony have been more apt to account for agency. While for Foucault the subject disappears or is replaced by the notion of a discursively produced subject position, Ernesto Laclau (1990, 1996) differentiates between subject position and political subjectivity. The concept subject position is clearly Foucauldian. It accounts for the multiple forms in which individuals are produced as social actors. The individual is assumed to inhabit multiple subject positions that match multiple and fractured identities (cf. Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 114–122, Mouffe 1992). The concept political subjectivity is introduced to explain how social actors act rather than being simply determined by pre-existing discourses. The contingency of the discursive system revealed in

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processes of permanent dislocation that interrupt and de-centre existing identities results in identity crises that call for new identification and political action. Both subject positions and political subjectivities are de-ontologised in the assumption that they are created and transformed in political (and articulatory) practices around the production of social frontiers or antagonisms (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000: 13, Howarth 2000: 121–122). The emergence of politicised gay and lesbian identities since the 1960s and 1970s, the gaining of strength of the bisexual movement throughout the 1990s, the articulation of queer identities and politics in the 1990s, and the new identities around the concept of polyamory are all examples which can be understood as responses to the constrictions of the social marked by socio-historically specific hegemonic discursive formations (cf. Herman 1993). Hegemony, Non-monogamy and the Question of Antagonism In the following I raise some problems regarding the applicability of the theory of hegemony (as discussed above) to heteronormativity and sexual politics. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) try to provide a flexible and democratic theory of social antagonism by maintaining that rather than assuming a single antagonism (such as class in Gramsci’s original formulation of the hegemony thesis) we should acknowledge that social struggles evolve in a complex discursive field in which a variety of antagonisms may have been articulated as nodal points. Hegemony (and counter-hegemony) as strategies aiming at the creation of consensus have to be understood then as a form of relation or a politics that is based on establishing chains of equivalences between different antagonisms in which no social site or actor can assume a privileged role or position. However, it has been maintained that not all aspects of hegemony can be understood in terms of antagonism (Smith 1994b). Aletta Norval (2000), for example, has questioned the assumption of a necessary link or causal interrelation between individuation (identification) and the articulation of antagonisms (or social frontiers). The ‘general logic of individuation can and ought to be distinguished from the formation of political frontiers, and the constitution of antagonistic forms of identity’ [italics in original] (p. 225). Identity formation and the way in which the self/other relationship is conceived could then be treated in a more indeterminate fashion. If we accept this logic, there would be no compelling reason to assume that the articulation of social antagonism would necessarily correspond with or translate into antagonistic forms of identification. Three important insights regarding the position of antagonism in an overall theory of hegemony emerge from this debate. Firstly, not all hegemonies can be sufficiently explained through theories of antagonism. Secondly, antagonism does not necessarily translate into antagonistic or in any way predictable identities and, thirdly, counter-hegemonic politics may set off their own normalising discourses. These insights help to explain some aspects of my research findings. My interview partners have developed an amazing degree of agency in order to, for example, come to terms with and explore non-mainstream sexual desires, communicate (or conceal) their complex desires in the context of their families, friendship circles, or workplaces, create supportive environments, participate in social movement events, groups and campaigns, and so on. However, not all have done this in explicitly

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antagonistic terms. The ones who did were primarily people who saw themselves as an active part of the gay and lesbian, bisexual, queer or feminist movements. People with an activist background were much more likely to politicise non-monogamy and to come up with an analysis based on antagonism. Even if some assumed antagonistic positions (or identities) with regard to some features of heteronormative society, it would be difficult to state a widely shared agreement on exactly where the line of a ‘social frontier’ with regard to heteronormativity should be drawn. Finally, many of my interview partners assumed ethical and political positions and deployed discursive strategies that may legitimise their own relationship styles, but constructed them in antagonism to (other) non-monogamies. The group discussions and individual interviews revealed a great deal of conflict about sexual ethics and sexual politics. Hegemony and the Limitation of Community Discourses The diversity of gay male and bisexual relationship culture is mirrored by an equal diversity of personal and political viewpoints. Although most of my gay male research participants held the view that non-monogamous relationships were the norm among their friends and acquaintances and many of the bisexual-identified ones considered non-monogamy to be a widely held ideal in the bisexual scene, their accounts convey a significant degree of conflict with regard to sexual lifestyle choices, sexual ethics and sexual politics. In Chapter 3, I argued that it is difficult to discern a consensus on ‘community values’ or a generalisable lesbian and gay (or bisexual) ‘ethos’ (cf. Blasius 1994, Weeks et al. 2001). The claim that such an ethos underpins and fosters queer sexual cultures and socialities is misguided, since it lacks any consideration of the manifold differences among queer people (cf. Young 1997). I have raised similar objections with regard to the concept of ‘community’. Certainly, the concept community has played an important role in progressive social movement struggles around sexuality since the late 1960s (D’Augelli and Garnets 1995, Weeks 2000c). The notion of ‘community’ is still anchored in the social imaginaries and discourses regarding sexual identities and politics. As revealed in the accounts of my research participants, it has certainly played an important role in the lives and identities of many of my interview partners. Nevertheless, their sense of belonging to communities was not unambiguous. Many research participants stressed that they felt affinities with manifold communities, some of which were perceived as fostering quite different cultural and moral orientations. Others were highly sceptical of the notion of ‘community’ and have stressed the normative pressures that community discourses enfold. From this point of view, being or being considered a member of a community means being exposed to surveillance with regard to what degree one is conforming. Others again, mostly ethnicised or racialised people or people of non-Christian faith, have stressed the exclusive dynamics of community discourses and politics. Most of the gay male and bisexual South Asian research participants, for example, have refuted the idea of a ‘gay and lesbian community’ by stressing the thorough divisions based on racism. Moreover, many experienced themselves as being positioned outside the boundaries drawn by hegemonic community discourses dominated by conservative, patriarchal

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and heteronormative sections of the South Asian diaspora constituency. The general scepticism with which most queer Black and Asian research participants approached the question of community attests to an enhanced self-reflexivity regarding their positionality which, according to Umut Erel, is a common feature of multiply marginalised lives (2007: 264). A range of social theorists have stressed the limitations of community discourses as a means for creating democratic and inclusive politics, because communities are constituted by boundary processes (Young 1990b, Mouffe 1992, Anthias and YuvalDavis 1992). Community discourses are continuously unsettled by the ‘problem’ of difference and can only deal with it by either glossing over or excluding articulations or bearers of difference(s). Despite the fact that ‘imagined communities’ have remained to present a real and material factor of social and sexual politics, I have objected to modes of analysis that deploy ‘community’ as their major lens because they risk reinforcing the exclusive and normative effects of community discourses; due to their inherent homogenising tendencies, diversity and hegemonic conflict tend to be obscured in analysis. Instead, I have suggested that a theory of multiple public spheres, related in hierarchy and marked by hegemonic conflict, may be more suitable for the analysis of the contextual conditions for queer relationship practices and the ethical and political discourses surrounding them. Publics, Counterpublics and the Politics of Public Sphere Inclusion While the State and other powerful social actors and discourses have constructed ‘the public sphere’ (which is the site for the enactment of ‘proper’ citizenship) in heteronormative terms, this is by far not the only mode of publicness. Social movements around gender and sexuality have been engaged in the creation of a plurality of partly alternate and partly antagonistic public spheres that can be described as counterpublics (N. Fraser 1997, Warner 2002, Clarke 2000, Plummer 2001a). Because it is commonly held that the circulation of discourse between strangers constitutes public spheres, the homogenising tendencies and the intimate overtones of the community assumption are avoided. In Chapter 1, I have argued that in order to prevent a theory of multiple publics and counterpublics to relapse into orthodox theories of (culturalist) multiculturalism, we should conceive of these spheres themselves as being shaped by inter- and intra-public sphere hegemonic conflict. I think that it is in particular through a fusion of a hegemony-perspective with public sphere theory that an understanding of conflict and normalising discourses in social movement politics can be enhanced. A critical focus on both inter- and intra-public sphere hegemonic conflicts may further prevent us from idealist descriptions of counterpublic social spaces and cultural or political projects. The stylisation of, for example, queer counterpublics as sites of resistance can obscure that counterpublic discourses and practices themselves may be marked by thorough contradictions. In the context of a complex interrelation of a multiplicity of public spheres, participants in any public sphere may challenge certain normative discourses and cultural formations in one public sphere context, while striving for inclusion or integration in another.

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As I said, both group discussions and individual interviews have revealed that non-monogamy is a contentious issue among gay men and bisexual men and women. It has been particularly interesting that many themes that are prominent in dominant heteronormative discourses on queer non-monogamy have also surfaced in the argumentation of some gay male and bisexual research participants. Drawing upon anti-promiscuity discourses, they distanced themselves from what they saw as shallow, hedonistic, immature, sex-focused and politically damaging behaviour. For example, some gay men have described the gay male ‘scene’ as irresponsible and immature. According to their point of view, many gay men’s public endorsement of highly sexualised lifestyles would have negative affects on all gay men because such behaviour (and politics) would naturally and inevitably reinforce straight society’s contempt of the ‘gay community’. Similarly, some polyamorous people have been at pains to distinguish their responsible non-monogamy based on love, intimacy and commitment from the objectifying behaviour of people who are into casual sex or swinging and who simply look for physical gratification. Politics and Public Sphere Inclusion I have argued that it is possible to understand such active dis-association as being motivated by the desire for ‘imaginary inclusion’. According to Anna Maria Smith’s (1992, 1994a) theory of hegemony as normalisation, the ‘good homosexual’ (‘good bisexual’)/‘dangerous queer’ distinction at the heart of heteronormative discourses has repercussions within the populations marginalised through it. The outrage about other sex-crazed, promiscuous or politically sex-positive queers emerges from the belief that an inclusion into the community of proper citizens would be possible if we only conformed to the codes of propriety spelled out in this discourse. The desire for ‘imaginary inclusion’ thus translates into assimilationist politics that go hand in hand with multiple forms of exclusions. I would like to stress that the readiness to exclude queers who deny subjection to the codes of propriety advanced within hegemonic definitions of the public sphere is not an inevitable effect of identification, but emerges from a particular understanding of the political process. Contemporary theories on social identities assert that any act of identification is relational and involves processes of distinction and othering (cf. Rutherford 1990b, Hall 1996). However, if what is at stake would merely be a question of identity, the differences around non-monogamy could easily be managed and channelled into a form of pluralistic co-existence. Marianne’s views on polyamory (discussed in Chapter 5) clearly illustrate this point. In the interview Marianne comes up with very detailed and sophisticated distinctions between polyamory and other forms of non-monogamy. She maintains that while she herself identifies as polyamorous, other partners in her relationship network would identify as non-monogamous or monogamous. While these identifications are grounded on distinctions that refer to quite different approaches to sex and relationships, Marianne does not claim that her approach to non-monogamy would be ethically more advanced or politically more appropriate. However, an exclusive dynamic is set up if such different identities are both moralised and politicised (cf. Seidman 1997). Neil’s condemnation of promiscuity in a focus group I discussed in Chapter

