Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities by Mimi Schippers (review)

In this thought-provoking book, Mimi Schippers turns a critical lens on mononormativity, the institutionalized legitimization, naturalization, and privileging of monogamous couple relationships. Extending the work of queer, feminist, and critical race scholars on connections between normativity and power and privilege, Schippers argues that monogamy, taken for granted as a key component of "good" romantic and sexual relationships, must be deconstructed in the same manner. The aim of her book is to show not only how monogamy gets privileged, but also how it is premised on the dominant masculine and the subordinate feminine and/or racialized "other," making compulsory monogamy integral to the institutionalization of gender and racial hierarchies in US society. Building on this claim, then, Schippers theorizes polyqueer sexualities as polyamorous intimacies that hold the potential to challenge these inequalities, at least in the context of intimate relationships, in ways not possible in monogamous pairings. A queer life, and the possibility it holds to build meaning outside of provided scripts, is thus viewed not only as an orientation away from heterosexuality, but also as a reorientation toward non-monogamy.

Schippers draws on scenarios from her own life as well as from literature and film in order to theorize the effects of compulsory monogamy. She focuses exclusively on intimacies composed of a cisgender woman and two heterosexual cisgender men (WMM triangulation). As a result, her examination of polyqueer sexualities is not exhaustive (nor need it be), given the many forms poly relationships can take, but her cases are instead theoretically useful for exploring the connection between monogamy and heteromasculinity in producing gender and racial hierarchies. Her substantive chapters thus each engage a scenario in which heteromasculinity, premised on one man's exclusive right to dominate and possess a woman sexually, is challenged. She then uses each case to reimagine the relationship as polyqueer, showing how this reorientation away from monogamy can be used to disrupt gender and racial inequality. The cases all highlight the limitations in imagination and pleasure produced by compulsory monogamy as the participants struggle with what it means for someone to hold desire for more than one person in a culture that tells them this isn't okay. Thus, Schippers asks, how might these scenarios play out differently if this wasn't the culture's default orientation?

Schippers is clear and convincing in her analysis of how polyqueer sexualities hold the potential to challenge gender hierarchies in intimate relationships. By reorienting WMM triangulations away from compulsory monogamy, Schippers demonstrates how these intimacies may then contest the bases of dominant masculinity and subordinate femininity in relationships such as men's possessiveness and control of women. In the process, this reorientation rejects the sexual double standard that only men should be permitted multiple sexual partners and that women's sexual pleasure and desire should come second, thereby allowing women greater sexual subjectivity. Finally, this reorientation away from monogamy then also opens space for men to reorient themselves toward other men. Instead of viewing each other as competition for the same woman, men can build a queer bond in which they do not see other men as challenges to their ownership of a woman, but rather as desiring subjects and, potentially, desirable sexual objects, creating new intimacies between them.

Although Schippers shows how mononormativity, homonormativity, and black respectability coalesce to constrain black men to be either gay or respectable, the potentiality of interracial polyqueer intimacies to challenge racial inequalities is less clear throughout. A provocative idea, how polyqueer WMM interracial threesomes hold the power to do anti-racist work in practice and more broadly, was underdeveloped. This is one place where examples from lived experience could have rounded out the scenarios Schippers uses. Instead, she draws on a literary piece in which the author explores the potential of an interracial threesome involving a black man, a white man, and a woman whose race is not revealed to queer the men's relationship and dissolve the racial hierarchy between...