Polyamoryand Political Economy: A Note on Socio-Economic Inequalities

Academic research and popular writing on nonmonogamy and polyamory have so far paid insufficient attention to class divisions and questions of political economy. This is striking since research indicates the concentration of significant amounts of class privilege within many polyamorous communities. This paper highlights the economic conditionality of polyamorous relationships and families. Theorising polyamory from a materialist point of view allows for a more adequate understanding of the contradictions which riddle poly communities in advanced industrialised societies and confine its reach of this particular identity to predominantly white middle class circles. The insertion of poly cultures into an economic and cultural nexus shaped by neoliberal capitalism helps to circumscribe the material and discursive spaces from within which poly relationships and kinship formations are enacted. In this paper, the author is particularly interested in how the construction of the discourse of polyamory as a style of enhanced reflexivity resonates with class-based cognitive and communicative normativities. The author argues that the common stylisation of polyamory as a reflexive ethics further goes hand in hand with the fading of an emphasis on passion and sensual pleasure and establishes a rationalistic bias within the discourse of poly love. The paper closes by proposing a research agenda into poly intimacies which is more attentive to class and socio-economic inequalities.