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3 provides a good example. Neil argues that despite the fact that he believes in monogamy and is currently living in a monogamous relationship, he may be ready to tolerate other gay men’s ‘promiscuity’ as long as they keep it private. However, he rigorously condemns such gay men’s behaviour if they stand up for their sexual lives in public. Although Neil is convinced that any form of ‘promiscuity’ is shallow and immature, what he really is concerned with are the effects of sex-positive lifestyles and politics on the advancement of gay politics as a whole. Like others, Neil is worried about potential negative effects regarding the perception of the existing and emerging gay male public spheres in wider society. The exclusive and normative effects of the ‘good homosexual’ (‘good bisexual’)/‘dangerous queer’ distinction thus fully enfold against the backdrop of a political reasoning that is concerned with public sphere inclusion. Eric O. Clarke’s (2000) work on the ambivalences and contradictions at the heart of the discursive and political processes that grant queer public sphere inclusion is quite elucidating here. The promise of integration and equality that is considered as the truly democratic potential of the public sphere is predicated on complex processes of determining value. This means that not all identities, representations, and demands are considered to have sufficient value to hope for successful public sphere inclusion. Compliance to dominant codes of propriety, successful claims to authenticity and a potential for commercial value extraction are key criteria in these moral and capitalist modes of value determination (Clarke 2000: 30–31). The class-based, gendered, racialised and heteronormative bias that has run through the history of ideal public sphere representations consequently impinges on the determination of particular interests as worthy of the public interest (cf. Wilson 1995, Phelan 1995). The distribution of equity is thus governed by unduly universalised moral codes derived from the ideals of bourgeois publicity. Thus, the efforts of queers to gain access to publicness (or publicity) have taken place in a context that fosters conformity. The need for self-censorship has been felt to a particular degree with regard to (queer) sexuality, because due to the heteronormative and rationalistic character of hegemonic constructions of the public sphere, sex and eroticism have clearly been located outside the parameters of the public interest (cf. Warner 2002, N. Duncan 1996, Young 1990a). Politics aiming at public sphere inclusion are thus marked by a profound ambivalence that is inscribed at the very heart of the political discourse. They are likely to legitimise and reinforce secondorder exclusions. Among other effects, this insight should profoundly influence our understanding of social movement politics that operate from within equal rights or citizenship discourses (cf. A.R. Wilson 1993, Herman 1993, Rahman 1998, 2000). The Structural Limitation of Equal Rights Politics Liberal political theory’s promotion of equality for the members of discriminated social groups is inherently limited. The problem emerges from the construction of the subject as an individualistic, self-contained being, stripped of her or his social relations. Social divisions that structurally affect people of certain social groups are generally not taken into account (cf. Young 1990a, Phillips 1993, Kymlicka 1995). If framed within the minority rights paradigm, equal rights campaigns further tend

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to feed into an essentialism that disavows differences within the constituencies of certain groups (cf. Phelan 1995, Herman 1993, A.R. Wilson 1993, Rahman 2000). Campaigns for rights for discriminated people modelled on these assumptions consequently are limited and problematic, because they tend to obliterate oppressive discourses such as heterosexism, sexism, racism and economic inequalities that affect in differentialist fashion individual people’s lives. A further short-coming of the classical liberal rights discourse is its implicit confinement to political and civil rights, although discrimination is often practically articulated in the social sphere which tends not be tackled at all (Pateman 1988, Phillips 1994). Gay and lesbian or bisexual equal rights politics are at best not successful and at worst may result in reinforcing the institutionalised dominance of hegemonic cultural forms (Rahman 1998). Stevi Jackson (1998) argues that any strategy aiming at equal rights with heterosexuals would have to be based on a critique of heterosexuality. Because homosexuality is intrinsically related to normative regimes of gendered heterosexuality, material equality is only possible if the structural meanings and dominant practices of heterosexuality are transformed in cultural and political struggle. This would demand a prioritisation of challenging the power regimes around gender in queer sexual politics. ‘Principles of equality always depend on other principles determining the value of the benefits which the egalitarian principles regulate‘, argues Joseph Raz (quoted by A.R. Wilson 1993: 187). Wilson concludes from this insight that we cannot hold up equality as an independent ideal. Rather, the value equality can only be determined if seen in relation to other political values. True justice realised in equality consequently would have to represent a variety of values that result from the differences that characterise the constituencies of marginalised groups. This depends on a careful analysis of structural power relations (including economic ones) and the ways in which differential social positioning in terms of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and so on affect queer subjects and collectivities. Such modes of analysis and political strategy tend to be precluded by the individualising and essentialising tendencies inherent to liberal equality discourses. Let me illustrate this problem with the question of marital rights for same-sex partners. Even if the notion of marriage in a same-sex context may not be identical with the heterosexual meaning of marriage, mainstream campaigning groups address a set of laws and institutions that are rooted in heterosexist and patriarchal traditions. Momin Rahman (1998) argues that the rhetoric of partnership, coupledom and marital relationships tends to diminish the actual diversity of sexual, intimate and ‘family’ relationships among queer people in order to get access to a socially privileged space shaped by heteronormativity. ‘The problem lies in taking for granted the rights that accrue to heterosexual couples as a basic model for human rights. This presupposes the normality and desirability of monogamous coupledom’, Rahman concludes (1998: 85; Bell and Binnie 2000). In Chapters 3 and 4 I have shown that with regard to the question of marital rights, most of my interview partners have been primarily concerned with the question of formal equality. For most of my interview partners, formal equality presented such a strong value that they would discard or subordinate their political critique of the assimilationist currents at the heart of the contemporary same-sex marriage campaign. Even if many were aware that they themselves would never personally profit from

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the rights associated with marital status, because the specificities of their lifestyle preferences or relationship patterns are not taken into consideration in the proposals pushed by the main lobbying groups for a legislation of same-sex relationships, they felt that they should lend their support to the campaign. Some people called for laws on group marriage. Some claimed the need for an extension of rights to multiple partnerships. Only few participants questioned the validity of a politics of rights that privileges some relationship forms over others. They usually either suggested a flexible and individualised approach to legislation or opposed any state interference into personal relationships at all. The radical and elaborated critique of marriage as it has been developed from within feminist and queer theory and activism has been largely absent from the accounts of my interview partners. This attests to the strong appeal of a liberal equal rights discourse in the current moment of sexual politics (Barker 2006, Harding and Peel 2006). The Structural Limitation of Citizenship Politics The discussion so far also has strong impacts on the conceptualisation of citizenship. In contemporary political discourse, politics striving for equal rights are often framed as a politics of citizenship. In the British debate on citizenship, the work of T.H. Marshall has been extremely influential, if not paradigmatic. For example, Marshall has defined citizenship as ‘a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed’ (1950: 14). Marshall’s primary concern was with social class and he stressed civil, legal, political and social rights as the basic components of a historically evolving citizenship status. Contemporary citizenship debates have gone far beyond Marshall’s frame by stressing the gendered, racialised and sexualised dimensions of citizenship discourses and practices. According to a widely held criticism, Marshall’s definition of citizenship as ‘full membership in the community’ fails to acknowledge that people are in fact involved in manifold communities or identity-based projects. This assumption implicitly challenges the universalism at the heart of dominant citizenship discourse (Yuval-Davis 1997, Lister 1997a, 1997b, Plummer 2001a). It is only through an emphasis of the multi-layered character of citizenship that politics in the name of citizenship can take account of these complexities. In order to realise its full democratic potential, many argue, we have to sever the exclusive ties of the concept to the terrain of the nation state (cf. Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999, Richardson 2000). I very much support such a broad interpretation of citizenship. It is only if we extend the scope of analysis beyond the aspect of law and legal entitlement that it becomes obvious that ‘full membership’ in any particular ‘community’ tends to be defined in much more subtle ways. Yet there still remain some doubts as to whether citizenship provides a suitable discourse for the mobilisation of a radical queer sexual politics. As discussed in Chapter 1, David Evans (1993, 1995) has analysed sexual citizenship as an empowerment of consumers in certain market segments shaped by the persistence of moral subordination. The moral subordination of homosexuality has been an inherent part of the material construction of sexual citizenship (cf. Clarke 2000). Because citizenship is granted on the grounds of adherence to codes of sexual behaviour/

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identity, Bell and Binnie (2000) claim that citizenship discourse follows a logic of compromise: ‘the twinning of rights with responsibilities in the logic of citizenship is another way of expressing compromise – we will grant you certain rights if (and only if) you match these by taking on certain responsibilities’ (2000: 3). As a politics of compromise, citizenship forecloses aspects of sexuality that are written off as ‘unacceptable’. In the current political climate, the authors argue, this would feed into notions of sexual citizenship that are de-eroticised, de-radicalised and privatised (Stychin 2003). In my discussion so far, I have argued that particular political strategies (or political discourses) are marked by structural limitations that often result in exclusions and their legitimisation. While the exclusion of certain groups (such as BDSM’ers, transgendered people, transsexuals, non-monogamous people, and so on) is often programmatic, or their members’ concerns are willingly sacrificed in the process of political bargaining, it is important to maintain that normativity also works in much more subtle ways through the political process. Politics of equal rights, politics of citizenship and politics of visibility are marked by a deep ambivalence that derives from dominant constructions of the public sphere, modes of public sphere inclusion and conceptualisations of the political. In order to avoid getting drawn into the normalising spin of the discourses that regulate processes of inclusion, sexual political demands and strategies need to be drafted against the backdrop of careful and reflective analysis of the complexity of power relations that encompass and determine queer subjects and their intimate and sexual practices. Assimilationist strategies tend to largely rest on the claim of being ‘just like everybody else’ and fail to engage with the structural power relationships and the associated normative discourses that run through society as a whole and the political process as such. However, Clarke (2000) has rightly pointed out that the development of a queer and leftist critique cannot stop with simply accusing assimilationism of conformity (e.g., of heteronormative standards) and complicity (e.g., of capitalism). Rather, what is at stake is the analysis of the historical and political (discursive) contexts that continuously foster and feed into assimilationist aspirations and strategies (pp. 65–66). The Question of Resistance and Transgression Progressive or radical sexual politics have to oppose the assimilationist agenda if we want to challenge the exclusions and injustices around sexuality and gender that are built into the political system and the discourses in which they are framed. However, it is romanticist and naive to assume that it is possible to simply step outside of the regimes of heteronormativity. The normativity around sexual and gender identities and practices is deeply interwoven with other power relations and bound up with economic and political processes. Any romanticist vision of ‘perverse alterity’ obscures the manifold contradictions, power relations and modes of normativity that shape queer people’s lives, relationships and their cultural and political projects. It is against this backdrop that I have been somewhat cautious throughout this book

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to talk about gay male and bisexual non-monogamies and polyamories in terms of resistance. In the Introduction, I argued that it is tempting to frame queer non-monogamous and polyamorous relationship practices according to Foucault’s programmatic ideas of counter-normative self-invention and cultural transformation. A range of queer and gay male theorists has embraced Foucault’s concept of ‘practices of freedom’ or the ‘care for the self’ to circumscribe such a political and aesthetical project of (self) creation. For example, Mark Blasius (1994) celebrates the Foucauldian notion of the erotic as an artful practice of agency and the site of aesthetic self-construction and becoming. For Blasius, erotic is the movement from subjection to counternormative agency. Gay and lesbian erotics work against the heterosexualisation of bodies, identities and sexual acts. They pave the way to new forms of fluid and open relationships and erotic friendships. Michael Warner (1999) suggests a ‘queer ethics’ of autonomy modelled on very similar assumptions. Such a culture of sexual autonomy can only be created through the creation and dissemination of new sexual knowledges and practices, which will eventually enable a transformation of sexual culture on a larger scale. The readiness to transgress the boundaries of the existent is a precondition for such a queer culture of autonomy to emerge. However, I have some doubts as to whether an understanding of queer nonmonogamous relationship practices as a cultural politics of resistance is too idealistic. Thus, Foucault’s strategy of the ‘care for the self’ has rightly been criticised for evoking the possibility of stepping out of regimes of normalisation. Nancy Fraser (1989) suggests that Foucault constructs an utopian space of freedom/autonomy in and around bodies that is at odds with his generally ‘pessimistic’ analysis of politics, culture and discourse (cf. Grimshaw 1993). Moreover, Fraser insists that claims couched in the language of the pleasures of our bodies are no more intrinsically immune from co-optation and abuse than are claims made in any other vocabulary. Their capacity to generate critical leverage and escape co-optation is entirely relative to their situation. (1989: 63)

