Polyamory, Monogamy, and American Dreams PDF Download

Author: Mimi Schippers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351717111
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This book introduces "the poly gaze" as a cultural tool to examine how representations of polyamory and poly lives reflect or challenge cultural hegemonies of race, class, gender, and nation. What role does monogamy play in American Identity, the American dream, and U.S. exceptionalism? How do the stories we tell about intimate relationships do cultural and ideological work to maintain and legitimize social inequalities along the lines of race, ethnicity, nation, religion, class, gender and sexuality? How might the introduction of polyamory or consensually non-monogamous relationships in the stories we tell about intimacy confound, disrupt or shift the meaning of what constitutes a good, American life? These are the questions that Mimi Schippers focuses on in this original and engaging study. As she develops the poly gaze, Schippers argues for a sociologically informed and cultivated lens with which anyone, regardless of their experiences with polyamory or consensual non-monogamy, can read culture, media images, and texts against hegemony. This will be a key text for researchers and students in Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Studies, Media Studies, American Studies and Sociology. This book is accessible and indispensable reading for undergraduate student and postgraduates wanting to gain greater understanding of debates around the key concept of heteronormativity.

Author: Christopher M. Gleason
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197659144
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The first history of polyamory, this work examines the roots of sexual non-monogamy in political thought and countercultural spiritualism and traces its path to mainstream practice and cultural discussion today. Recent studies have found that as many as one in five Americans have experimented with some form of sexual non-monogamy, and approximately one in fifteen knows someone who was or is polyamorous. Although gathering statistics on polyamorous people is challenging, there has clearly been a growing interest in and normalization of relationship practices defined by emotional intimacy and romantic love among multiple people. Over the past decade, the mainstream media has increasingly covered polyamorous lifestyles and the committed relationships of throuples, and popular dating apps have added polyamory as a status option. This book is the first history to trace the evolution of polyamorous thought and practice within the broader context of American culture. Drawing on personal journals and letters, underground newsletters, and publications from the Kinsey Institute Archives, among other sources, it reconstructs polyamory's intellectual foundations, highlighting its unique blend of conservative political thought and countercultural spiritualism. Christopher M. Gleason locates its early foundations in the Roaring Twenties among bohemians. In the 1950s and 1960s it surprisingly emerged among libertarian science fiction writers. The next wave of polyamorists belonged to countercultural communities that rejected traditional Christianity; some were neo-Pagans and New Age tantric practitioners who saw polyamory as intrinsic to their spirituality. During the 1980s polyamory developed as a coherent concept, faced backlash from conservatives, and tried to organize into a social and political movement with a national network. Throughout the 1990s, polyamorists utilized the internet to spread their ideas, often undermining any remaining religious or spiritual significance their ideas held. Polyamory now encompasses a diverse set of people, from those with libertarian leanings seeking unlimited freedom from government interference in their consensual partnerings to those who pursue legal recognition of their relationships, especially issues revolving around children. Offering an original perspective on sexuality, marriage, and the family, American Poly reveals the history of polyamory in the United States from fringe practice to a new stage of the sexual revolution.

Author: Sonia Song
Publisher: Outskirts Press
ISBN: 1977232604
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Polyamory, one form of open relationships, is rapidly entering mainstream consciousness. Among the many books on polyamory, Sonia Song’s story is unique in that it is the first one that has been written on this subject by a new immigrant from another culture. A contemporary of New China, Sonia’s amazing journey, from Beijing to Berkeley and to Hawaii, with the massive backdrop of historic events in China and the U.S. over more than half a century, unfolds like a scroll, depicting how these two vastly diverse cultures shaped her way of thinking and choices. Sonia’s book is warm and engaging. Reading her fascinating memoir feels like sitting down with a new friend who invites you into her most intimate and vulnerable moments over a cup of tea.

Author: Nancy L. Fischer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000579182
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 961

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Book Description
Introducing the New Sexuality Studies: Original Essays is an innovative, reader-friendly collection of essays that introduces the field of sexuality studies to undergraduate students. Examining the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of sexuality, this collection is designed to serve as a comprehensive yet accessible textbook for sexuality courses at the undergraduate level. The fourth edition adds 51 new essays whilst retaining 33 of the most popular essays from previous editions. It features perspectives that are intersectional, transnational, sex positive, and attentive to historically marginalized groups along multiple axes of inequality, including gender, race, class, ability, body size, religious identity, age, and, of course, sexuality. Essays explore how a wide variety of social institutions, including medicine, religion, the state, and education, shape sexual desires, behaviors, and identities. Sources of, and empirical research on, oppression are discussed, along with modes of resistance, activism, and policy change. The fourth edition also adds new user-friendly features for students and instructors. Keywords are italicized and defined, and each chapter concludes with review questions to help students ascertain their comprehension of key points. There is also an online annotated table of contents to help readers identify key ideas and concepts at a glance for each chapter.

