Sex/love skirmishes: “swinging,” “polyamory,” and the politics of naming

Abstract

The contested definitions of “swinging” and “polyamory” reveal profound inconsistencies in the logics of sex, love, commitment, and coupledom. In this article, I use a number of non-monogamy blogs and online glossaries as examples of the way these two words are often deployed against each other in an effort to position the speaker in relation to mononormative practices of sex and love. Leaving aside questions of the accuracy of particular definitions, I map a range of definitions against two existing scholarly/activist tools for describing relationship styles, specifically Gayle Rubin’s “Charmed Circle” and Meg-John Barker’s sex/love continuums. This exercise is doubly fruitful: first, the tools reveal the political stakes of the definitional debates; second, the definitions demonstrate that the distinctions we commonly use to distinguish between types of relationships—including types of non-monogamous relationships—in fact rely on mononormative assumptions about sex, love, and friendship. If “mononormativity” is defined as the system of ideas, institutions, and practical orientations that provide the backdrop against which the idea of monogamy as coherent, common, natural, and right congeals, the sex/love skirmishes of “swinging” and “polyamory” remind us that its logics are both pervasive and deeply fractured.

Keywords:

• Swinging
• polyamory
• Gayle Rubin
• queer theory
• mononormativity

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this essay was presented in 2014 at the Frontiers of Transqueer Studies: Issues, Challenges, Directions Conference, at the University of Sydney. I am grateful to the organisers for generously allowing me the space to workshop these ideas in their earliest stages and to Associate Professor Kane Race for his detailed notes as the work developed.

Notes

1. “Free love,” for example, has no doubt passed out of regular usage in part because of the imagined naivety of both the term itself and the 1960/70s counter-cultural movements associated with its coining.

2. Of course, we should not assume any direct equivalence between taxonomies of sexual preferences and taxonomies of relational ones—the idea that individuals might have a stable relational identity or orientation does not yet have the entrenched disciplinary backing that the idea of stable sexual identity does. While the practices of monogamy and marriage have a host of formal and informal institutions that figure them as coherent, natural, and “right” (Kean 2015), including a long history of mobilising science in order to bolster claims for monogamy’s place in nature (Angela Willey 2016), Elizabeth Emens has noted that differences in relationality, unlike sexuality, are generally described in universalising rather than minoritising terms (2004, 277). That said, identitarian language is beginning to flavour discussion of relationship “orientation” in some polyamorous activist communities—with discussants borrowing the LGBT “coming out” narrative to position themselves as candidates for the protection of anti-discrimination laws (Ann E. Tweedy 2011). These emerging tendencies have been contested by Christian Klesse (2014), who argues that polyamorous activists and communities should resist attempts to emulate the false clarity of sexual and gender taxonomies. Sharing his concern, this article asks what might be gained from an engagement with relationship taxonomies that does not attempt to clarify or consolidate them, arguing that the definitional disputes themselves can shed critical light on some of the tensions that animate contemporary relational discourses.

3. Although many of the sites included in this article appear to be produced by people who themselves practice some form of negotiated non-monogamy, and the internet is often an important resource for individuals and communities of sexual or relational difference, the ongoing project of qualitative and ethnographic studies of communities is crucial to exploring how these words get picked up and put into use offline (Ritchie and Barker 2006, 587). That said, it does appear that the range of opinions about the relationship between swinging and polyamory offered by these sites were also present among participants in Christian Klesse’s study of gay men and bisexual non-monogamies and polyamories (Christian Klesse 2007, 110). Whether or not this correlation holds for other groups of non-monogamous people, or the extent to which there have been changes within communities over time that are hard to witness in the layered digital texts of the internet, is an important matter for future research.

4. A notable and recent exception is Angela Willey who elegantly outlines the range of distinct practices that are subsumed under the rubric “monogamy” in scientific literature on the matter (2016, 47–50).

5. “Polyfidelity” is used to describe a relationship style where a group of more than two people are “closed” to outside relationships and/or sexually exclusive. The term was reportedly first used by participants in the Kerista community in the 1970s (Alan 2007). Some, like Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy (2009), understand polyfidelity as a subset of polyamory. Others, like Catherine Deville (1995), see them as closely related but nonetheless distinct relationship styles (hence “sister lifestyle”).

6. The other person is Jennifer L. Wesp, who created the Usenet newsgroup alt.polyamory. For discussions of the origins and history of word “polyamory” see Alan (2007); Easton and Hardy (2009, 8); Tristan Taormino (2008, 20).

7. Veaux states, without reference, that this Ravenheart quote formed part of Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart’s response when the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary contacted her to ask for a formal definition and background of the word “polyamory” in 1992.

8. The two potential uses of the “love” in “many loves” is a source of ongoing friction in polyamorous intra-community discussions more broadly, though proponents of the “many-lovers” definition of polyamory (see Easton and Hardy 2009, 8) always acknowledge the existence of the “many loves” definition, while the reverse is not always the case.

9. “The Lifestyle” is a common alias for “Swinging.”

10. Or, for that matter, an open-ended definition of sex as “whatever the people engaging in it think it is” including, potentially, reading or eating ice-cream as well as intercourse or spanking” (Easton and Hardy 2009, 21–2).