This criticism points to an ambivalence on the level of the theory of transgression that is extremely difficult to resolve. My research experience has reinforced my doubts as to whether it is possible to embrace an understanding of queer non-monogamies and polyamories as ‘practices of freedom’. Much of my data is too ambivalent to talk comfortably about these relationship practices in the language of resistance (not at least in a generalised way). My original intention in this research was to explore how heteronormative discourses and relational ideologies affect queer people in non-monogamous relationships. Strongly impressed by the work of Anna Marie Smith (1992, 1994a), I had started to apply in my mind the model of the ‘good homosexual’/‘dangerous queer’ dichotomy to the construction of queer non-monogamies in a range of political discourses. Indeed, Smith’s theoretical model has proven useful for understanding a range of discursive strategies I have identified in my research. However, often I found it appropriate to apply this model not only in order to understand the workings of anti-queer and anti-non-monogamy discourses, but also to the ones deployed

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by those who were defending non-monogamy. For example, as I have pointed out earlier, many polyamorous people are extremely upset that their non-monogamy is equated with promiscuity, casual sex or swinging. Similarly, some gay men in the group discussions defend non-monogamous partnerships only on the grounds that they may be also intimate or long-term. It is not far-fetched to raise the question of where such defences leave non-monogamous people who enjoy casual or anonymous sex and do not aspire to be in a long-term relationship. In the course of this research I have become more attentive to the nuances and ambivalences in the discourses on sex and relationships circulated in social movement debates in general and among non-monogamous and polyamorous people in particular. Those who figure as the ‘dangerous queers’ in dominant discourses often created the image of other ‘dangerous’ (or sad) queers in the discourses they articulated themselves. It is simply not tenable to argue that all of my non-monogamous interview partners were engaged in setting up counter-normative discourses. Many may have challenged some heteronormative assumptions, while they were at the same time willing to embrace or reproduce others. Thus, the conceptualisation of queer non-monogamous or polyamorous practice as resistance or transgression appears to be too one-dimensional to take account of this ambivalence. My intervention is not meant to say that resistance is futile and that transgression is not a valid form of politics at all. Bell and Binnie (2000) have rightly criticised a tendency in current debates on sexual politics to subordinate transgressive politics to other more mature and effective political strategies, namely the ones focussing on rights and citizenship (cf. E. Wilson 1993, Weeks 1998). I do strongly agree with the critique of ranking forms of political activism this way. Moreover, I have earlier on raised my concerns about the prominence of the paradigm of citizenship in current sexual politics in the UK. Yet I am also worried that idealising the possibilities of transgression or counter-normativity may render us insensitive to the multiple forms of power that structure and work through queer lives, politics and projects. The radical gesture with queer theory or queer politics claims to undermine heteronormativity through an act of binary shattering and the denial of categories appears to be negligent of its own contradictions. Frank Mort (1994) is highly sceptical in how far queer theory really succeeds in dismantling the binaries it has set out to deconstruct. According to Mort, queer theory has simply replaced a set of old binaries with a new one. Thus, the queer paradigm ‘has privileged the principle of sexual dissidence as the epistemology of sexuality, in such a way that the pervert, as against the norm, has become the motif of sexual classification’ (pp. 212–213). The plurality of sexualities that queer implies, if it is understood as a coalitional political strategy, tends to get reduced and boiled down again into new binary oppositions: ‘queer against straight’ or ‘perversion over normality’. This obscures the fact queer politics, too, are built in a tension between an embracement of difference and a cultural project of inclusion (Phelan 1995, Escoffier 1998). This is evident in recurrent appeals to the ‘queer nation’, in particular in US queer politics, an unreflective endorsement of a nationalistic rhetoric that is illustrative of the white bias of queer mainstream politics (Puar 1998, 2006). The complexities of power relations around queer relationships and sexualities described in this book call for political strategies that go beyond a politics of transgression understood in terms of identification or bodily acts and

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pleasures. In order to come to terms with such complexity radical (sexual) politics also have to tackle issues regarding the economy, the political system and the ways they are bound up with sexist, racist and classist discourses and practices. Moreover, there is sufficient reason to assume that cultural and political transformation is also dependent on more organised campaigns and strategies (Johnson 1997). While I welcome the counter-normative and sex-positive emphasis at the heart of many conceptualisations of a queer politics of transgression, I think it is important to keep in mind the structural constrictions posed on transgressive transformation. Moreover, we should also bear in mind that transgression in itself is not necessarily a practice of resistance or counter-normativity. As many of my interview partners pointed out, in everyday social interaction transgression can also be linked up with oppressive practices. In Chapter 4 I discussed Caroline’s complaint about many women’s experience of sexist transgression in bisexual movement spaces, where women who are known to be polyamorous are frequently approached in inappropriate ways by bisexual men. Similarly, Ali gave as an example of his experience of racism on the gay male scene – that white men often transgress his body space by simply touching him up without bothering to ask for his consent. Whether transgression challenges power relations depends on the epistemological and ethical framework and the social context in which it takes place (cf. Fraser 1989, Grimshaw 1993). Pleasure on its own (even if consensual) is not necessarily an emancipatory value. Moreover, strategies of transgression in one context of power relations may at the same time be complicit with or fetishistic of others (cf. Haritaworn 2005, Klesse 2007c). An Ethics of Equal Power and the Question of Intersectionality Current models of transgression are insufficient among others due to their implicit single-issue focus. Throughout this book I have argued for the need to develop a refined theoretical perspective in critical sexuality studies that acknowledges the degree to which discourses on sexuality are imbued with gendered, racialised and classed meanings. Due to a rather intense debate between gay and lesbian studies, queer theory and feminism, the interconnectedness of sexuality and gender is rarely called into question in principle. However, there continue to be intense debates on how this connection should be theorised and which category should assume priority in analysis (Butler 1997, Butler and Rubin 1994, Jackson 1999, Richardson 2000). Yet the argument that the analysis of sexuality cannot be separated from an analysis of race and class is rarely heard of in the debates within queer theory (Somerville 2000, Skeggs 1997, Cohen 2001). As I have argued in Chapters 4 and 4, gender, race, class and sexuality closely intersect in discourses on non-monogamy. The differentialist character of anti-promiscuity discourses has the effect that certain queers find themselves exposed to an aggravated stigma and much harsher sanctions, if they are out as non-monogamous or polyamorous. Moreover, the interrelation of racism, classism and sexism renders sex-positive and queer spaces less welcoming and safe for women, transgendered people and queers of racialised and/or working class background (Haritaworn et al. 2006). If we agree with the desirability of a situation in which all individuals have the same power to impact on their environment or to fulfil their wants or desires (which, according to Davina Cooper

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(1995) is the foundation of an ‘ethics of equal power’), it is obvious that a singleissue politics, which simply sets itself up against ‘heteronormativity’ is not enough. Exclusive practices (around race, gender, class, sexuality and dis/ability) undermine multiply marginalised subjects access to and reliance on collective resources and protective spaces. A commitment to an ‘ethics of equal power’ would demand much a more serious practical efforts on part of the gay, bisexual, polyamorous and queer movements to forge alliances with queers and non-queers struggling against different forms of oppression (cf. Noël 2006). The problem of a ‘differential ability to cause’ on the level of interpersonal relationships (which I discussed in Chapter 7 with regard to ‘relationship defining power’), too, is ultimately tied to the level of political engagement. While a self-critical and mutual reflection on the inter-subjective differences and power dynamics in a multiple relationship context certainly helps to confine some aspects of un-equal power, or at least to minimise the abuse enabled by an unequal situation of power, these relations are finally determined by overarching social divisions and oppressive practices. The promise that it is possible to achieve happy non-monogamous or polyamorous relationships, if we only communicate well enough and negotiate long enough, marketed to us through relationship guides and self-help philosophies, rests on an unrealistic assumption derived from liberal individualism. An intersectionality-analysis certainly does encourage self-reflection and transversal dialogue.1 Yet ultimately it calls for political action, too.

1

For the concept of transversal politics, see Nira Yuval-Davis (1997).

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Appendix

The Study: Research Design and Methodology This book is based on a qualitative research project I undertook between and 1997 until 2002. My study aimed at exploring power issues around non-monogamous relationships and partnerships. Qualitative research can be seen as principally multimethod in focus. Norman Denzin and Yvonne S. Lincoln have stressed the role of the qualitative researcher as bricoleur (1994b). In particular, feminist contributions to the debate on methodology have promoted the use of multiple methods (including quantitative ones) as a useful strategy for gaining a more comprehensive understanding of social phenomena (Cook and Fonow 1995, Maynard and Purvis 1994). Similarly, writers on methodology influenced by critical poststructuralism and postmodernism have suggested the use of multiple methods as a strategy of triangulation. Triangulation is here actively detached from a concern with validity, but is thought to add rigor and depth to an investigation (Lincoln and Guba 1985/1999, Denzin and Lincoln 1994b, Crabtree et al. 1993). I worked with a combination of a range of qualitative methods, the most important of which were in-depth interviews, focus groups, participant observation and discourse analysis. In the following I will briefly discuss and contextualise these methods, explain my approach to analysis, and provide some information on my research sample. Qualitative Interviewing Qualitative interviews with people who have been in gay male and bisexual nonmonogamous relationships was one of the most significant methods used in this study. My approach to interviewing has been strongly influenced by the life history method (cf. Plummer 2001b, Gluck and Patai 1991, Personal Narrative Group 1989). In contrast to a previous research project, I chose a more focused approach in this research by exploring specific topics in the context of an individual’s life narrative. The interviews were semi-structured and open-ended. I produced an extensive interview guide with detailed questions that covered the areas of highest interest to my inquiry. I reworked the interview guide several times in the course of the research as a result of my interview experiences, new insights or shifting interests. The interview guide helped me to navigate through the conversations with my interview partners. It provided me with a mental map that I could use in a flexible manner during the interview sessions. At the same time, I was cautious not to impose its structure on the interview process. A less standardised approach to interviewing seemed appropriate to the complexities of my subject matter. Research

