u/therapymademeworse

And Jason Arday really didn’t have to die. The onslaught from the media was really all for naught! I hate this world.

I’ve been thinking about whether queer theory can reproduce the colonial gaze even when its politics are explicitly anti-colonial.

Colonialism did more than impose laws and social hierarchies; it also shaped how sexuality, gender, family, and the body were classified and understood.

So when queer theory studies non-Western sexualities, how much of that analysis still depends on categories, methods, and assumptions inherited from Western institutions? Can naming and making sexual identities legible sometimes reproduce a colonial way of knowing, even when the goal is liberation?

And if so, does decolonizing queer theory require more than simply including non-Western experiences within existing frameworks?

I’d really appreciate recommendations for books, essays, or theorists who deal with the colonial gaze, epistemic colonization, and queer theory.

I’m asking this genuinely because I’m interested in how asexual lesbians understand the lesbian part of their identity when sexual attraction isn’t something they experience.

If you’re romantically drawn exclusively to women, want to date women, build relationships with women, and see lesbian community as your natural social home, what is it about those experiences that feels specifically lesbian to you?

Is it romantic attraction? Emotional intimacy? The desire to build your life with women rather than men? Is there a distinctly lesbian way you experience closeness and partnership even without sexual desire?

I’m especially curious about asexual lesbians who strongly identify with lesbian community and specifically want lesbian relationships. What does “lesbian” name for you internally? What makes the L feel like the most natural place for you within LGBTQIA+ community rather than asexuality being the primary identity around which everything else is organized?

I’m not asking this as a "gotcha" or suggesting anyone needs to justify their identity; I’m genuinely interested in what lesbian identity means from the inside when sexual attraction isn’t part of the experience.

EDIT: I’ve noticed some of you downvote questions you don’t like. If we can openly discuss trans issues, coalition dynamics, and other parts of LGBTQIA+ identity, then asexuality shouldn’t be treated as uniquely exempt from scrutiny or good-faith interrogation. And just because asexual lesbians can be relatively stealth within this community doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have substantive discussions about lesbian identity and what that identity means for them.

With Notting Hill Carnival happening in London, Caribana in Toronto having just passed, and a summer full of carnivals and fêtes across the Caribbean and the diaspora, soca is being played all over the world right now, including at my house here in San Francisco 😂

I’m a big soca fan, and one thing I’ve noticed is how often lesbianism, or women being involved with other women, comes up in the music. It seems surprisingly common given the Caribbean’s history of social homophobia and colonial-era same-sex and buggery laws.

So why does lesbianism show up so often in soca when homosexuality in general has historically been so stigmatized?

Is it mostly male fantasy and sexualization? Is female homosexuality treated differently from male homosexuality? Does Carnival culture itself create more room for those themes?

I’m not trying to police anyone’s views or turn this into a morality debate. I’m genuinely interested in the contradiction and in how people from different parts of the Caribbean understand it.

And in case anyone wanted to look into this more, apparently someone already beat me to exploring the idea lmao. I found a peer-reviewed academic article hosted on the Stanford Humanities Center’s website called Queer Tactility: Same-Sex Intimacies Between Women in Chutney and Soca Music.

Gay men center men. Bisexual, pansexual, and other multisexual people can absolutely center women in their own lives, but men are still included within the possible field of attraction.

Lesbian is the only sexuality within LGBTQIA+ that is centered exclusively on women and entirely defined by attraction to women.

The more I sit with that, the more I wonder whether our invisibility inside the wider LGBTQIA+ community is built into the arrangement itself. We are the only sexuality in that coalition whose romantic and sexual reality can exist completely outside men, while every other sexuality either includes them or centers them.

So why would we expect the wider community to care about lesbian priorities, especially lesbian-only spaces, in the same way we do when their sexualities include or center men?

I think we keep treating the disappearance of lesbian-specific spaces like some strange failure of representation, when it may be the predictable result of putting a woman-exclusive sexuality inside a much larger coalition where every other sexuality has men somewhere in the picture.

