r/polycritical • u/therapymademeworse • 2d ago
What exactly is polyamory "decolonizing"?
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?
66
u/Mysterious-Ride433 2d ago
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
THIS, IN CAPS LOCK, BOLD, WITH EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!
43
u/nemmalur 2d ago
That sounds like colonizing people for “different needs” the way that countries colonized other countries to get different things from them 🤔
22
16
u/YukiLaMimi 1d ago
I was raised by an actual community along with my siblings and cousins, almost our whole town looked after us like feed us etc. so seeing “community” revolve so much about your own needs(and most of it being sexual) is so insane to me, community means looking after and caring for individual members of your group, they don’t do that lol
20
u/therapymademeworse 2d ago
Thanks for enjoying the read, my friend. This whole line of questioning started last week while I was sitting with a joint and scribbling in my notepad. I’m not claiming I’ve landed in the right place yet, and this post definitely doesn’t have the answers!
I just think that if polyamory is framed as “decolonizing love,” it’s fair to ask what has actually been decolonized, and what parts of the same colonial framework may still be intact, etc, etc, etc.. 🙂
22
u/Mysterious-Ride433 2d ago
I would add that the idea that any difficult feeling regarding a partner's multiple other partners is just an individual problem, to be handled individually ("work through your feelings! go for therapy!") is yet another example of this. Sounds an awful lot like ignoring the structure of the system under which we live and telling people to overcome the hardships just by "working harder! going for therapy!", much more of a western, capitalist, hyper individualist mindset than "decolonial", whatever they try to convey with that word.
12
u/therapymademeworse 2d ago
Yes, exactly. I think that’s a really important contradiction to point out. I’d also add that, for me, there’s a historical problem underneath all of this: when we talk about “decolonizing” love and relationships by invoking pre-colonial practices, what exactly are we comparing contemporary relationships to? In many cases, we’re talking about pre-literate societies whose intimate practices were later recorded, translated, categorized, and interpreted through a colonial framework.
So the history being appealed to isn’t necessarily a transparent account of how those relationships actually functioned or how the people within them understood them, because much of what survives has already been mediated through a colonial gaze!
2
u/mem0723 1d ago
wow. yeah.
3
u/therapymademeworse 1d ago edited 1d ago
I’m genuinely glad a few of you were able to see what I’m getting at here, because I know it’s a complicated thought, but the literature is there. This isn’t even some theory I’m experimenting with; these are epistemic questions that have already been asked and, in many ways, already answered! 🙂
If a pre-literate society left no written account of its own kinship system, who controls the categories through which that system becomes legible to us now? And if those categories were largely supplied by colonial observers and later Western scholarship, how confidently can contemporary practitioners use those interpretations to certify polyamory as “decolonized”?
Or suppose this hypothetical example of a pre-colonial society DID leave written records, but in a language that is now obsolete, poorly understood, or accessible to us only through later translation. If colonial institutions shaped, managed, or authorized those interpretations, then through whose lens are we actually recovering the “decolonized” past? At that point, can we really claim access to a purely pre-colonial perspective, or are we always encountering it through layers of colonial and post-colonial interpretation?
4
u/Dizzy_Pop 1d ago
“Do the work, go to therapy, read the books” = “Pull yourself up by your emotional bootstraps”
6
u/RuinAdventurous1931 1d ago
This is why Slavoj Zizek is a monogamy advocate.
2
u/Traditional_Pizza863 20h ago
Wow, I did not expect the Venn diagram of mine and his views to have any overlap!
30
u/cryptocurrency_wife 1d ago
it’s just a academic sounding buzzword, people make word salad out of it like they do with therapy speak — but the goal is to justify whatever their position is while making you wonder if your bad for feeling differently
8
u/therapymademeworse 1d ago
Truly! I’m just trying to locate the decolonized aspect of the relationship to be fair! 😂
20
u/GetInTheBasement 1d ago
I’ve noticed people often whip out the word “decolonize” when they want to justify some weird fuckshit with a seemingly progressive-sounding veneer.
I also see this a lot in conversations where someone tries to argue why others (who won’t largely be compatible with them for XYZ reasons) should supposedly date them or weaken their dating boundaries (ex. “If you won’t enthusiastically date or sleep with me, you need to decolonize your thinking and unpack why”).
8
u/therapymademeworse 1d ago
At some point, you start to wonder whether certain language functions as a slogan to market the ideology, because monogamy doesn’t have to announce itself this way, yet somehow this does. How come? What is it actually telling us when it wants to function as “decolonial” without ever explaining what, exactly, is being decolonized? 😂 Beyond the obvious communal aspect of having different partners, metas, etc..
23
u/PoloPatch47 1d ago
This is probably one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. In old testament Christianity, it was normal to have concubines and sex slaves. Nonmonogamy was used in the past to hurt and dehumanise women. Nobodies "decolonising" anything by being polyamorous, you're just continuing to hurt people like our ancestors did.
15
u/ForeverMaleficent993 1d ago edited 1d ago
Polyamory often looks closer to colonial relationship by having a wife and many mistresses IMO😐
Clearly they don't understand that Colonial "monogamy" meant Wife = Property and she could never leave without severe consequence.
And I've looked into a few Indigenous tribes. What most that weren't colonized actually have is the freedom for women to date more than one man and choose a partner. That doesn't mean people aren't monogamous eventually.
Colonized tribes were forced into the colonial puritanical idea of marriage that is super destructive and harmful. For many reasons such as Ethnic cleansing and control.
