Fleshy Dykey Antimonogamy (with or without Asexuality) (original) (raw)
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The critique of monogamy has been a pervasive feature of feminist debates on gender, power, and sexuality since the nineteenth century. Different currents within feminist theorising and activism have tackled the oppressive effects of cultures of sex, intimacy, and kinship that render monogamy a normative feature within women's lives. Rejections of monogamy were voiced from within Marxist and anarchist feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in existentialist feminism in the post-World War II years, and in various strands of radical feminism, lesbian feminism, and bisexual feminism since the late 1960s, unfolding in a complex genealogy that extends to contemporary queer-feminist positions. This work has developed different foci, ranging from critiques of capitalist gender relations and the division of labour over attempts to reshape female subjectivity to hetero-patriarchal constructions of love and the family. Some of this work has also been motivated by sexual liberationist ideas or identity political agendas (for example, as in radical feminist, lesbian feminist, or bifeminist movements). Despite important differences, I suggest that all these lineages are interconnected and held together by common threads of discourse. One of the unifying features of feminist anti-monogamy has been the common concern with women's erotic autonomy. Yet how the concept of autonomy has been filled with meaning depends profoundly on the backdrop of the respective wider social movement agendas. While I have documented the breadth of this genealogy of feminist antimonogamy critiques elsewhere (Klesse, 2018), I focus here specifically on bifeminist refutations of monogamy, concentrating primarily on work published in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s, with the aim of highlighting arguments that have influenced more recent bisexual and queer feminist discussions on the topic. Through the analysis of some key texts, I show that bifeminist critiques of this period have shared some of the core assumptions prevalent within other identity-related feminist currents (such as lesbian feminism and heterosexual feminism), while endorsing a bifeminist standpoint and advocating a distinctly bifeminist
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