Rethinking Monogamy’s Nature: From the Truth of Non/Monogamy to a Dyke Ethics of “Antimonogamy”
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Published:May 2016
2016. "Rethinking Monogamy’s Nature: From the Truth of Non/Monogamy to a Dyke Ethics of “Antimonogamy”", Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology, Angela Willey
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Following Lynne Huffer’s work on queer feminism, this chapter centers the figure of the lesbian in order to develop a dyke ethics that engenders more nuanced thinking about both monogamy and embodiment. The chapter reads Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For to elaborate a “dyke ethics of antimonogamy.” Grounded in notions of friendship, community, and social justice, this ethics decenters the sexual dyad in a way that polyamory does not. It also insists on a theoretical and ethical disposition of respect for the simultaneously political and embodied nature of desire. In so doing, it offers first a way of rethinking the story of monogamy’s nature as a naturecultural tale about mononormative desire and further places that desire in a field of relationality that renders its significance as a feature of humanness and an object of scientific inquiry newly strange.
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