You can see it in the way our spaces work, because gay male spaces don’t seem to require endless justification for remaining gay male; their exclusivity is understood almost intuitively as part of what the sexuality entails. I don’t see transmasculine people broadly demanding access to those spaces, nor do I see gay men being expected to keep expanding them until everybody adjacent feels represented.

With us, the conversation almost immediately becomes about who else the space should accommodate, whether “lesbian” is unnecessarily restrictive, whether “sapphic” would be more inclusive, or whether our boundaries need to loosen. After a while, you have to ask whether staying this deeply invested in the wider LGBTQIA+ structure even makes sense.

I’m GENUINELY starting to wonder whether the “L” in LGBTQIA+ has become little more than a nod to shared history, especially when lesbian spaces and boundaries are repeatedly treated as too restrictive and expected to expand. If we’re the only sexuality in the umbrella that doesn’t include men at all, while the others either include or center them, then what do we really have in common beyond history and political coalition?

Our elders and foremothers fought within that coalition for reasons that made sense in their time, and that history should be remembered, but history doesn’t have to become permanent social obligation!

If the “L” is increasingly symbolic while lesbian social reality keeps getting flattened inside the wider umbrella, wouldn’t divestment start to make more sense than continuing to invest in a structure where we’re always fighting to remain visible?

I’m American, but I lived in London for a while and still follow British media closely, which is how I ended up following Jason Arday when American media barely seemed interested in the story.

Over those weeks I followed the daily updates and probably watched well over 40 British commentators on YouTube discuss him, and I was genuinely stunned by the disgust, fascination, ridicule and sometimes outright glee that came with each new revelation. The questions about his academic record were legitimate, but journalists and commentators soon moved through his childhood, family, autism, old interviews and the stories he’d told about his own life, until the line between scrutinizing the work and scrutinizing the person had almost disappeared.

His death changes the equation for me because I don’t think the frenzy that came before it is enough reason to keep excavating his life now; the fact that people are still digging has instead made me think more seriously about why so much of Jason Arday was treated as public property in the first place.

Arday was never talked about as just one academic at Cambridge, since his success had already been tied to bigger ideas about race, class, disability, social mobility and who gets to make it into institutions like that. Once parts of his story were questioned, people weren’t only scrutinizing Arday himself but also the bigger ideas his success had been used to represent, which is why I have trouble seeing the later dissection of his life as entirely separate from the earlier praise.

That’s where the white gaze gets interesting to me, because I’ve seen Black British footballers, celebrities and other public figures get pulled into Britain’s arguments about race, class and belonging, but I’d never seen it happen quite like this, with one Black academic dissected so relentlessly and in such detail. The praise and the hostility look like opposites, but both depend on the same intense interest in a Black person and in what their success or failure is made to signify.

Once Arday had been made into a symbol, scrutinizing him also became a way of scrutinizing the ideas Britain had attached to him, from meritocracy and social mobility to diversity and who gets to belong in elite institutions; is there something particular about Black British visibility within British public life, where certain figures end up carrying the country’s anxieties about itself? And does the intensity of that gaze tell us something more specific about Black existence in Britain than simply another example of racism in the media?

I love Birkenstocks and understand the appeal of their comfort and specific sizing, but the London sizing has been incredibly frustrating for me.

For reference, I normally wear a men’s US 8, sometimes a 7.5 in Vans Authentic, which is probably the most comfortable shoe in the world to me. I generally don’t have much trouble figuring out my shoe size.

I already own a pair of Londons from about two years ago, EU 40 / US 9–9.5 / 7–7.5, but the back slides off my heel enough that I barely wear them outside. They’ve basically become shoes for running down to the garage or taking out the garbage. This year, I finally decided to buy another pair that actually fits properly.