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into sexualities demands a sensitive attitude and the ability to respond to people’s at times difficult experiences and emotions. It further demands an interview strategy that allows people to take their time, choose their own routes into memory and to have the freedom to either discard certain story lines or to take them up again at a later time. Measures to enable participation on the grounds of informed consent and careful procedures to safeguard participants’ privacy, confidentiality and anonymity are among the most important elements of an ethical practice in sexuality research (Lee 1993, Renzetti and Lee 1993, Klesse 2007d). I explained the character, purpose, context and scope of my research to all potential interview partners. I promised to carefully safeguard all my interview partners’ anonymity and to deal confidentially with all the information they were giving me. I used pseudonyms for all interviewees (including the professionals) and the participants in the group discussions in this book. I further deployed protective measures in the context of data management and data storage. In general, the interviews took place either in my home or the homes of my interview partners, depending on the preference of my interview partner. Two of the interviews were based on telephone conversations, one of them spread over three successive sessions. The interview sessions lasted between three-quarters of an hour and six hours with an average length of about two hours. In some cases I met the same interview partner several times in order to clarify issues or to catch up with new developments. In all cases I conducted interviews with individuals, rather than with partners in a joint session. Due to the specific focus of my research on non-monogamy, it did seem neither practicable nor adequate to try to arrange joint interviews with people who were often part of more complex relationship networks or defined their relationships in loser terms. Moreover, in my study, too, a significant number of participants (nine out of forty-four) did not consider themselves to be in a relationship at the time of the interview (cf. Heaphy et al. 1998, Weeks et al. 2001). Initial Analysis Thirty-seven of the interviews were fully transcribed. I could only partially describe seven interviews due to low quality recording at stretches of the interview recording. The analysis of the interviews drew on the following steps. After having listened to the tapes I read all interview transcripts carefully. In the initial stages of the analysis I developed a coding scheme using literal, interpretative and reflexive codes (Mason 1996). Codes were applied in the course of the analysis of the first twenty interviews only. In this phase of the analysis I revised and extended the coding scheme, continuously incorporating new issues emerging from the data and trying to come up with more precise codes. From the very beginning I understood coding to be only an auxiliary device for data management in the initial stages of data analysis (cf. Seale and Kelly 1998, Huberman and Miles 1994). Initial coding helped me to explore the multitude and complexity of the interview and focus group data. I began abandoning consistent coding when the process became too time consuming. As analysis was progressing I began to focus more pragmatically on a rather limited number of themes, such as ‘negotiation’, ‘power’, ‘normalisation’, ‘sex’, ‘intimacy’ ‘identity’, ‘conflict’, ‘sexual politics’ and a range of associated issues. I wrote extensive case

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studies on the first twenty interviews focussing on the most dominant themes of the narrative and discussing them in their specific context. On this level of analysis I aimed at understanding and interpreting my interview partner’s decisions, choices and perspectives. These are principles of analysis which are broadly associated with the hermeneutic or interpretivist traditions in the social sciences (Schwandt 1994, Denzin 1997). This work provided the first level of my analysis. As I will explain in more detail below, I later integrated the insights gained from this process into an analysis based on discourse analytical techniques. Sampling Issues I have deployed two sampling strategies in the course of this research: snowball sampling (or chain-referral sampling) and theoretical sampling. Both approaches present non-probability or non-randomised sampling strategies (Biernacki and Waldorf 1981, Arber 1993). Snowball or chain-referral sampling consists in the researcher first approaching a group of people who fit the sample criteria and asking them whether they could refer other people who fit the sampling criteria and who may (also) want to participate. In this process the sample is continuously growing by drawing upon the knowledge and relationships of a group of people that are all in one way or another related to each. The major methodological problem with using these networks is that the evolving sample will be inevitably biased, because people tend to refer to their friends and acquaintances. In theoretical sampling the most important criteria for a person’s participation is the theoretical relevance of the insights which the researcher expects from the participation of the person in question. According to the principles of theoretical sampling, the sample should not so much be representative as theoretically meaningful (Glaser and Strauss 1967, Mason 1996, O’Connell Davidson and Layder 1994). Meant to be beneficial to either mastering the research task or for a theoretical explanation to emerge, theoretical sampling has also been described as purposive sampling. Research into sexuality and more specifically into gay male, lesbian, bisexual and other ‘queer’ sexualities tends to encounter particular problems with traditional sampling strategies. Due to persisting discrimination based on heterosexism and transphobia, queers as populations are difficult to access for research purposes. In terms of the technical language of social science methodology they are therefore at times refereed to as ‘hidden populations’ (Martin and Dean 1993, Davies et al. 1993, Heaphy et al. 1998). Snowball sampling is frequently chosen simply because there are not many alternatives. One of the possibilities is to take the institutions and organisation that have grown around social movement activism as a starting point for sampling strategies. However, this approach has its own problems. Since this infrastructure tends to be primarily used by people who identify as gay, lesbians, bisexual or queer there is an implicit bias with regard to public self-identity. At the same time, lesbian, gay and bisexual culture has predominantly catered for white and middle class constituencies. There is significantly less visibility of organisations of

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or public spaces for queers marginalised in terms of race, class, gender or their kinky sexual preferences. I decided to support my snowball sampling approach with theoretical sampling steps using the networks of the established lesbian, gay, and bisexual ‘community’ structures. In two waves of mobilisation I sent out letters to sixty-nine organisations. In the first wave I posted letters to thirteen groups chosen from the directories in Gay to Z and Gay Times in February 1998. I tried to cover a wide range of different segments of social, cultural and political organisations. Although I originally intended to primarily recruit groups for my focus group sessions, this approach was even more effective in bringing me in touch with individuals, who volunteered to take part in the study. In April 1999 I started my second wave of recruitment. I sent slightly revised letters to fifty-six groups and organisations. Theoretical considerations were much more explicit in this second step of sampling. Firstly, I included groups of certain characteristics that I had not considered at the first sampling step. Secondly, I decided to make an extra effort to mobilise participants from within categories that did not figure highly in the emerging sample of interview partners. The groups I identified as being under-represented in my sample were racial and ethnic minorities, younger people, people with disabilities and bisexual women. As my following discussion will reveal, my attempts to counter the biases of my emerging sample through theoretical sampling steps were only partially successful. The Sample All in all I conducted forty-four interviews with people who have had experiences with non-monogamous relationship arrangements. I further conducted three interviews with professionals who organised workshops on gay male relationships for Londonbased counselling and HIV organisations. Most of my interview partners resided in the south-east of England and primarily in London. Smaller numbers lived in (or around) Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Dublin, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Twentythree of my interview partners identified as gay men or lived in a gay context. Twentyone of them identified as bisexual or lived in a bisexual context. I interviewed ten bisexual-identified men, among them two who identified as transgendered (FTM). One male participant identified as heterosexual. I spoke with ten bisexual-identified women and one lesbian-identified woman. The sample covers gay male and bisexual non-monogamies in similar numbers with the bisexual sample consisting of male, female and transgendered people. There is an over-representation of male voices in this sample, which is primarily due to the research process and my original plan to focus on male same-sex relationships only. I discuss this aspect of the research process at length in Chapter 2. Age-wise, the sample was very diverse with the age of participants ranging from the early twenties into the late seventies. In terms of race/ethnicity, white participants present the vast majority of my interviewees. Only a handful of racial and ethnic minority men and women participated in the study. I interviewed three South Asian men, two mixed-race women (of Middle Eastern/ English and South Asian/English mixed heritage) and two Jews (one man and one woman). Although I identified this bias at an early point of my sampling and made

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an effort to get Black individuals and groups involved, I could not significantly increase their weight in the sample. However, I was able to conduct one focus group with a group of South Asian young men. No person with disability participated in the study, although I approached some organisations and groups run by disabled people. Class-wise, the sample is heavily biased towards (diverse) middle class positions and identities. Only three people claimed working class identities or talked about their working class family background. The sample of research participants is thus biased on multiple levels. There is a significant over-representation of male voices and it only provides limited data on Black or ethnic minority and working class perspectives and is ‘silent’ on issues around disability. I perceive these biases as a weakness of my study, in particular since they mirror structural biases in sexuality research and wider power relations in society. As I indicated above, I did try to alter the feature of my research sample through theoretical sampling steps. I assume that these attempts were only partially successful because of my own dominant positioning as a white, male, educated middle class researcher (cf. Phoenix 1994). Focus Groups (Group Discussions) While put in practice in different ways and for different purposes, a focus group can be defined as a form of group interview (Morgan 1988, 1998, Frith 2000). According to Kitzinger and Barbour, ‘any group discussion may be called a “focus group” as long as the researcher is actively encouraging and attentive to the group interaction’ (1999: 5). I conducted focus groups in addition to individual interviews because of their nuanced capacity to foreground the socio-cultural context. While interviews are quite effective to comprehend individual biographies in their cultural context, focus groups can help to examine how knowledge, ideas or discourse operate within a given social context. Because focus groups are such a highly contextualising research method, many have suggested the suitability of this method to explore attitudes and debates within group based social environments or ‘communities’ (Morgan and Scannel 1998, Waterton and Wynne 1999, Chiu and Knight 1999). Since I have been strongly interested in the effects of political debates and cultural developments in the context of the gay and lesbian, bisexual and polyamorous movements on the experience and narratives of non-monogamous queers, I decided to recruit already existing social, cultural or political groups from within these contexts. Moreover, because focus groups draw upon and encourage interactive processes, there is furthermore a tendency in these discussions for differences of opinion or experience and disagreement or conflict to surface (Kitzinger and Barbour 1999, Kitzinger 1994/1999, Frith 2000). Such disagreements (inasmuch as they articulate moral or political controversies) can in fact indicate lines of discursive conflict within this particular social context. All in all I conducted four group discussions (three with gay men and one with a bisexual group – with only men participating that evening). All these groups had been approached in writing as part of a comprehensive sampling process which I described above. In most cases I discussed my research project first with professionals, who had been in charge of the group as part of their paid work for an organisation. In all

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cases I asked whether it would be possible to visit the group at least once in advance. I thought this would reduce the likelihood of misunderstandings (cf. Kitzinger and Barbour 1999). Furthermore, I wanted to be able to explain my research project, the way I would handle the data and to discuss issues around confidentiality and anonymity and questions raised by the group members. The names of groups and organisations have been altered as agreed upon with the participants of the group discussions. The first focus group was with a group for HIV positive men run by Out!Positive, an HIV/AIDS organisation in London. The men of this group met on a weekly basis to discuss issues of concern for gay men with HIV. It was open to all men who used the services of the organisation. Twelve men were present on this evening. I ran the second focus group with the men who attended a social evening organised by The Inner Circle. The intention of the organisation was to provide a weekly space for pan-spiritual or pan-religious discussion among gay men in London. Thirteen men attended the themed discussion on that evening. I conducted my third focus group with the participants of a social support group for young South Asian gay and bisexual men called Matai. This group met weekly and was organised by an HIV/AIDS organisation in London. On the night of the group discussion nine men participated. The fourth discussion group was with a bisexual discussion group which usually met on a weekly basis in London. Although Bi Together! was usually a mixed-gender group, this evening only four men participated. Because I failed to ask participants for their personal background data (for example, by asking them to fill in an anonymous form) it is difficult for me to break down the focus group participants according to any categories. Being aware that my own perception of people’s identities and backgrounds may be misguided, I cannot say much on this issue. I think I can safely claim that apart from the discussion group with South Asian men, most discussion groups consisted of predominantly white men (either from the UK or the European continent). One participant in the discussion group with Inner Circle identified himself as East Asian and one in Bi Together! as American–South Asian. Participant Observation In the course of my research I have visited a range of gay male, gay and lesbian and bisexual groups and a range of conferences. I participated at group evenings for four gay male and gay and lesbian social and support groups after having been invited to the meetings by members as a response to my written request for support for my research project. The intention of the people inviting me was to give me an opportunity to discuss my suggestion for a group discussion or to be able to talk to individual group members, who might want to participate in my research. Even if I could not convince these groups to come together for a specially organised group interview, either individuals or the whole group were happy to discuss the issue of non-monogamous relationship practice on that evening. People were eager to help and shared their ideas, analysis and personal experiences with me. I usually took notes on the conversations I had and the observations I made on these evenings in hand-written form directly after the event on my way home. The next day I elaborated