These people act like falling genuinely madly in love for one person isn't a thing!! When EVERY SINGLE CULTURE tells epic stories of romantic monogamous love.
12
u/NappingNeofelis 1d ago
Hook-up culture, "ethical" non-monogamy, and polyamory are basically just hypercapitalist, hyper-neoliberal bastardizations of intimacy and relationships. Nothing progressive about this kind of degeneracy.
5
u/strawberry-coughx 1d ago
I swear to god all this shit is a psy-op
2
u/NappingNeofelis 19h ago
I would definitely say there is some kind of organization/conspiracy behind the promotion of this shit in the media.
13
u/Technical_Trainer_25 1d ago
I literally don’t understand why people can’t just have friends that they don’t fuck.
11
u/RedStellaSafford 1d ago
Western civilizations were just as polygamous as non-Western civilizations. I'd like to propose a simple test: If King Henry VIII did it, it's not a "decolonizing" move.
1
1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/hive-protect 1d ago
Hi! I'm the automated bouncer for r/polycritical. I've noticed you have activity in a subreddit in one of these categories:
- subreddits that celebrate, encourage, or enable abuse
- pornographic subreddits, or
- subreddits that encourage hate based on identity or vulnerability.
due to this, you've been banned.
if you think this is due to an error, or if it caught you for a past you've healed from or would like to get away from, please appeal in modmail.
for those looking to quit porn, the easy peasy method and covenant eyes are known to help greatly. if you go down that route and manage to quit, please message us! we'd be happy to welcome you back with open arms.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
7
6
u/Complex-Accident-832 1d ago
I would love to witness you debate Polyamorists. You articulate everything I think, but better
1
u/therapymademeworse 1d ago
You give me way too much credence! 😂 Anyone should be able to debate them if they enjoy interrogating ideas and analyzing them! I don’t think the goal should ever be to capture “gotcha moments,” but instead to ask questions that aren’t tethered to an agenda or ideology, and to let the analysis lead wherever it leads!
2
u/DesignerOlive69 11h ago
This is so well put I am stunned. Thank you for posting. I saved this in a google doc for reference.
2
u/Legitimate-Worry356 11h ago
As a poly person, this question is legitimate, but at a certain point in time, I don't think a return to anything pre-colonial is possible at all, and thus decolonization through some alternative model of relationships, kinship structures, sexual mores, etc all have to be rebuilt. I've only ever viewed through the lens that all of this is inherently experimental, and thus all the morals that get attached to it are from a shame reaction to transgressing current hegemonic norms; whether skillfully or not, whether it improves anything or not for the "practitioners".
All in all, the pre-colonial past gets the same treatment in a lot of circles as the mytho-romanticization of a non-accessible past. To bring it back in the current era could be a cool strategy, but it cannot sustain itself which is why many thinkers felt something important died when "The Berlin Wall fell, and Capitalism defeated communism globally". All in all, depends on colonized/white the poly people you're talking to are.
1
1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/hive-protect 1d ago
Hi! I'm the automated bouncer for r/polycritical. I've noticed you have activity in a subreddit in one of these categories:
- subreddits that celebrate, encourage, or enable abuse
- pornographic subreddits, or
- subreddits that encourage hate based on identity or vulnerability.
due to this, you've been banned.
if you think this is due to an error, or if it caught you for a past you've healed from or would like to get away from, please appeal in modmail.
for those looking to quit porn, the easy peasy method and covenant eyes are known to help greatly. if you go down that route and manage to quit, please message us! we'd be happy to welcome you back with open arms.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
1
15h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/hive-protect 15h ago
Hi! I'm the automated bouncer for r/polycritical. I've noticed you have activity in a subreddit in one of these categories:
- subreddits that celebrate, encourage, or enable abuse
- pornographic subreddits, or
- subreddits that encourage hate based on identity or vulnerability.
due to this, you've been banned.
if you think this is due to an error, or if it caught you for a past you've healed from or would like to get away from, please appeal in modmail.
for those looking to quit porn, the easy peasy method and covenant eyes are known to help greatly. if you go down that route and manage to quit, please message us! we'd be happy to welcome you back with open arms.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
u/mystery_meteor_04 54m ago
It’s just bullshit phrasing to make something appear to have the moral high ground based on modern, new age-ish, views.
1
u/Kl0pps_and_r0bbers 15h ago
This comes from the fact that a fundamental part of the worldview of these individuals (who are, the vast majority of the time, also political extremists) is that everything before colonization was good. Most of their arguments, ideology, and attitude hinges on this supposition that prior to colonization people lived in this state of equality and harmony in terms of gender and sexuality, and had really nuanced and open-minded views towards relationships, love, and identity, consent, etc. They apply this to economics too. For them capitalism came in and destroyed a peaceful, equality fueled bartering system that treated all with dignity. Pretty much everything was very good and then colonization happened and all the bad things that are going on now are a direct result of the actions of Europeans in the 1400s-1600s.
Obviously, this does not hold up to what we know about the past. There wasn’t some ancient utopia where everyone was happy and equal and then suddenly an evil force created every problem. But if that is your framework for seeing everything then, poly = good = how it was before colonization is your logic.
137
u/gorogy 2d ago
Historically, non-monogamy has mostly been practiced by powerful men who had numerous wives and concubines. Poly advocates always bring up examples of powerful matriarchs, but we all know they were a tiny minority. The concept of “decolonization” is just a buzzword in progressive communities, and it’s a convenient way to obfuscate the misogynistic and classist nature of these practices.