My first order was the London Suede Leather in Carafe, listed as US 7–7.5 / EU 38, Medium/Narrow. Neither my confirmation email nor the Orders section of my Birkenstock account specifies whether that US size is men’s or women’s. When they arrived, they were obviously too small. I later realized EU 38 is roughly a men’s US 5–5.5, not the men’s 7–7.5 I thought I was ordering.

For the second order, I went with EU 41, which is supposed to correspond to a men’s US 8–8.5. Somehow, those still feel too big and slide right off my heel.

I’m not trying to fight Birkenstock’s fitting system or make them fit like a completely different kind of shoe. I understand they’re supposed to have some room. At this fucking point, though, I just want to be able to walk at a normal pace without my shoes sliding off.

Now I’m probably going to send these back too, and I honestly don’t even want to try ordering another pair because I really don’t feel like making a third return. I love the London, but buying a pair that actually stays on my feet has become way more complicated than it should be. I’m hesitant to try an EU 39 because I’m worried I’ll end up with the same problem I had with the EU 38, which was clearly too small. I already own an EU 40 that was too big for me, and now I have an EU 41, my nominal men’s size 8, that is also too big. At this point, I genuinely have no idea which size I’m supposed to order.

The “decolonizing relationships” argument around polyamory has never been especially clear to me, and the more I try to interrogate it, the less clear it gets.

When I ask practitioners (lol) of ENM and polyamory what exactly is being decolonized, the answer usually circles back to European colonialism imposing Christian marriage, monogamy and particular family structures on colonized peoples.

Fair enough! That explains how certain forms of monogamy were used as instruments of colonial rule but, it still doesn’t explain what makes contemporary polyamory itself decolonial!

Are we talking about recovering something pre-colonial? If so, which culture, and which kinship system? lol There was no universal pre-colonial model of intimacy, and Indigenous societies had radically different arrangements around marriage, sexuality, family, obligation and hierarchy. If we’re talking about something post-colonial instead, that creates another problem, because colonialism doesn’t simply disappear and leave a blank slate behind; its institutions, economic relations and ways of understanding the self can persist long after formal colonial rule ends.

This is also where I get stuck on the appeal to kinship and community: if the point is to move away from colonial relationship models toward something more communal, why does so much contemporary poly discourse still begin with the individual and their needs? “No one person can meet all my needs,” “different partners fulfill different needs,” “I’m responsible for getting my needs met,” “this relationship no longer serves me.”, that sounds less like a departure from Western individualism than an expansion of it. LOL

Kinship, at least as I understand the concept being invoked here, isn’t simply a larger network of intimate relationships. It can involve obligation, reciprocity, interdependence, continuity and responsibilities to other people and communities that aren’t necessarily contingent on personal fulfillment; to me, that feels meaningfully different from multiplying relationships while still organizing them primarily around individual choice and need-satisfaction.

So is the argument that polyamory recovers something pre-colonial, that it resists something colonial, or that it creates something genuinely post-colonial? If it’s the latter, I’m curious where the actual break with the Western liberal conception of the self occurs.

And maybe that’s the larger question I keep coming back to: if Western liberal ideas about autonomy, property, choice and self-determination were themselves historically entangled with colonial expansion and its ideas of civilization and progress, how do you “decolonize” relationships while still taking that same liberal conception of the individual as your starting point?

I’ve been thinking about a tension between queer theory’s critique of fixed or naturalized identity categories and the fact that those categories can still have real political and social functions.

Take “lesbian,” for example, queer theory gives us plenty of tools for questioning whether categories like lesbian, gay, woman, etc.. are internally coherent or historically stable. But lesbian also names a particular sexual orientation, history, community, and set of experiences.

So how does queer theory distinguish between destabilizing a category and making that category so porous that it stops describing anything in particular?

Is there a serious theoretical account of when boundaries are politically useful or necessary, even if we accept that the categories themselves are historically contingent?

I’m especially interested in writers who engage directly with this tension, or any work that explores it in depth.

Sometimes I genuinely wish I lived in a world where only lesbians existed. Just women loving women, lesbian bars everywhere, lesbian neighborhoods, lesbian bookstores, lesbian sports leagues, lesbian retirement communities, and absolutely no explaining ourselves to anybody.

