THE OF

Evelyn Rosengren-Hovee

A capstone thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Curriculum of Global Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences

Chapel Hill 2021

Thesis Committee: Jonathan Weiler, Advisor Angela Stuesse, Committee Member Daniel Cardoso, Committee Member

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT 4

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 5

CASE STUDY SELECTION AND CHAPTERS OUTLINE 7 HAMILTON ON MONOGAMY 9

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CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 11

NATION- AND NATIONAL IDENTITY 12 SECULARISM: HEGEMONIC LIBERALISM 17 WHAT IS TO THE STATE 19

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CHAPTER 3: MORMONS AND QUEERS, EARLY PERIOD 24

THE TWIN RELICS OF BARBARISM: AND SLAVERY – 1850S TO 1890S 25 THE TWIN RELICS OF BARBARISM REVISITED – 1960S - 2010S 29 THE COMPROMISING BID FOR SAME-SEX MARRIAGE EQUALITY 32 THE COST OF ASSIMILATION 37

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CHAPTER 4: POLYGAMY AND CNM, PRESENT DAY PERIOD 39

SITUATING POLYGAMY AND CONSENSUAL NON-MONOGAMIES 40 SOMERVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS 42 THE STATE OF POLYGAMY IN UTAH 45 DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 47

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CHAPTER 5: CNM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY INTERVIEWS 51

INTRODUCTION 51 METHODS 53 DISCUSSION 55 FIRST ENCOUNTERS AND PHILOSOPHY 55 NATIONAL IDENTITY, AMERICANNESS AND CNM 58

2 THE QUESTION OF LEGAL RECOGNITION 59 DISTINCTIONS FROM AND ALLIANCE WITH POLYGAMY 61 OTHER WORLDMAKING 64 FUTURE ANALYSIS AND EXPANSIONS 65

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CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION 66

EARLY PERIODS 67 PRESENT DAY PERIODS 68 FUTURE DIRECTIONS 69

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BIBLIOGRAPHY 70

APPENDIX 76

TABLE 1. SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN POLYGAMY AND CNM CASES 76 TABLE 2. CNM-RELATED ORGANIZATIONS FOR RESEARCH STUDY RECRUITMENT 77 TABLE 3. DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS 77 TABLE 4. GENDER IDENTIFICATION VERBATIM 78 FIGURE 1. REDDIT TWITTER REPOST “IMAGINE BEING MONOGAMOUS, IN THIS ECONOMY!” 79 FIGURE 2. COMPARING POLYGAMY AND 79

3 Abstract

The perceived, idealized norm for romantic and sexual relationships and in the United States is of long-term committed unions between only two people (i.e. monogamy). Throughout U.S. history there have been opportunities to break with the monogamy. It remains the dominant norm and is tied to respectability and productive citizenship, but perceptions and practices may be changing. This capstone thesis examines the ways in which monogamy and non-monogamies, namely polygamy and consensual non-monogamies, have operated as markers of national identity and otherness; as secular expressions of good and bad practice; and represent possibilities for addressing larger systemic social change. The examined cases are divided into two time periods: an early period and present day period. For the early period, historical analysis of secondary sources was done of Mormon polygamy from the 1850s to 1890s and the gay and lesbian movement from the 1960s to 2010s. For the present day period, primary source archival analysis and semi-structured interviews were conducted with activists and persons practicing some form of consensual non-monogamies. As interest in and practice of non-monogamies in the United States grows, more research is needed to understand the ways in which social and political discourse have codified monogamy as American and non-monogamy as un-American. This research also seeks to understand how different forms of non-monogamies are perceived as similar and distinct from one another. This thesis concludes that while monogamy has historically and in conservative circles is still tied to national identity, in present day non-monogamies movements are pushing to expand the definition of relationships and the “American family” to include alternative structures and ways of being.

4 In America, it's Americanism like , right? Individualism then also feeds into your familial relationship structures. And so when you reject American individualism, you are rejecting, like a really big part of the American mythology that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps alone. So when you reject that, and you say, No, I refuse. You are actively saying like, I do not want to participate within this American experiment. I want to recreate this experiment. Can we try again? Can we try again, please?