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more extensive field notes on the basis of these notes and my memory in my research diary. (I kept a research diary all along throughout my research in which I recorded my experiences, questions and thoughts with regard to my research). I further visited a group discussion on non-monogamy organised by a bisexual group in London that had been announced in BCN, the bisexual newsletter. I also participated in a few conferences, the most significant of which were the Bisexual Conferences (BICONs) 1999 in Edinburgh and 2000 in Manchester (a joint event with the International Bisexual Conference). At these conferences I had the opportunity to participate in a range of workshops in which participants were discussing nonmonogamy, polyamory, monogamy, marriage and other relationship or sexualityrelated issues. I discuss the role of these workshops for the bisexual movement in Chapter 4. I further could discuss my research topic informally with a range of people and managed to arrange a significant amount of in-depth interviews. At these conferences, too, I produced extensive field notes which have flown into my overall analysis. Discourse Analysis Discourse analysis has been a major method and analytical technique used in this study. Discourse analysis provided a further level of analysis, additional to my original more hermeneutic approach to the data. Discourse analysis provides a particular means of contextualising this data by trying to uncover how people give meaning to and construct relationship ideologies and non-monogamous practices against the backdrop of specific cultural and political developments. My discourse analytical approach has been supported through affiliated strategies of documentary research (Platt 1981, 1999a, 1981/1999b). Throughout my research, but more systematically from 1999 until autumn 2001, I built up an archive with relevant articles published in the gay and lesbian and bisexual press (most importantly in the Pink Paper, Gay Times and BCN). I further collected and studied HIV prevention material and HIV newsletters of several HIV/AIDS organisations. Keeping on track with debates in such media presented an important strategy of contextualisation. I further conducted a comprehensive discourse analytical case study on the construction of nonmonogamy in gay male relationship manuals (Klesse 2007b). My analysis of the interview data has continuously progressed on two levels: a reading of life histories or personal experience stories influenced by the hermeneutic tradition and a discourse analytical approach interpreting the same stories (or elements and tropes in them) as parts of wider societal practices. This approach may seem surprising or even contradictory to some. However, I think David Howarth (2000) is right when he points out a particular ‘family resemblances’ between discourse analysis and hermeneutic modes of inquiry. Like those traditions of research, he maintains, discourse analysis is primarily concerned with the understanding and interpretation of social realities. Rather than doing this by simply carving out the meanings social actors have applied a phenomenon, it does so by analysing the way in which political forces and social actors construct meanings within incomplete and undecidable structures. This is achieved by examining the

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The Spectre of Promiscuity particular structures within which social agents take decisions and articulate hegemonic projects and discursive formations. (p. 129)

It has often been argued that discourse analysis would be a rather ‘messy’ method with very few standard applications (cf. Tonkiss 1998). This may be partially due to the fact that different concepts of discourse are in use in diverse fields of study (for example, in linguistics, social psychology or cultural studies/queer studies) (cf. Mills 1997). Partly, it is due to the fact that the philosophical assumptions which underpin discourse theory eschew the idea there is one (or any) true method for researching social phenomena (cf. Klesse 2004). Like many feminist and critical ethnographic methodologies, discourse analysis does not stand for an attempt to provide onedimensional objective accounts (cf. Stanley and Wise 1993, Denzin 1997). Rather, discourse analysis tends to be used in the ambition of constructing insightful and critical interpretation that should be measured primarily against the yard-stick as to whether it is persuasive (Howarth 2000). I have in this book extensively worked with a Foucauldian notion of discourse and its more recent Derridean elaborations by, for example, Laclau, Mouffe and Smith (see Introduction). Despite their high degree of abstraction, these modifications of Foucauldian discourse theory are advantageous in that they carve out some space for a notion of agency by distinguishing between subject positions and subjectivity (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000, Norval 2000). Foucault’s and Derrida’s work, Howarth (2000) argues, provide two distinct (although, as I would say, not incommensurable) styles of applying discourse analysis to empirical research: in his archaeological and genealogical research, Foucault has deployed strategies of problematisation (that is, showing the contingent and political, rather than necessary character of discursive formations), while in his technique of deconstruction Derrida has developed a strategy to unsettle the ‘closure’ of discourses in conceptual oppositions in which one concept is subordinated to the other. Both ‘styles’ of discourse analysis have informed the writing of this book in which I have tried to operationalise the critical potential of these intellectual methods. Discourse analysis has a strong capacity for the generation of theory by sensitively mapping empirical data through appropriate theoretical concepts. Theory production thus progresses in a way that is neither purely inductive nor purely deductive. Rather inductive and deductive strategies merge or feed into each other. The theoretical insights presented in The Spectre of Promiscuity are therefore closely interwoven with the empirical study.

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Index

Abbott, P. and Wallace, C. 29 Acker, et al. 40, 47 Adam, B.D. 135 Adoption and Children Act (2002) 32 agency 9–10, 13, 14, 28, 36, 80–1, 110, 139–40, 148, 160 Al-Fatiha 73, 128 Allan, G. 105 Alldred, P. 32 Allen, A. 14, 117 Allyn, D. 110 Altman, D. 28, 60, 61, 73, 113 Anapol, D. 98, 99, 101, 103, 106, 109 Anderlini-D’Onofrio, S. 83, 97, 99, 101, 103, 109 Andersen, M.L. 48 Ang-Lygate, M. 48 Angry Fiancée 89 ANSLIM 101 antagonism 35–6, 75, 140–1 Anthias, F. and Yuval-Davis, N. 35, 73, 74, 80, 142 anti-Semitism 51–2 Anzaldúa, G. 116 Arber, S. 155 Arnup, K. and Boyd, S. 32 articulation 10, 12–14, 21–2, 116–7, 137–8, 140, 142 assimilationism 61, 147 Assister, A. 124 Auchmuty, R. 31 Ault, A. 78, 82, 90 Bailey-Harris, R. 31, 66, 68, 71, 95 Bainham, A. and Brooks-Gordon, B. 23, 27 Baird, R.M. and Rosenbaum, S.E. 65 Balibar, E. and Wallerstein, I. 31 Ball, S. and Vincent, V. 5 Bamforth, N. 25, 27, 28, 32 Barker, N. 31, 32, 66, 68, 95, 146 Barlow, A. et al. 6 Barnett, S. and Thomson, K. 5 Bartell, G.D. 110 Bauer, R. 122, 123

Bauman, Z. 9 BDSM 11 and note, 84, 90, 122–3, 147; see also S/M Bech, H. 7, 115 Beck, U., and Beck-Gernsheim, E. 9; et al. 9 Bell, D. 27; and Binnie, J. 4, 7, 26, 31, 33, 67, 112, 114, 135, 145, 149 Bennett, K.C. and Thompson, N.L. 130 Berlant, L. 1, 65, 113, 133, 139; and Warner, M. 10, 35, 36, 113, 135, 139 Bhatt, C. 80, 128; and Lee, R. 60n1 Bhattacharyya, G. 80 Bhavnani, K.-K. 41, 48, 49 Bi Academic Invention, The 83 Bi Community News (BCN) 82, 159 Bi Together! 158 Bi-Monthly 82 Biernacki, P. and Waldorf, D. 155 Bifrost 82 biphobia 6, 79, 135 Bisexual Conferences (BICONs) 82–3, 84, 85, 159 Bisexual Horizons 89 bisexuality, authentic 78; conferences, workshops, publications 82–4, 85; construction of 78–82; debating male promiscuity in focus group 62–5; definition of 78; diversity of 77; and female agency/constraint 79, 80–1; and female fear of sexual harassment 80–1, 135, 150; and gendered ’double standard’ 79–80; and hegemonic conflict 85–6; and HIV/AIDS risk 78–9; and identity 78; and loss of heterosexual privilege 90–1; and love 113–14; and marriage 86–95; non-monogamy debates on 1, 82–6; and political lesbianism 81–2 and notes; postfeminist views 81; and promiscuity discourses 79–80; research on 1–2, 77; and safe sex 78–9; and sexual identity 134; and sexual politics

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84–6; and shaping of public spheres 84–5; and structures of support/ debate 83–4 Blachford, G. 138 Blackwood, E. 55 Bland, L. et al. 24n3 Blasius, M. 72, 141, 148 Bloomquist, E. 106 Blumstein, P. and Schwartz, P. 77, 78, 90, 98 Bola, M. 48 Bolton, R. 53, 54, 55 Bolton Seven 19 and note Borland, K. 41 Bosky, B.L. 106 Boulton, M. et al. 78 Bourdieu, P. 125 Bower, J. et al. 81 Brah, A. and Phoenix, A. 10 Bristow, J. 14, 58 Brooks, A. 81 Brownfain, J.J. 86 Browning, F. 67 Burke, M.E. 27 Burridge, J. 30 Buss, D. and Herman, D. 80 Butler, J. 10, 12, 138, 150; and Rubin, G. 150 Buxton, A.P. 86 Cade, F. 89 Calhoun, C. 21, 31, 45 Califia, P. 27, 114 Cameron, D. 5 Carabine, J. 30, 31, 34 Card, C. 67 Carol, A. 5 Carrington, C. 6, 8–9, 59 Cartledge, S. 113 Carver, T. 22, 26, 134 Chauncey, G. 23 child care 7–8, 20–1, 32 Chiu, L.-F. and Knight, D. 157 Chuter, C. and Seidl, G. 59 citizenship 4–5, 18; and assimilationist strategies 147; assumptions concerning 146; broad interpretation of 22, 146; and compromise 147; definitions of 21, 146; and empowerment 146; exclusions 147; and gender 21, 22, 146; and heteronormativity 21–3; and human rights discourse 22; legal dimensions

22–3, 26; and moral/ethical aspects 22, 146–7; sexualised nature of 21–2 and note, 26; structural limitation of politics 146–7 Civil Partnership Act (2004) 3, 31–2, 66, 87 civil partnerships see marriage, civil partnerships Clarke, E.O. 35, 36, 62, 72, 134, 138, 142, 144, 146, 147 Clarke, L. and Thomson, K. 6 Clarke, V. et al. 66, 70 class/classism 9, 17, 21–2, 34, 40–3, 48, 58, 79–80, 115–6, 125–7, 144, 150, 157 Cline, S. 104, 137 Cohen, C.J. 3, 10, 13, 60, 80, 116, 136, 150 Cole, C.L. 60 Coleman, E. 86, 87 commitment 59, 66–7, 77, 93, 94, 103, 107, 109, 126, 137–8 community, ambivalent role of 73; deconstructing 72–5; and gay/ lesbian ethos 72; limitation of discourses 141–2; meanings of term 74–5; and racial/ethnic minorities 73–4; scepticism towards 73; and shared interests/close affinity 72, 75; significance of 72; as social capital 125; social/cultural contexts 73; and white cultural hegemony 74 conflict see negotiation consensus 43, 107, 116, 122–4 Cook, J.A. and Fonow, M.M. 153 Cooper, C. 27 Cooper, D. 14, 19, 20, 21, 26, 29, 32, 33, 67, 68, 71, 116, 117, 132, 139, 150–1; and Monro, S. 30 counterpublics 34–7; and politics of public sphere inclusion 142–7; and social positioning 129–30 Cowie, C. and Lees, S. 80 Coxon, A.P.M. 27, 59 Crabtree, B.F. et al. 153 Crimp, D. 61 Crouch, A. 62 cruising 62, 63, 108, 138 Dangerous Bedfellows 61 D’Augelli, A.R. and Garnets, L.D. 141 Däumer, E.D. 78, 82 David, M. 29 Davies, P. 134; et al. 59, 134, 155