Not because I actually want everyone else erased from existence, obviously, but because I would love to experience what it feels like for lesbian life to be the default instead of this tiny little island we’re constantly trying to carve out inside everybody else’s world.

Just once, I want to walk outside and feel like the entire culture was built with us in mind.

I don’t mean when you realized it wasn’t for you, I mean when you actually started questioning it beyond the usual “different strokes for different folks” kind of thing; was there a specific experience that made you look at it differently?

For me, it started with lesbian spaces. I kept noticing heterosexual men gaining access to LGBTQIA+ spaces because they were dating bisexual or pansexual women, and then some of those women would come into lesbian spaces looking for something they weren’t getting from the men they were with.

That bothered me, because at some point I started asking myself what the point of having lesbian spaces even was if heterosexual relationships were still finding their way into them through somebody’s poly arrangement. Not literally every time of course, but enough that I started noticing it as a pattern.

And to be clear, I’m not saying bisexual or pansexual women don’t belong in LGBTQIA+ spaces, they obviously do; I’m talking specifically about lesbian spaces, and the way those spaces can start feeling less lesbian-centered when women are entering them while still very much attached to heterosexual relationship dynamics outside of them.

That was probably the first crack for me. Once I noticed that, I started paying attention to other things too, like how often jealousy gets treated like some personal failing, how much emphasis there is on becoming more accommodating, more secure or more evolved, or how quickly somebody’s discomfort can get turned into “you just need to do more work on yourself.”

I also understand that this subreddit has people from all walks of life and across the political spectrum; conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, Democrats, progressives, liberals, and probably plenty of people who don’t fit neatly into any of those categories. I get that my sexuality itself may be something some people here don’t particularly like or agree with, and that’s okay with me. I’m not here to shove my sexuality in anybody’s face or demand that everyone see the world the way I do.

What I am here to do is analyze and critique polyamory, and I actually appreciate that I can have those conversations with people whose politics, backgrounds, and values may be completely different from mine, we don’t have to agree on everything else in order to recognize some of the same problems or ask some of the same questions about this particular relationship structure.

So I’m curious, when did it happen for you? Was there one thing that made you start questioning polyamory, or was it more of a slow accumulation of things that just stopped sitting right with you?

I have a question I’m genuinely interested in thinking through: why do transmasculine and transfeminine people continue to look specifically toward lesbian spaces for inclusion, rather than toward the many other queer, trans, LGBTQ+, or gender-expansive spaces that are explicitly organized to accommodate a much broader range of identities?

I’m not asking whether trans people should have community, support, safety, or belonging. Obviously they should. I’m asking something narrower: what is it about lesbian spaces in particular that makes their boundaries so frequently contested?

For transmasculine people, I’m especially curious about the tension between identifying away from womanhood while sometimes retaining a connection to lesbian identity or lesbian community.

How is that connection understood, and at what point does preserving historical or personal ties begin to conflict with the purpose of a space organized specifically around lesbians?

And from the other direction, how should lesbian spaces think about transfeminine people whose identities, sexualities, and relationships to womanhood may vary considerably?

Is identifying with womanhood sufficient for participation in every lesbian space, or can individual lesbian communities establish narrower purposes and boundaries without that automatically being interpreted as hostility?

Part of what I’m trying to understand is why the expectation so often seems to be that lesbian spaces must continually broaden themselves, when the contemporary LGBTQ+ landscape already contains trans spaces, queer spaces, mixed sapphic spaces, nonbinary spaces, and general LGBTQ+ spaces.

I think the question is worth asking directly: why is the lesbian boundary, specifically, expected to remain uniquely permeable, and what, if anything, is a lesbian-specific space actually allowed to be?

EDIT: Don’t come in here if you’re overly sensitive and get offended if someone has a differing perspective than you do. If you want access to the perspectives and want to participate, please join us! If your skin is too thin, you can still read but please refrain from joining if discourse is challenging for you! Thank you!