Consensual non-monogamies and National Identity Interview, March 2, 2021

Chapter 1: Introduction

Imagine a playwright from this century who lands in the United States after time and interpretation have destroyed all objective reality but left undamaged national libraries and archives. Like the alien from another planet described by Richard Robbins1 and, before him, Eric Hobsbawm who concludes nation and nationalism are critical to understanding human history, this playwright—in this case, Lin-Manuel Miranda—might conclude that the origins of the United States are best understood through one Founding ’s struggle with monogamy.

In the United States, it makes sense to us that the story of our nation’s beginnings be told in tandem with the private life of Alexander Hamilton because we have seen this comparison of family to nation so many times it is almost unremarkable. Furthermore, we have seen monogamy reinforced so many times that too is unremarkable. Finally, unnoticed or unmentioned are the ways in which monogamy is tied to ideations of nation-state and proper citizenship. This thesis is not a takedown of Hamilton: An American Musical, but, as I will explain at the end of this chapter, I found the source material a useful (and entertaining) way to understand the generative cycle between the state of the United States and their citizens: how they might mirror one another and are conjured to explain, legitimate, and make claims on each other. As a non-playwright observer, I have concluded that the history of the United States is incomprehensible without an understanding of monogamy and the nation as creating a monogamous national identity and a polygamous other.

1 Richard H. Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, Sixth edition. (Boston : Pearson, [2014], 2014), 102, https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb8850691.

5 National identity, in the United States is tied to certain attributes, including class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, age, and dis/ability. These attributes, individually and collectively, act as boundary enforcement against an oppressed and marginalized other. and family must also be added to our understanding of national identity. In the United States, family is meant to be comprised of two adult partners and any number of children. Configurations deviating from this norm, persons who are asexual, single, single , polyamorous, or otherwise visibly non- monogamous are considered at best non-optimal, temporary, unsustainable and at worst, shameful, immoral, pathological and ultimately destructive. Moreover, the harm constituted by these abnormalities is seen, in American social and political discourse, to extend beyond the individual members of non-conforming to society, as a whole. While one could examine any deviations from the norm, overt non-monogamies2 is particularly well-documented and suited for explication as a dense and fragile site of moral panic and political agitation. Using the case studies of social and political debate over polygamy in the U.S. territory of Utah prior to statehood; contemporary marriage equality leading up to legalization of same-sex couple marriage; treatment of polygamy today; and recent legislative developments for people practicing non-monogamies, this thesis examines the ways in which monogamy and non-monogamies continue to be codified to protect the nation-state and an imagined monogamous “us” from the imagined polygamous “other.”

Of the many social issues the state regulates, why should marriage and family command our attention? Borrowing from Foucault, sex is an especially dense transfer point of relations of power and it is versatile with “the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as linchpin, for the most varied strategies”3 and as such can be looked to for understanding of how the most private relates to the public in terms of power. Sex and relationships can be understood in terms of discipline, biopower, and knowledge-power production. The control of sexual and familial configurations available to people within their borders, has been of critical importance to modern nation-states. Within the United States, marriage and family "influences

2 The term “overt” is used here to refer to the visibility of non-monogamies, even if that is only within the relationship in order to exclude secret multiple relationships (i.e. cheating). Daniel Cardoso helpfully caught this theoretical oversight and suggested the term modification. 3 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, Reissue edition (New York: Vintage, 1990), 103.

6 individual identity and determines circles of intimacy,"4 but additionally, "marital status is just as important to one's standing the in community and state as it is to self-understanding. Radiating outward, the structure of marriage organizes community life and facilitates the government’s grasp on the populace."5 This process can be understood as “disciplining the family.”6

Case Study Selection and Chapters Outline

Temporal and spatial similarities are not the only way to determine cases but rather thematic similarities and differences (See Appendix, Table 1) may also dictate selection. 7 It is impossible to consider non-monogamies in the United States without considering “one of the largest sex scandals of the 19th Century”8 namely Mormon polygamy. They are also the first image conjured for many Americans when the topic of non-monogamies is raised, including for all CNM practicing persons interviewed for this thesis. Consensual non-monogamies as it has developed in recent decades provides a compelling secular extension of rights won and celebrated in same-sex marriage equality. I have organized the two cases into two time periods: historical and present day. I will use both cases to highlight how we might understand the ways monogamy operates as a marker of national identity in the United States. The cases’ shared relevance is threefold: 1) they represent significant challenges to monogamy as the dominant family formation regulated by the state; 2) the state responded to these challenges in various ways that can be examined; and 3) both cases are of an oppressed group shedding their more fringe and deviant members in a bid for inclusion and respectability.