Index Davis, M. et al. 78 Dawson, M.C. 21, 35 De Beauvoir, S. 40 De Cecco, J.P. 83; and Shively, M.G. 43 deconstruction 10, 160 Denzin, N.K. 40, 41, 155; and Lincoln, Y.S. 39, 40, 41, 153 Derrida, J. 160 detraditionalisation theory 7, 9, 135 Devault, M.L. 47 diaspora 74 discourse analysis 39, 159–60 division of labour 7, 40 Dixon, D. 86, 110 Dixon, J.K. 86, 110 Donovan, C. 8 Dubisch, J. 54 Duggan, L. 19 Duncan, N. 20, 21, 27, 134, 144 Duncan, P. 123, 125 Duncombe, J. and Marsden, D. 120, 129 Dunne, G.A. 8 Dyer, R. 50 Eadie, J. 44, 78, 90, 99 Easton, D., and Klesse, C. 129; and Liszt, C.A. 97, 99, 101, 110 Edwards, R. 27, 48, 80, 125, 138 Ehrenreich, B. et al. 123 Epstein, D. 30; et al. 4, 33; and Johnson, R. 31 equality, equal rights 144–6 equality-myth 6–8 Erel, U. 9, 22, 49, 73, 125, 128, 139, 142; et al. 10 the erotic 148 Escoffier, J. 149 Eskridge, W. 66, 67, 71 ethics; research 54; sexual 58, 61, 65, 81, 132, 137–48 Ettelbrick, P. 67 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) 4 Evans, D. 26 Evans, D.T. 5, 21, 22, 26, 29, 30, 134, 146 Evans, M. 113 Faderman, L. 105 family values 4–5; and legislation of queer relationships 31–3; and monogamy as basis of capitalist system 120;

199

non-monogamist attacks on 88; normalisation/naturalisation of heterosexual marriage 29; promotion of 135; and section 28 29–33; and Tory discourse 29 Featherstone, M. 130 feminism 113; and heteronormativity 10; and interconnectedness of sexuality/ gender 150; and postfeminist/gender paradoxes 129–30; and public-private spheres 20; research concerns 40, 54; and restructuring of sexual ethics 129–30; and sexual ethics 81; and subaltern position 36 Fenster, T. 27 Finch, J. 46n2, 47, 55 Firestone, S. 113 Fishman, P.M. 47 fisting 15, 16 focus groups 1, 39, 62, 153, 157 Fonow, M.M. and Cook, J.A. 40 Fortier, A.M. 48, 49 Foucault, M. 14–16, 58, 138, 139, 148, 160 Frankenberg, R. 50 Fraser, M. 21, 90 Fraser, N. 14, 16, 34–6, 142, 148, 150 Freundlieb, D. 14 friendship 15; polyamory as a philosophy of 104–6 Frith, H. 157 Fung, R. 53 Fuss, D. 44 Garber, M. 80 Garner, S. 53 Gavigan, S.A.M. 32 Gay Times 159 gay men; and age differences 130–2; and anti-gay discourse 29–30, 58–65; conservatism of 61–2; and debates on promiscuity 62–5; and HIV/AIDS 57, 59–62; and loss of heterosexual privilege 90–1; and love 113–14; and new romanticism 61–2; and proposed code of conduct 61–2; and public sex 61–2; and question of (non)monogamy 57–8; and radicalisation of anti-promiscuity discourses 59–61; research on 1–2; and resentment towards ’gay male scene’ 57; romantic turn 61–2;

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and same-sex marriage 65–75; and sexual identity 134 Gearing, J. 54, 55 Geertz, C. 40 gender, and bisexual worries 44–5; and citizenship 21, 22, 146; concept 3; double-standards 54, 79–80, 113; and equality 9; exclusions/injustices surrounding 147; and friendship 105; and hegemony 138; and heteronormativity 16, 17, 67, 113, 139, 144; and heterosexuality 11, 13, 145; hierarchy of 8; and identity 46, 72, 99; and marriage/partner choice 67, 71, 77, 78, 87; and nonmonogamy 87; normative ideas on 10; paradoxes 129–30; and power relations 9, 10, 34, 41, 80, 115, 135, 145; prioritisation of 9; as process/performance 8; and promiscuity 6, 58, 136; and public/private divide 19–20, 21; relational dimension 8; and research process 39, 47–9, 54, 56; and same-sex relationships 6; and sexual acts 11; and sexual discourse 81, 150; and social movement politics 3, 33, 42, 74, 134, 139, 142; and social positioning 18, 116, 124, 127, 132, 145; and state regulation 19–20, 27, 28, 37, 87; traditional models 135; and transgressions 21 Gender Recognition Act (2004) 4 George, K.D. 104 George, S. 77, 80 Giddens, A. 6, 7, 9, 116, 123, 138 Gilman, S. 58 Glasner, B.G. and Strauss, A. 155 Gluck, S.B. and Patai, D. 40, 153 Glucksmann, M. 41 Gochros, J.S. 86 Goldberg, D.T. 40 Golombok, S. and Tasker, F. 8, 32 good homosexual/dangerous queer dichotomy 12, 136, 148 Goodison, L. 113 Gopinath, G. 74, 74n4 Gorna, R. 79 Goss, R.E. 103 Gove, B. 59 Graff, E.J. 67

Gramsci, A. 139 Greenwood, V. and Young, J. 24n3, 26 Greer, G. 113 Gregory, D. 81, 113 GRIDS (Gay-Related Immuno-Deficiency) 60 Griffin, K. 32; and Mulholland, L. 32 Grimshaw, J. 16, 148, 150 Gunaratnam, Y. 40, 41, 47 Haas, B. 81 Habermas, J. 21, 34, 35 Haimes, E. and Weiner, K. 33 Hale, B. 3 Hall, S. 24, 24n3, 25, 45, 143; and du Gay, P. 43 Halperin, D. 14, 15, 16, 138 Hamer, D. et al. 30 Hansen, C.E. and Evans, A. 79, 83 Haraway, D. 40 Harding, R. and Peel, L. 66, 68, 71n3, 146 Harding, S. 40, 44, 48 Haritaworn, J. 3, 10, 13, 16, 41, 45, 113, 119, 136, 150; et al. 13, 45, 101; and Tauqir, T. 9, 73 Harne, L. and Miller, E. 81n1 Hart, L. and Dale, J. 122 Haste, C. 28 Heaphy, B. 8, 65; and Donovan, K. 71, 72; et al. 47, 53, 154, 155 Heelas, P. 9 Hegarty, P. et al. 32, 66 hegemony, and agency 140–1; ambiguousness of 139; and antagonism 140–1; and bisexual culture/ politics 85; heteronormativity as form of 138–42; and heterosexuality 11; and individuation 140; and limitation of community discourse 141–2; as normalisation 11–13; and political process 33; as power strategy 12; and public/private distinction 21–2; radicalisation of articulation 11–12; and suppression of alternatives 138 Hekman, S. 40 Hemmings, C. 44, 82, 90, 99, 110 Herman, D. 22n2, 80, 140, 144, 145; and Stychin, C. 19 heteronormativity, and agency 14, 139; and anti-promiscuity discourses

Index 136–7; and bisexual relationships 90–1; challenges to 132; and citizenship 21–3; concept 135–6; as contested 139; critique of 10; definitions of 10, 135; drawbacks of 13–14; as form of hegemony 11–13, 138–42; and idealised image of heterosexuality 11; and the law 28; and love, intimacy, commitment 137–8; monolithic theory of 13; as pervasive form of power 11; and political subjectivity 139–40; and politics 138–42; and power relations 10, 14; pressures exerted by 139; and queer relationships 134–8; and sex/relationship practice 11, 135–6; and sexual identity 11; and social expectation/interaction 133–4; and subject position 139–40; and white bias 13 heterosexism 2, 48, 91, 145, 155 heterosexuality, discourses on 2, 10; family values 29–33; and fear of AIDS epidemic 78–9; as hegemonic representational system 11, 12; and heteronormative discourses 135–6; link with bisexuality 78; as main target 13; and sexual stratification 11; and stereotypes 13 Hickson, F.C.I. et al. 59 HIV/AIDS 3, 49, 55, 57, 59, 158, 159; and anti-promiscuity discourses 59–61; and stereotype of bisexual promiscuity 78–9; and gay male culture 61–2; and high risk/infected groups link 60 and note; link with gayness 60 Ho, P.S.Y. 119 Holland, J., et al. 80, 116; and Ramazanoglu, C. 41 Holt, T.C. 35, 36 homophobia 79, 135; and accusations against gay men 29; and assumptions of promiscuity 58, 59; and bisexuality 80; and conspiracy theories 29–30; internalised 91; marginalisation of 4; and Islamophobia 9, 73, 128, and Muslim and South Asian cultures 73, 128; persistence of 5, 6, 62; and swinging 110 homosexual, homosexuality, and age of consent 24, 25, 27; as decent/

201

reprehensible 26; and decriminalisation of private sexual acts 25 and note; female 58–9; as good 12–13, 143, 144, 148–9; link with bisexuality 78; and moral deviation/sexual excess 58; and moral subordination 146–7; as outsiders 23–4; pathologisation/criminalisation of 58; policing/prosecuting of 23; and promiscuity 59; and public morality 24; public/private division 25–6; and retreat into the closet 23; and review of criminal law 24–5; Victorian idea of 58 Honnens, B. 86 hooks, b. 36 Hot Bi Babe syndrome 80 Howarth, D. 12, 140 Howarth, D. 159, 160; et al. 39; and Stavrakakis, Y. 12, 137, 140, 160 Hubbard, P. 27, 35, 36, 84, 134, 138 Huberman, M.A. and Miles, M.B. 154 Human Fertilisation Embryology Act (HFEA) (1990) 33 Hunter, N.D. 31, 67, 68 Hüsers, F. and König, A. 78, 90, 92 Hutchins, L. 77, 97, 101 identification 39, 43, 45, 108, 140, 143, 149 identity politics 35, 44 intersectionality 10–11, 150–1 intersubjectivity 42, 51 interviewer effects 47–9 interviews/interviewing 39, 47, 49–52, 68, 143, 153–4 intimacy 6–7, 18, 53, 59, 63–5, 112–14; and friendship 104–7 Jackson, S. 68, 138, 145, 150; and Scott, S. 113 Jamieson, L. 7, 107, 114, 116, 129, 138 Johnson, C. 22, 90, 134, 135 Johnson, R. 16, 150 Johnston, J. 113 Josephs, G.I. and Lewis, J. 36 Kabeer, N. 139 Kaloski, A. 84, 99 King, E. 43, 60n1, 78 Kipnis, L. 119 Kirk, M. and Madsen, H. 61, 72

