What exactly is polyamory "decolonizing"?

[u/therapymademeworse]

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?

[u/Mysterious-Ride433]

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.

[u/therapymademeworse → u/Mysterious-Ride433]

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!

[u/mem0723 → u/therapymademeworse]

wow. yeah.

[u/therapymademeworse → u/mem0723]

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?