The first case is divided into two periods from the 1850s to 1890s leading up to Utah statehood and then focuses on decriminalization of polygamy in Utah in 2020. The second case can also be seen in two time periods are from the 1960s to 2010s culminating in the aftermath of the first African American President, legalization of gay marriage, and “Trump’s America” where the

4 Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, 1st Harvard University Press pbk. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002., 2002), 1, https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb8160173. 5 Cott, 1. 6 Thanks to my advisor, Jonathan Weiler, for this insight and phrasing. 7 Theda Skocpol, States and Social : A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1979., 1979), https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb10095998. 8 Peter Coviello, Mormonism and the Challenges of Whiteness | UVU Ethics Awareness Week, 2020, pt. 10:14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ffpf5YyRU0&t=180s.

7 future belongs to patriots, not globalists.9 Similar to the first case the second time period begins in 2020 with a ordinance allowing multiple partners in Somerville, Massachusetts and the “Right to Family Act” in the District of Columbia which is still under consideration in 2021. Chapter 2 delves into the literature of nation-state legitimacy, the operationalization of deviance shedding through secularism, and finally the relationship between monogamy and marriage in the United States. To ground the historical periods of both cases, in Chapter 3, I focus primarily on the observations and public arguments of several historical figures who represent the dominant social pressures to exclude the oppressed groups seeking assimilation, For the present-day periods of each cases, which both conveniently happened this past year in 2020 and are ongoing, in Chapter 4, I will look at three burgeoning efforts to normalize non-monogamies around the country. In Utah, polygamy was decriminalized almost unanimously by the Utah State Legislature. It was not legalized, but this represents the only significant state action that has effectively rolled back anti-polygamy laws. Somerville, Massachusetts passed the first known multiple person domestic partnership ordinance in the United States. This case served as inspiration for other cities and activists and also provides useful lessons about the effectiveness of incidental government sanctioning. The second, much more intentional, push by CNM activists to end multiple partner discrimination is underway in the District of Columbia. Somerville may have come first, but it is a small liberal progress town. Washington DC is always progressive, but if passed in the nation’s capital, has significant implications across the country. Finally, in Chapter 5, I look broadly at themes from interviews with people practicing10 consensual non-monogamies in the United States to understand how persons who are polyamorous, in an , or are practicing other forms of consensual non-monogamies (CNM) view their personal identity in relation to CNM and to national identity, citizenship, and belonging, and finally to determine whether or not legal recognition is desirable. I will use this analysis to understand the consequences of continued monogamy and the possibilities of breaking from monogamy. The interviews will also be referenced throughout this work to provide context and a counternarrative to the family and relationship structures we encounter most often in the United States. As two foundational nonmonogamy scholars put it, “If we stay local and seek to understand the lived experience (and

9 , “Address by Mr. Donald Trump, President of the United States of America” (2019), http://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3832033. 10 I use this language as opposed to people in “consensual non-monogamous relationships” to avoid suggesting any length of time or level of commitment.

8 indeed, practical wisdom) of people engaged in different practices then we will be much better place than if we pontificate on the basis of high or through the strategic us of limited data informing our own prejudices.”11

Hamilton on Monogamy

“How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore” make their way into a thesis about monogamy and non-monogamies as markers of national identity? My analysis of Hamilton is a small cosmic stage and representative of the rest of the thesis: diffuse and powerful linkages between Americanness and monogamy. Hamilton fittingly offers an interpretation of the most well-worn and fondly embraced period for the country: the American and the nation’s founding. The play’s interpretation represents imagined historic values laden with present-day values. The story told is a form of remembering and forgetting.12 This is to say I am not so much concerned with historical accuracy as I am historical representation.13 If all of history is interpretation and selection of significance, then what matters is the emphasis placed on certain forgotten truths about our national origins and what they should mean to us today. In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s own words, referring to Hamilton, “This is a story about America then, told by America now.”14