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Kitzinger, J. 53n3, 157; and Barbour, R.S. 157, 158 Klein, F. and Wolf, T. 83 Klesse, C. 7, 9, 23, 39, 41, 44, 52, 63, 79, 81, 114, 116, 130, 135, 138, 150, 154, 159, 160 Kong, T.S.K. et al. 53 Kulick, D. 54; and Willson, M. 54 Kurdek, L.A. 83 Kymlicka, W. 144 Labouchère Amendment 25 Labriola, K. 103, 106 Laclau, E. 12, 139; and Mouffe, C. 11–12, 65, 109, 137, 139, 140 Lang, S. 48 Lano, K. 82, 100; and Parry, C. 83, 97, 103, 106, 109, 110 Lash, S. 116 law 17, 134; authority of 19; Foucauldian perspective 19; heteronormative discourse 28; and heterosexual family values 29–33; and lesbian sex/culture 28; permissiveness/ control 23–8; and policing ‘public sex’ 25–6, 27–8; and public/private distinction 20–3; and queer counterpublics 34–7; and queer relationships 31–3; and revision of offences policies 27 Lee, R.M. 19, 154; and Renzetti, C.M. 40 Lees, S. 80 Lehr, V. 67, 88, 95, 139 LeMoncheck, L. 6, 79, 108 Lennon, K. and Whitford, M. 40 lesbians, and bisexuality 81–2; and HIV/ AIDS discourse 78–9; and loss of heterosexual privilege 90–1; and love 113–14; marginalisation of 82; and marriage 86–7; and participation in polyamory 91–2; political 81–2 and notes; and sexual identity 134 lesbigays 32, 134–5 LeVay, S. 98 Lever, J. et al. 77 Levine, M.P. 112 Lewin, E. and Leap, W.L. 46, 54 Lewis, J. 113 liberalism 24–6 Lincoln, Y. and Guba, E. 153 Lister, R. 21, 146

Local Government Act (1988) see Section 28 Lominé, L.L. 54 London Bisexual Group (LBG) 82, 84 London Bisexual Women’s Group (LBWG) 82, 118 Lorde, A. 116 love 7, 18, 59, 64, 66–7, 137–8; and polyamory 98, 103–4, 107–8, 111, 112–14 love, intimacy, commitment, and bisexuality, non-monogamy, gays 113–14; as central values 38, 137; and chains of signification 137, 138; and heteronormativity 137–8; meanings of 137–8; as nodal points 137, 138; polyamorous 103–4, 107, 109, 112–14; and public sex culture 138; and reverse discourse 138 McCandless, J. 32 McClintock, A. 58, 68 McGhee, D. 27 McGrath, R. 59 McGuigan, J. 35 Macnair, M. 123 McNay, L. 14, 16 Marcus, E. 104 Marcuse, H. 134 marriage, civil partnerships, alternatives to 70–1; ambivalence towards 68–72; and assimilation 72; benefits of 68; and bi- or queer-identified partners 87; and bisexual attitudes 85–95; and citizenship status 65; as civilising institution 66–7; debates concerning 89–90; and equality 68–72, 88, 89; ethical/political positions of normativity 86; as heterosexual/ out-moded institution 70 and note; and human rights 66; and identity, authenticity, political correctness 90; and legislation 31–3, 66, 70, 88–9; and lesbians 86–7; liberal paradigm 67; and marital rights 145–6; and non-monogamy 85–95; normalising effects of 69, 89–90; and normativity of coupledom 71–2; and politics of rights 67–8; and polyamorous households 90; and primary/ secondary partner distinction 91–5; proponents of 71; rejection of 69;

Index and religious values 69–70; research on 86–7, 92; and same-sex campaign 87–9; and same-sex debates 65–75 Marshall, A. 53, 80, 104 Marshall, T.H. 21–2, 146 Martin, B. 99 Martin, J.L. and Dean, L. 155 Mason, J. 41, 154, 155 Massey, D. 27 master-slave relationships 122–3 Matteson, D.R. 86 Maynard, M. 40; and Purvis, J. 153 Megill, A. 40 Merrick, 101 methodology 17, 39–40, 55, 120, 153, 155 Mieli, M. 90 Mies, M. 40 Millen, D. 41 Miller, N. 23, 24 Millett, K. 113 Mills, S. and White, C.A. 113 modernity/modernisation 6–9 Mohanty, C.T. 36 Moller Okin, S. 20 monogamy, non-monogamy 13, 120; and age differences 130–2; and antipromiscuity discourses 58–65; associated with certain identities/ collectivities 6; as bisexual issue 78; and casual sex/swinging 108; and coming out 134–5; and concept of community 72–5; as conference/ workshop subject 83–4; and conflict/ power struggle 117, 119–20; construction/assumptions 2; and control/restrictions on freedom 120; as cultural politics of resistance 148; debates on 18, 97; different styles of 107–14; and differential social positioning 132; equality in 120; explanations/motivations 1; and external expectations 80; and female bisexual agency/constraint 80–1; focus group debates 62–5; and Foucauldian notion of the erotic 148; and good homosexual/dangerous queer dichotomy 148–9; and happy relationships 151; and heteronormativity 134–8; and HIV/AIDS research 59; and male/female concerns 136; and marriage 65–75,

203

85–95; negotiation of 120; and partnership values 2; and political lesbianism 81–2 and notes; politics of 1–2, 88; and polyamory distinction 107–8, 143; and postfeminism/gender paradoxes 129–30; and promiscuity 57–8, 137; responsible 106–7, 112; and serious adult relationships 63; and sexual health 1; and sexual politics 5–6; and surplus monogamy 119; as transgressive 3; workshops on 57 Moore, L. 105 Moran, J. 4, 30–1 Moran, L.J. 24; et al. 19 Moreno, E. 53n3 Morgan, D.L. 157; and Scannel, A.U. 157 Mort, F. 24, 25, 26, 149 Morton, H. 55 Mouffe, C. 139, 142 Munson, M. 104n2; and Stelboum, J.P. 99, 101, 104n2, 105, 106, 113 Murray, S.O. 54 Myers, J. 46 Myslik, W.D. 21 Nardi, P.M. 53, 61, 105; and Bolton, R. 28 the nation/nationalism 22, 29, 31, 51–3, 59–60, 81, 136 Naz Project 128 Nearing, R. 99, 106 negotiation, and acceptance of further partners 117; and age differences 130–2; and bridging of differences 118; and communication of ground rules 117–18, 121; and community knowledge 125; and compromise 119; and conflict/relationship labour 118–19; and consent as abstract fiction 122–4; and differential social positioning 124–32; and emotional democracy 116; and finding agreement 117–18; and gender 119–22; and happy relationships 151; and power dynamics 116–17; and relationship defining power 124–5, 126–7; and self-empowerment 128; and social capital 125; and threats to relationships 118 New Labour 4–5, 30, 33, 135 New Right 3–4, 12, 135

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Newton, E. 54, 55 Ng, V. 74 nodal points 10–11, 12, 137–8, 140 Noël, M.J. 13, 101 non-monogamy see monogamy, nonmonogamy Norval, A.J. 140, 160 Nussbaum, M. 66–7 Oakley, A. 47, 55 Ochs, R. 79, 135 O’Connell Davidson, J. and Layder, D. 48, 155 Off Pink Collective 83 Onlywomen Press 81 Outnorthwest 27 OutRage 60 Padfield, M. and Proctor, I. 48, 49, 50 Pallotta-Chiarolli, M., 77, 106 Palmer, A. 66 Parr, Z. 74, 82 participant observation 39, 153, 158–9 Patai, D. 41, 55; and Gluck, S.B. 41 Patel, G. and Maharaj, K. 70n2, 128 Patel, P. 74, 128 Pateman, C. 20, 116, 145 Patton, C. 61 Paul, J.P. 77, 135 Paulin, K. 48 Peiss, K. 80 Pendleton, E. 61 Peplau, A.L. 83; et al. 83, 124 Petrella, S. 110, 116 Phelan, S. 144, 145, 149 Pheterson, G. 80, 113 Phillips, A. 16, 20, 144, 145 Phillips, L. 4 Phoenix, A. 48, 49, 50, 157 Pieper, M. and Bauer, R. 116, 117 Pink Paper 159 Platt, J. 159 Plummer, K. 9, 22, 25, 34, 44, 46, 99, 142, 146, 153 politics of inclusion, ambivalences/ contradictions in 144; and equity 144; and the good homosexual/ dangerous queer dichotomy 143, 144; and polyamory/non-monogamy distinction 143; and promiscuity 143–4; and the public sphere 142–7;

and self-censorship 144; and social identity 143; and structural limitation of citizenship politics 146–7; and structural limitation of equal rights 144–6 polyamory 13, 18, 81; activism in 111; at conjuncture of diverse subcultures 100–1; and bisexual relationships 90, 91–2; and building a social movement 101–2; central elements of 107; and childcare 94 and note; and commitment/emotional closeness 109; and compersion 107 and note; concept of 102–7; and de-emphasis on sexuality 103, 107; definitions of 98, 102; discursive formations of 97–8; Foucauldian 148; and gay male public sex culture 108, 112–14; and happy relationships 151; and the Internet 100 and note, 112–13; and its ‘others’ 107–14; love/intimacy in 103–4, 107, 112–14; and marriage 92–5; and master/slave relationship 122, 123; and new age philosophies 101; and non-monogamy distinction 107–8, 143; open approach to 111; origins of UK community 99–101; and philosophies of friendship 104–6; and politics of differentiation 108–10; and polyfidelity 109; in practice 110–11; and primary/secondary partners 92–5, 103, 108; and promiscuity 108–10, 149; and Protestant work ethic 119; publications on 100–1; relational ideologies 112–14; and relationship labour 119; relationship philosophy of 95; as responsible non-monogamy 106–7, 112; sexpositive stance to 111; sex-radical critique of 110–12; and socio-sexual identity 98–102; and swinging/casual sex 109–10; as transgressive 3 Porter, K. and Weeks, J. 23 postfeminism 81, 129 post-Marxist theory 11 postmodernity 9, 40, 153 Power, L. 113; and Barnett, T. 34 power relations 18, 134; and citizenship/ family discourse 4–5; complexities of 135, 149; and conflict 117,

Index 119–20, 123; and consent 123–4; and detraditionalisation/individualisation assumptions 9; and differential ability to cause 116, 117, 124, 127, 151; and differential social positioning 124, 128; disciplinary 14, 135; and emotional democracy 7; and equality 150–1; ethical dimension 14, 150–1; and freedom/misuse of power 119, 120–1; and gender, race/ethnicity, class 9, 80; and heteronormativity theories 10; and myth of same-sex equality 6–10; and negotiation of non-monogamy partners 114; and non-monogamous relationships 115–16; and normativity 147; onedimensional concept 7; and privileging of gay men/lesbians 7–8; and public sphere assumptions 34; and sexual diversity 3–6 practices of freedom 16, 148 Pringle, K. et al. 29, 30 Pringle, R. and Watson, S. 19 Probyn, E. 10 promiscuity, anti-promiscuity 17–18; and bisexuality 79–80; and challenging of stereotypes 86; condemnation of 143–4; and differentialising discourse 136; and female vulnerability 79–80; and gender 80–1, 129, 136–7; and HIV/AIDS 59–61; meaning of 79; and non-monogamy 58–65, 137; and polyamory 108–10; stereotypes 80–1 prostitution 24 and note, 60, 134 Puar, J.K. 9, 73, 74n4, 149 Public Order Act (1986) 28 public–private spheres, and appropriate behaviour 21; boundaries of 34, 134; and bourgeois public sphere 34; definition of 19–20, 33; feminist view 20; and gender 19–20, 21; hegemonic interpretations of 21–2; and legislation 23–6; and policing of public sphere 25–6, 27–8, 134; politics of inclusion 142–7; and postfeminism/gender paradoxes 129–30; and power relations 34; and public sphere theory 34–7, 75; regulation of 20–3; sexual nature of 25–6; sexualised nature of 20–1; shaping of bisexual public spheres