And, if you’re going to participate please bear in mind, we can disagree and still be in community, in this space, we are all sisters. Keep that in mind and let’s treat each other with respect and kindness. I love you.

LASTLY, I want you guys to not be TOO reactive and use the downvote button. If you disagree, engage with the person whom you disagree with. But let’s not downvote for petty reasons, okay? If somebody comes in here with harmful and toxic opinions, by all means DOWNVOTE away. But let’s not downvote someone just for having a perspective, even if it’s different than yours.

If you can do that for me, we can have more conversations like these but we have to approach every single opinion on neutral ground unless it is absolutely egregious. Again, I love you so much. If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t be here. Bring your intelligence, your snacks and your participation. See you soon, sisters!

Half of the Pan-African canon is Caribbean: Henry Sylvester Williams, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Walter Rodney.

The Caribbean clearly formulated and exported Pan-Africanism to Africa, then received it back in altered political and intellectual forms.

However, from my own research, the framework doesn't seem to fit the region evenly; much of Anglophone Caribbean independence came through negotiated constitutional transfer rather than revolutionary rupture, and political sovereignty did little to dislodge foreign control over bauxite, sugar, banking, and other major industries.

In Guyana and Trinidad, Pan-Africanism as a governing framework also encountered societies in which Indo-Caribbean people constituted either a majority or a substantial near-majority.

So how well does Pan-Africanism still describe the Caribbean? Does it remain the region’s most useful political framework, or do Glissant and Brathwaite’s theories of creolization now explain more of its history, culture, and social formation?

In short, I'm looking for some literature (book and essay recommendations are very much welcome); I’m also interested in feminist thought from Indo-Caribbean and broader Caribbean perspectives, including foundational texts, useful starting points, and work that addresses race, gender, colonialism, migration, and creolization.

Half of the Pan-African canon is Caribbean: Henry Sylvester Williams, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Walter Rodney.

The Caribbean clearly formulated and exported Pan-Africanism to Africa, then received it back in altered political and intellectual forms.

However, from my own research, the framework doesn't seem to fit the region evenly; much of Anglophone Caribbean independence came through negotiated constitutional transfer rather than revolutionary rupture, and political sovereignty did little to dislodge foreign control over bauxite, sugar, banking, and other major industries.

In Guyana and Trinidad, Pan-Africanism as a governing framework also encountered societies in which Indo-Caribbean people constituted either a majority or a substantial near-majority.

So how well does Pan-Africanism still describe the Caribbean? Does it remain the region’s most useful political framework, or do Glissant and Brathwaite’s theories of creolization now explain more of its history, culture, and social formation?

In short, I'm looking for some literature (book and essay recommendations are very much welcome); I’m also interested in feminist thought from Indo-Caribbean and broader Caribbean perspectives, including foundational texts, useful starting points, and work that addresses race, gender, colonialism, migration, and creolization.

The jokes write themselves; I've been working on this post since last night and I got banned from r/polyamory for attempting to post the following with citations! 🤣

Polyamory is often described as feminist because it allows women to reject sexual exclusivity, pursue multiple relationships, and define intimacy outside marriage or the heterosexual nuclear family.

But besides protecting women’s sexual and relational agency, what makes polyamory feminist as a political practice? I ask because feminism has not traditionally treated every freely made choice by a woman as liberating. Feminist theories of relational autonomy argue that choices are formed within social relationships and institutions, rather than by completely independent individuals acting outside culture, dependency, and power. The relevant question is therefore not only whether a woman chose something, but what conditions shaped the choice and whether those conditions support genuine self-determination. (Source: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]⁠)

Nancy Hirschmann makes a similar argument in The Subject of Liberty. Her feminist account of freedom examines how preferences and available choices are socially constructed, particularly in relation to domestic violence, welfare, and Islamic veiling. Freedom cannot be assessed only by asking whether a direct prohibition prevented an individual woman from acting. It also requires examining the social conditions within which her options and desires developed. (Source: The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom [University of Notre Dame]⁠)

bell hooks defined feminism as a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. Under that definition, a practice does not become feminist simply because women are permitted to participate in it. We would also need to ask whether it reduces sexist domination or merely gives individual women more options within existing gender relations. (Source: Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks⁠)

So what forms of gendered power does polyamory actually challenge?