Author: Mimi Schippers
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479801593
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Through an investigation of sexual interactions and relationship forms that include more than two people, from polyamory, to threesomes, to the complexity of the "down-low" Schippers explores the queer, feminist, and anti-racist potential of multipartnered sex and relationships

Author: Kathy Labriola
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538169282
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This book explores the unique group of elders, ages fifty-five and older, who practice some form of consensual nonmonogamy. It covers both the joys and challenges of multiple relationships for elders and explores how their relationships develop and evolve. Polyamorous elders have the complexities of juggling multiple relationships, as well as navigating all the issues of aging: managing medical conditions and disabilities (their own and/or their partners’); assuming caregiving responsibilities for aging relatives; grieving the deaths of parents, siblings, and partners; retiring from careers and starting new lives; and potentially moving into some form of senior living. Drawing from her extensive clinical and personal experience working with this population, Kathy Labriola provides anecdotes from polyamorous elders’ lives, including the constellation of relationships surrounding each individual, couple, or triad. This guide will help health care and mental health clinicians, researchers, and professionals, as well as polyamorous elders and their loved ones, better understand the concerns and diverse lifestyles of this population to better represent and support them.

Author: Michelle D. Vaughan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538157144
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
As the first comprehensive, intersectional examination of consensual non-monogamy, this handbook provides evidence-based research and practice across mental health disciplines on working with consensual non-monogamous (CNM) people and relationships. Leading experts in this emerging field provide counselor educators and practicing clinicians with the authoritative, essential information they need to serve a growing—yet frequently stigmatized—client population with affirmative, research-based, ethical care. Readers will learn basic information related to the development of their own unique relational information, acquire knowledge about CNM and CNM-focused communities, discern how identity, culture, and community impact intimacy and functioning, and take away practical recommendations, insights, and tools to promote CNM-affirming practice across settings, services and populations.

Author: Jorge N. Ferrer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 153815658X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
In Love and Freedom, Jorge Ferrer proposes a paradigm shift in how romantic relationships are conceptualized, a step forward in the evolution of modern relationships. In the same way that the transgender movement surmounted the gender binary, Ferrer defines how a parallel step can—and should—be taken with the relational style binary. This book offers the first systematic discussion of relationship modes beyond monogamy and polyamory, as well as introduces the notion of “relational freedom” as the capability to choose one’s relational style free from biological, psychological, and sociocultural conditionings. To achieve these goals, Ferrer first discusses a number of critical categories—specifically, monopride/polyphobia, and polypride/monophobia—that mediate the contemporary “mono–poly wars,” that is, the predicament of mutual competition among monogamists and polyamorists. The ideological nature of these “mono–poly wars” is demonstrated through a review of available empirical literature on the psychological health and relationship quality of monogamous and polyamorous individuals and couples. Then, after showing how monogamy and polyamory ultimately reinforce each other, Ferrer articulates three relational pathways to living in-between, through, and beyond the mono/poly binary: fluidity, hybridity, and transcendence. Moving beyond that binary opens a fuzzy, liminal, and multivocal relational space that Ferrer calls novogamy. In this groundbreaking book, readers will learn practical tools to not only transform jealousy, but also enhance their relational freedom while being aware of key issues of diversity and social justice. They will also learn novel criteria to evaluate the success of their intimate relationships, and be introduced to a transformed vision of romantic love beyond both monocentrism and emerging polynormativities.

Author: Dana Berkowitz
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479839612
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
"This edited volume of first-person narratives and empirical studies questions what happens when "male" bodies "do" femininity, the complexities of male femininities, and the conditions under which men engage less with masculinity and more with femininity and the consequences of these practices within a historical moment of gender binary transgressions"--

Author: Steven Epstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226818179
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
Offering an entryway into the distinctive worlds of sexual health and a window onto their spillover effects, sociologist Steven Epstein traces the development of the concept and parses the debates that swirl around it. Since the 1970s, health professionals, researchers, governments, advocacy groups, and commercial interests have invested in the pursuit of something called "sexual health." Under this expansive banner, a wide array of programs have been launched, organizations founded, initiatives funded, products sold—and yet, no book before this one asks: What does it mean to be sexually healthy? When did people conceive of a form of health called sexual health? And how did it become the gateway to addressing a host of social harms and the reimagining of private desires and public dreams? Conjoining "sexual" with "health" changes both terms: it alters how we conceive of sexuality and transforms what it means to be healthy, prompting new expectations of what medicine can provide. Yet the ideal of achieving sexual health remains elusive and open-ended, and the benefits and costs of promoting it are unevenly distributed across genders, races, and sexual identities. Rather than a thing apart, sexual health is intertwined with nearly every conceivable topical debate—from sexual dysfunction to sexual violence, from reproductive freedom to the practicalities of sexual contact in a pandemic. In this book Steven Epstein analyzes the rise, proliferation, uptake, and sprawling consequences of sexual health activities, offering critical tools to assess those consequences, expand capacities for collective decision making, and identify pathways that promote social justice.