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84–6; and subaltern counterpublics 34–7 pure relationship model, and choice 115; concept 7; criticisms of 7; definition of 115; and detraditionalisation theories 7, 9; and egalitarian relationships 8–9; endorsement/ rejection of 8; and equality myth 7–8; and intimate democratisation 8; and negotiation 116; and non-heterosexual relationships 115; popularity of 7; and power 116; queer lives equated with 7; and reflexive modernisation paradigm 9 queer 81; and anti-promiscuity discourses 6; bashing 3, 28; as dangerous 12–13, 143, 144, 148–9; meanings of term 2n; and normative discourses 132; politics 149–50; power issues 2–3; and race/religion 128–9; and relationship legislation 31–3; relationships and heteronormative discourses 134; and social positioning 128–9 queer theories, and agency, resistance, transgression 14–15, 149–50; Foucauldian legacy 14–16; theories on heteronormativity 13–14; and people of colour 13 race/ethnicity 18, 33, 40–1, 48–50, 115–16, 124, 145, 156; and classism/racism interrelation 150; and female promiscuity 80; and gender equality/sexual rights 9; and Islamic/Muslim culture 9, 127–8; and non-monogamous concerns 136; and public/private regulation 20; and public spheres 42–3, 127–8; and research methodology 49–51; and respectability 136; and sexism/homophobia 9; and social positioning 127–9; and whiteness 13, 48–50, 53, 60–1, 149 racism 9, 13, 48–51, 73–74, 128, 141, 145, 150 radical pluralism 106–7 Rahman, M. 4, 22n2, 30, 67, 68, 144, 145 Rankine, J. 68 Ratti, R. 74n4 Rauch, J. 66 Raymond, J.G. 105

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Raymond, K. 16 Reay, D. 40 Reinhold, S. 29 religion 127–9, 132, 18, 69–70, 73, 88; Sikhism 69; Islam 9, 69; Christianity 36, 89, 101, 103, 128, 141 Renzetti, C.M. and Lee, R.M. 154 representation 12–13, 14, 26, 40–1, 127 research 17, 39–40; and being a ‘kinky’ academic 45–6; and bisexuality 43–4; feminists debates on methodology 40; gender worries 44–5; and gendered communication 47–8; and identity management 43–4; and identity matching 48–9; interpretative conflict 41–2; and intersubjectivity 42–6, 51–3; and interviewer effects 47–9; nationality 51–3; and non-monogamous relationships 42–3, 46; and power relations 40–2, 47–9; race, ethnicity, racism 49–51; and representation 40–1; sexualising relationships 53–6; and structuring of relationships 48; and values 42 research design, discourse analysis 159–60; focus groups/group discussions 157–8; initial analysis 154–5; participant observation 158–9; qualitative interviewing 153–4; the sample 156–7; sampling issues 155–6 Rhodes, P.J. 48, 49 Rich, A. 105 Richardson, D. 10–11, 20, 22, 26, 32, 79, 134, 135, 136, 146, 150 Ringer, J. 112 Ritchie, A. and Barker, M. 92, 100, 103, 107n4 Robson, R. 95 Rodriguez Rust, P.C. 43, 77, 78, 97, 110 Ronai, M. 48, 53n3 Rose, N. 83, 116 Rose, S. 82, 89–90 Ross, M.W. 86 Rotello, G. 61, 66 Rothblum, E. 105 Rubin, G. 11, 106n3, 136 Rubin, L.B. 105 Russel, D.E.H. 48 Rust, P.C. 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 90, 97, 99, 106

Rutherford, J. 43, 143 S/M 11n, 15, 80, 83, 131, 134; see also BDSM Saffron, L. 32 Sahgal, G. and Yuval-Davis, N. 74, 80 same-sex relationships, and marriage 2, 17–18, 87–9, 145–6; and myth of equality 6–10; and next of kin rights 31and note; and primary/secondary partner distinction 91–5; and registering of partnerships 31–2; and reproductive technologies 32–3; and role of parenting 32; tolerance of 134 Sayigh, R. 55 Schenk, C. 68 Schmidt, G. 7; et al. 7; and Strauß, B. 7 Schulman, S. 61, 113 Schwandt, T.A. 155 Schwartz, P. and Rutter, V. 87 Seale, C. and Kelly, M. 154 Section 28, and anti-gay discourse 29–30; Conservative arguments for 12; debates surrounding 28; and educational policies 30–1; and heterosexual family values 29–33; and homophobic sentiments 30; paradoxical effects of 34; and queer relationships 31–3; repeal of 3–4, 30 Sedgwick, E.K. 10, 28, 99 Segal, L. 138 Seidler, V. 105 Seidman, S. 11, 61, 106n3, 108, 112, 114, 136, 137, 138, 143; et al. 134 sexism 9, 13, 48, 81, 150 sexology 58 sex-radicalism 18, 84, 86, 108, 110–11, 114, 130 sexual acts, stigmatisation 11; decriminalisation of 25; transgressive 15–17 Sexual Behaviour in Britain 5–6 sexual identity 18, 60, 68, 83, 98; author’s 46; bisexual 78, 80, 84; poly 101, 103, 110 Sexual Offences Act (1956) 25, 28 Sexual Offences Act (1967) 23, 33; Amendment/Revision to (2000, 2003) 3, 23, 27; and gender differences 28; impact of 26; and the private sphere 25; and a promise not to prosecute

Index 25; and the public sphere 25–6; and sexual citizenship 26; and Wolfenden recommendations 24–5 sexual politics 15–16, 135; and anti-queer promiscuity assumptions 6; assimilationism 61, 147; and citizenship 4–5, 22n; and continuing homophobia 4, 5, 6; egalitarian aspects 2; and heteronormative discourse 4; and legislative equality 3–4; and liberalisation of attitudes 3, 24–6; moral taxonomy 25–6; and non-monogamous behaviour 5–6; and power 2–3; and pro-family agenda 4; progressive nature of 2; and recognition of individual autonomy, choice, freedom 3; and state institutions 19 sexuality, gendered construction of 80–1; racialised construction of 13, 21–2, 29, 41, 54, 58, 79–80; regulation/ contestation of 20–1; research 2, 56, 154, 157; and research relationships 53–6; and sex-negativity 6; and sexual deviance 58 Sharrock, C. 60 Sheff, E. 80, 99 Sheldon, S. 33 Shepherd, S. 23 Signorile, M. 61, 66 Silva, E.B. and Smart, C.B. 6, 7 Simmonds, F.N. 48 Simon, W.S. 9 Skamballis, A. 55 Skeggs, B. 13, 58, 136, 150 Smart, C. 19, 32, 80; and Neale, B. 7 Smith, A.M. 4, 11, 12–13, 26, 29, 67, 90, 112, 136, 138, 140, 148 Smith, D. 47 Smith-Rosenberg, C. 105 Smyth, C. 28 social capital 124–5, 127–8, 132, 139 social movements 3, 18, 33, 42, 74, 85, 101–2, 134, 139, 142, 144, 149 social positioning, and access to resources 124–5; and age 130–2; and class 125–7; and commitment 126; and counterpublics 129–30; and decision-making 126; and equality 125–6; and navigating public spheres 127–9; and negotiation 124–32; positionality 6, 17, 36,

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56, 142; and postfeminism/gender paradoxes 129–30; and power differentials 124–5, 126–7, 128; and power dynamics 124, 128; and race, religion, social capital 127–9; and vulnerability 136–7 Somerville, S.B. 53, 58, 150 Song, M. and Parker, D. 48 Soysal, Y.N. 22 Spender, D. 47 Squires, J. 14, 20, 117 Stacey, J. 41, 55, 68 Stanley, L. 40, 42; and Wise, S. 40, 42, 47, 48 Stein, A. 81 Steinberg, D.L. 32 Steinbugler, A.C. 21 Stokes, J.P. et al. 78 Straw, J. 4 Street Offences Act (1959) 24n Stychin, C. 3, 4, 5, 19, 31, 33, 122, 135, 147 subjectivity/subject positions 10–11, 12, 14, 42, 48, 135, 139–40, 160 Sullivan, A. 61, 65–6 Sullivan, N. 16 Supporting Families 4 Tagaki, D.Y. 74 Tanenbaum, L. 80 Tatchell, P. 71, 88, 95 Taylor, G.W. and Ussher, J.M. 122 Taylor, Y. 4 Theweleit, K. 80 Thomson, R. 30 Thorneycroft, B. et al. 113 Tonkiss, F. 160 transgender 2, 3, 45, 147, 150 transgression 15–17, 80; and freedom/ autonomy 148; and gender 21; and non-monogamous/polyamorous practices 3, 149; and power relations 149, 150; and public/private boundaries 21; and queer theory/politics 149–50; and research process 54; as resistance/counter-normative 150; and sexual acts 15–17; single-issue focus 150; structural constrictions on 150; validity of 149 transphobia 155 Treichler, P.A. 59 Tucker, N. 90

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Tuller, N.R. 59 Turner, B.S. 21, 22 Udis-Kessler, A. 79, 81 Uguris, T. 41 Valentine, G. 21 Valverde, M. 91, 124 VanEvery, J. 31, 71 Wafer, J. 54 Wagenknecht, P. 10 Waites, M. 3, 25, 27, 28, 30 Walby, S. 20 Warner, M. 11, 13, 16, 21, 35, 36, 61, 67, 84, 134, 136, 142, 144, 148 Warnock Committee on Human Fertilisation and Embryology (1984) 33 Waterton, C. and Wynne, B. 157 Watney, S. 59, 60n1, 61 Weait, M. 43n1 Weatherburn, P. et al. 59 Weeks, J. 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 22, 23, 26, 28, 31, 53, 58, 59, 60, 71, 72, 73, 100, 106n3, 115, 125, 130, 135, 139, 141, 149; et al. 7, 8, 31, 32, 53, 59, 65, 105, 113, 115, 116, 117, 124, 139, 141, 154 Weinberg, M.S. et al. 77, 78, 87, 92, 104 Weisse, E.R. 105 Wellings, K. et al. 5 Werbner, P. 20; and Yuval-Davis, N. 22, 146

West, C. 99, 109 Weston, K. 65, 105, 115 Whisman, V. 43, 98 Whitehead, T.L. and Conaway, M.E. 54 Wilkins, A.C. 80 Wilkinson, S. 81 Willey, A. 80 Williams, W.L. 45, 54, 55 Willkinson, S. and Kitzinger, C. 41 Willson, M. 54 Wilson, A.R. 144, 145 Wilson, E. 16, 134, 149 Wilton, T. 79 Wintemute, R. and Andenœs, M. 65 Wintour, P. et al. 32 Wise, S. 30 Withney, C. 86 Wittig, M. 11 Wolf, N. 80, 86 Wolfenden Report 33; and limits of liberalism 24–5; pre-1967 situation 23–4; and privatisation of gay male sexuality 25–6 Woodhead, D. 27 Woods, R. and Smith, D. 5 Wosick-Correa, K. 116, 117 Yeatman, A. 40 Yip, A.K.T. 7, 59, 116 Young, I.M. 20, 21, 34, 73, 74, 142, 144 Young, S. 72, 141 Yuval-Davis, N. 20, 21, 22, 80, 146