It may weaken the idea that a woman belongs exclusively to one man. It may create space for queer kinship, chosen family, collective care, and relationships that are not organized around marriage. It may also challenge the expectation that one woman should provide a partner with sex, domestic labor, emotional support, childcare, and permanent companionship. But are these outcomes characteristic of polyamory, or are they possibilities that depend entirely on how particular relationships are organized?

Polyamorous relationships can still contain economic dependence, domestic inequality, sexual double standards, unequal emotional labor, and hierarchies between established and newer partners; a relationship may be extensively negotiated while still being organized around the preferences of the person with the most money, housing security, social influence, or willingness to leave.

Women may also perform much of the emotional administration required to sustain multiple relationships: scheduling, reassurance, conflict mediation, remembering agreements, managing jealousy, and helping partners process their other relationships. Has polyamory produced a different distribution of this labor, or has it sometimes expanded the amount of relational work expected from women?

I'm also interested in how discomfort is interpreted within polyamorous communities. When does encouraging someone to examine jealousy increase her freedom, and when does it teach her to reinterpret a reasonable objection as insecurity, possessiveness, monogamous conditioning, or insufficient personal growth?

Catharine MacKinnon’s work raises a broader problem for sexual politics: sexuality and desire are themselves shaped by unequal social conditions. Her argument is not that women possess no agency, but that consent and preference cannot by themselves establish the absence of domination. A sexual arrangement can be chosen and still reproduce a hierarchy that feminism should examine. (Source: Toward A Feminist Theory of The State by Catharine MacKinnon⁠)

This does not mean that polyamorous women are incapable of deciding what they want, or that monogamy is naturally more egalitarian. Monogamous marriage has historically been one of the central institutions through which women’s sexuality, labor, reproduction, and economic dependence were controlled; however, rejecting monogamy does not necessarily resolve those problems, it may redistribute intimacy without redistributing power.

What evidence would show that polyamory is especially effective at reducing women’s domestic labor, economic vulnerability, sexual subordination, or responsibility for maintaining relationships? Are there feminist theories of polyamory that address these material questions rather than primarily emphasizing consent, communication, sexual freedom, and personal choice?

Perhaps polyamory is compatible with feminism without being inherently feminist. Adults should be free to form consensual relationships without stigma or legal punishment, but is that a feminist theory of liberation, or primarily a liberal theory of individual freedom?

​Update 08/05/26 @ 7:28 PM PDT:

I just want to share some final observations here as I think about my post; when disagreement starts being treated as harm, people become afraid to ask questions and as a result, communities begin policing acceptable thought, and certain ideas are protected from scrutiny altogether. This is how intellectual conformity takes hold, and we should absolutely be afraid of that, especially if you're reading this from the United States of America.

The first amendment restricts government censorship, not disagreement or moderation within a private online community, but thee principle behind free expression still matters culturally.

A society can't maintain a serious commitment to open inquiry if people increasingly treat criticism as violence or, asking challenging questions as hostile, as good enough reasons to shut down conversation.

Ever heard of the Thought Police? Yeah, this is just a small-scale version of the kind of conformity George Orwell warned us about in 1984 (people learning which questions are acceptable, policing language, and treating dissent as unacceptable, etc, etc..).

What happens when people become comfortable punishing inquiry outside of the confines of the Internet?

Polyamory is often described as feminist because it allows women to reject sexual exclusivity, pursue multiple relationships, and define intimacy outside marriage or the heterosexual nuclear family.

But besides protecting women’s sexual and relational agency, what makes polyamory feminist as a political practice?