From the opening numbers to the end we are meant to see Alexander Hamilton’s claim to recognition, successes, and failures as one-in the-same with the former colonies. As he tells us, “Just like my country, I am young scrappy and hungry.” He is ambitious, gunning for a fight, and runs with a group of revolutionaries who are ready to turn their sexual exploits into justified warfare. Masculine sexual vitality and prowess of these American revolutionaries are contrasted

11 Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge, eds., Understanding Non-Monogamies, Routledge Research in Gender and Society ; 23 (New York : Routledge, 2009., 2009), https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb9609218. 12 Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities :Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism /, Rev. and extended ed., 2nd ed. (London;, 1991), 201, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015026830466. 13 However, further exploration of the historical inaccuracies might be telling. For instance, Martha Washington according to some sources did not name her feral tomcat after Hamilton for his philandering even though Lin- Manuel Miranda breaks the fourth wall to tell us this is in fact true. Additionally, the “Reynolds Pamphlet,” and therefore, the with Mrs. Reynolds, did not ended Hamilton’s career. Moreover, one historian has suggested that the “Reynolds Pamphlet” and the affair were a fabrication to cover for grave financial mismanagement on the part of Hamilton (Tilar J. Mazzeo, Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the of Alexander Hamilton (New York, NY: Gallery Books, 2018), 295). 14 “How Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘Hamilton’ Shapes History - The Atlantic,” accessed February 24, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/lin-manuel-miranda-hamilton/408019/.

9 with the sniveling, feminized, wig-wearing British, whose claim, like an abusive relationship, is illegitimate and can be broken. American legitimacy is tied to monogamous marriage and family. Quite explicitly the number “Satisfied” opens and closes with the lines “To your union” chorused immediately by “To the union! To the revolution! And the hope that you provide. May you always be satisfied.” Monogamous marriage, while not perfect, is meant to be enough in the same way the newly formed, fragile nation must hold together. Of the many ways Hamilton exemplifies the perceived state of American monogamy, two related examples stand out: Angelica and the “Reynolds Pamphlet.” We are told Angelica, Hamilton’s sister-in-law, was in love with him first but sacrificed her own feelings for her sister Eliza’s happiness. The sisters sing at each other. Eliza shares, “Laughin’ at my sister, cuz she wants to form a harem.” Angelica responds, “I’m just sayin’, if you really loved me, you would share him.” Eliza dismisses that absurd suggestion with a curt “Ha!” Audiences come away from this moment consciously in agreement with Eliza and unconsciously exposed to monogamy as American and non-monogamies as un- American in the single term “harem” as a faraway, gender-unequal and ruinous despotism. While the musical does not pretend women were considered equal in 1700s-soon-to-be-United-States, it suggests they will move in that direction. Notably, there is a great deal of gender inequality in story as it is retold. Women characters are silent on all subjects except men thereby failing the Bechdel-Wallace test.1516 The tragic and impossible love triangle drives our protagonist to stay in New York City for the summer, “Longing for Angelica. Missing my wife” where he succumbs to the temptations of Mrs. Maria Reynolds, carries on an affair, is blackmailed by the , and releases a public confession, the “Reynolds Pamphlet,” to clear his name, hastened (in the play) by Jefferson and Madison. They represent the South and tensions of Separatists focused on states’ rights in opposition to Hamilton’s Federalism. The musical, imagining Eliza heartbroken, has her actively erase of her own voice in history and banish him from their bed but not dissolve the marriage. In the play the pamphlet crushes his career in politics. The great tragedy and penance he must pay for : his eldest son is killed in a duel trying to defend his father’s honor. Angelica completely disavows him but Eliza stands by their marriage and eventually they are reconciled through grief over their son’s death. In consequences of career, death, and abandonment, the

15 “Alison Bechdel Asks You to Call It ‘Bechdel-Wallace Test’ | The Mary Sue,” accessed February 21, 2021, https://www.themarysue.com/bechdel-wallace-test-please-alison-bechdel/. 16 The only exception is Angelica sings that she’s been reading Common Sense by Thomas Paine and that she will compel Thomas Jefferson to include women in the sequel. There is our nod to eventual gender equality.

10 unsustainability and precarity of non-monogamies is reinforced while the hard work of keeping the marriage and the nation together are reinforced.