I ask because feminism has not traditionally treated every freely made choice by a woman as liberating. Feminist theories of relational autonomy argue that choices are formed within social relationships and institutions, rather than by completely independent individuals acting outside culture, dependency, and power. The relevant question is therefore not only whether a woman chose something, but what conditions shaped the choice and whether those conditions support genuine self-determination. (Source: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]⁠)

Nancy Hirschmann makes a similar argument in The Subject of Liberty. Her feminist account of freedom examines how preferences and available choices are socially constructed, particularly in relation to domestic violence, welfare, and Islamic veiling. Freedom cannot be assessed only by asking whether a direct prohibition prevented an individual woman from acting. It also requires examining the social conditions within which her options and desires developed. (Source: The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom [University of Notre Dame]⁠)

bell hooks defined feminism as a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. Under that definition, a practice does not become feminist simply because women are permitted to participate in it. We would also need to ask whether it reduces sexist domination or merely gives individual women more options within existing gender relations. (Source: Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks⁠)

So what forms of gendered power does polyamory actually challenge?

It may weaken the idea that a woman belongs exclusively to one man. It may create space for queer kinship, chosen family, collective care, and relationships that are not organized around marriage. It may also challenge the expectation that one woman should provide a partner with sex, domestic labor, emotional support, childcare, and permanent companionship. But are these outcomes characteristic of polyamory, or are they possibilities that depend entirely on how particular relationships are organized?

Polyamorous relationships can still contain economic dependence, domestic inequality, sexual double standards, unequal emotional labor, and hierarchies between established and newer partners; a relationship may be extensively negotiated while still being organized around the preferences of the person with the most money, housing security, social influence, or willingness to leave.

Women may also perform much of the emotional administration required to sustain multiple relationships: scheduling, reassurance, conflict mediation, remembering agreements, managing jealousy, and helping partners process their other relationships. Has polyamory produced a different distribution of this labor, or has it sometimes expanded the amount of relational work expected from women?

I'm also interested in how discomfort is interpreted within polyamorous communities. When does encouraging someone to examine jealousy increase her freedom, and when does it teach her to reinterpret a reasonable objection as insecurity, possessiveness, monogamous conditioning, or insufficient personal growth?

Catharine MacKinnon’s work raises a broader problem for sexual politics: sexuality and desire are themselves shaped by unequal social conditions. Her argument is not that women possess no agency, but that consent and preference cannot by themselves establish the absence of domination. A sexual arrangement can be chosen and still reproduce a hierarchy that feminism should examine. (Source: Feminism In New Terms by Catharine MacKinnon⁠)

This does not mean that polyamorous women are incapable of deciding what they want, or that monogamy is naturally more egalitarian. Monogamous marriage has historically been one of the central institutions through which women’s sexuality, labor, reproduction, and economic dependence were controlled; however, rejecting monogamy does not necessarily resolve those problems, it may redistribute intimacy without redistributing power.

What evidence would show that polyamory is especially effective at reducing women’s domestic labor, economic vulnerability, sexual subordination, or responsibility for maintaining relationships? Are there feminist theories of polyamory that address these material questions rather than primarily emphasizing consent, communication, sexual freedom, and personal choice?

Perhaps polyamory is compatible with feminism without being inherently feminist. Adults should be free to form consensual relationships without stigma or legal punishment, but is that a feminist theory of liberation, or primarily a liberal theory of individual freedom?

Polyamory is often described as feminist because it allows women to reject sexual exclusivity, pursue multiple relationships, and define intimacy outside marriage or the heterosexual nuclear family.

But besides protecting women’s sexual and relational agency, what makes polyamory feminist as a political practice?

I ask because feminism has not traditionally treated every freely made choice by a woman as liberating. Feminist theories of relational autonomy argue that choices are formed within social relationships and institutions, rather than by completely independent individuals acting outside culture, dependency, and power. The relevant question is therefore not only whether a woman chose something, but what conditions shaped the choice and whether those conditions support genuine self-determination. (Source: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]⁠)

Nancy Hirschmann makes a similar argument in The Subject of Liberty. Her feminist account of freedom examines how preferences and available choices are socially constructed, particularly in relation to domestic violence, welfare, and Islamic veiling. Freedom cannot be assessed only by asking whether a direct prohibition prevented an individual woman from acting. It also requires examining the social conditions within which her options and desires developed. (Source: The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom [University of Notre Dame]⁠)

bell hooks defined feminism as a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. Under that definition, a practice does not become feminist simply because women are permitted to participate in it. We would also need to ask whether it reduces sexist domination or merely gives individual women more options within existing gender relations. (Source: Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks⁠)

So what forms of gendered power does polyamory actually challenge?

It may weaken the idea that a woman belongs exclusively to one man. It may create space for queer kinship, chosen family, collective care, and relationships that are not organized around marriage. It may also challenge the expectation that one woman should provide a partner with sex, domestic labor, emotional support, childcare, and permanent companionship. But are these outcomes characteristic of polyamory, or are they possibilities that depend entirely on how particular relationships are organized?

Polyamorous relationships can still contain economic dependence, domestic inequality, sexual double standards, unequal emotional labor, and hierarchies between established and newer partners; a relationship may be extensively negotiated while still being organized around the preferences of the person with the most money, housing security, social influence, or willingness to leave.

Women may also perform much of the emotional administration required to sustain multiple relationships: scheduling, reassurance, conflict mediation, remembering agreements, managing jealousy, and helping partners process their other relationships. Has polyamory produced a different distribution of this labor, or has it sometimes expanded the amount of relational work expected from women?

I'm also interested in how discomfort is interpreted within polyamorous communities. When does encouraging someone to examine jealousy increase her freedom, and when does it teach her to reinterpret a reasonable objection as insecurity, possessiveness, monogamous conditioning, or insufficient personal growth?

Catharine MacKinnon’s work raises a broader problem for sexual politics: sexuality and desire are themselves shaped by unequal social conditions. Her argument is not that women possess no agency, but that consent and preference cannot by themselves establish the absence of domination. A sexual arrangement can be chosen and still reproduce a hierarchy that feminism should examine. (Source: Feminism In New Terms by Catharine MacKinnon⁠)

This does not mean that polyamorous women are incapable of deciding what they want, or that monogamy is naturally more egalitarian. Monogamous marriage has historically been one of the central institutions through which women’s sexuality, labor, reproduction, and economic dependence were controlled; however, rejecting monogamy does not necessarily resolve those problems, it may redistribute intimacy without redistributing power.

What evidence would show that polyamory is especially effective at reducing women’s domestic labor, economic vulnerability, sexual subordination, or responsibility for maintaining relationships? Are there feminist theories of polyamory that address these material questions rather than primarily emphasizing consent, communication, sexual freedom, and personal choice?

Perhaps polyamory is compatible with feminism without being inherently feminist. Adults should be free to form consensual relationships without stigma or legal punishment, but is that a feminist theory of liberation, or primarily a liberal theory of individual freedom?

I ask because “women of color” often gets used as though non-white women share one political and cultural position, when Asian, Indigenous, Latina, Middle Eastern, mixed-race, diasporic, and other non-Black women may experience patriarchy, colonialism, religion, race, caste, migration, and family structures very differently.

So which feminist traditions are most useful for women who are neither white nor Black? Should we be looking more closely at postcolonial feminism, decolonial feminism, Indigenous feminism, transnational feminism, Chicana feminism, Islamic feminism, Dalit feminism, or other culturally specific traditions rather than trying to place every non-white woman under womanism?

The twentieth century produced many new feminist schools, including multicultural, postcolonial, and more recently gender-critical approaches. Which frameworks offer the strongest analysis of women’s lives outside a predominantly white, Western, liberal model?

I'm especially interested in theories that do not treat Western individualism, secularism, sexual liberalism, or personal choice as universally liberating. What should I be reading?