This thesis, less elegantly composed than Hamilton: An American Musical, and certainly less memorable (or sing-able), is a corrective work to themes and historical forgetting which the play did not invent put rather highlighted as so deeply embedded in our collective national conscious we accept them as given. In other words, this thesis further reimagines the seemingly disconnected histories of how monogamy has been remembered and forgotten and privileged in the United States and has fused with American understandings of what it means to be productive, respectable citizens of the United States.

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Chapter 2: Literature Review

There are three legs to my argument. The first is that nation-states, after dynastic and religious legitimation were no longer salient, had to create a new form of legitimation. To gain legitimation, a number of approaches were taken including education, traditions, and most importantly creating the Us by creating the Other. I draw on Renan, Hobsbawm, and Robbins for foundational understanding of the nation-state. In order to further define the nature of national identity formation, I also look to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. However, as feminist scholar Anne McClintock highlights that all of these different visions of the state are gendered while leaving gender wholly out of the discussion.17 A feminist reading of how nation-states are thought to come to being, she tells us, will help us understand how they have been imagined in particular ways that favor a white, hetero, masculine-orientation. Secondly, secularism, or secular ideals, in the United States can be seen as one active social mechanism that gatekeeps monogamy as an Us from the Other. Secularism, to be clear, is not in the business of monogamy but rather in the business of separating good practice from bad practice, good belief from bad belief. Monogamy

17 Anne McClintock, “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family,” Feminist Review, no. 44 (1993): 61–80, https://doi.org/10.2307/1395196.

11 happens to have become a preferred marker of Western social acceptability. We need to understand how secularism works within the modern nation-state. This thesis will examine how, in the case of consensual non-monogamies, there is secular split happening once again between bad non- monogamies (polygamy) and good non-monogamies (CNM). Thirdly, and finally, we need to understand what marriage means to the state. The work of historian Nancy Cott shows how monogamous marriage (and committed relationships as proxy ) historically has been and continues to be important to the United States as an institution that not only creates citizens (future laborers, consumers, and capitalists)18 through reproduction but also ensures their fidelity. As Cott demonstrates in Public Vows, this is a feedback loop from the state to society. She names three levels of public authority that shape the institution of marriage. Taken in reverse order, these levels are: federal, state, and community of kin.19 She also hints at personal identity formation as tied to monogamy and national identity. Wrapped up in an understanding of “disciplining the family” is the involvement of self-regulated individuals who have come to see their personal identity as constitutive of their national identity and vice versa. My contribution will be to formally add the individual as a level of authority to her list in the way Foucault understands individuals to participate in their own discipline. Foucault’s understanding of biopower is also here. I will also further understand and extend this by looking at how anthropologist and historian Ann Laura Stoler views markers of identity relationship to the state through Foucault’s grid of intelligibility. All three sections can also be seen as an exploration of various lens through which to understand how monogamy is operationalized within and by the nation-state in the case of the United States: as a legitimation tool separating citizens from non-citizens; as a shared journey or pilgrimage, as bifurcation into secular and non-secular; as one component in a feedback loop; as an interchangeable identity marker in a grid of intelligibility, and as an expression of biopower.

Nation-State and National Identity

This section covers seminal authors on nation-state formation, particularly Renan, as sources for later authors such as Hobsbawm, Robbins, and Anderson. Of the many questions posed by scholars related to the state, this thesis is primarily concerned with how the state has operationalized

18 Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. 19 Cott, Public Vows, 5.

12 national identity, as the contemporary crux of their legitimacy. Consequently, we should know how identity is tied to nation-state and how the nation-state is understood to have used it and continues to use it. When I use the term “nation-state” outside of this section, I will typically be referring the United States unless otherwise explicitly stated.

Critical to the thinking behind this work is an understanding of the nation-state as a historical but ongoing project. National identity is actively and continuously constructed by the nation-state through education, language, traditions, rituals and other practices in an attempt to bind particular peoples within a nation-state’s borders.20 This identity project benefits the nation-state in furthering its own power, political, and economic ends.21 The context of family should be read in light of nation-state, nationalism, national identity and citizenship. Furthermore, these foundational scholars who give us our understanding of nation-state formation and the relationship of citizens will be read through a critical feminist lens. For instance, where heteronormative natural science and anthropology once observed a haram of apes, the feminist anthropologist saw a lesbian family with a single male sperm donor.22 This is to say, if the hegemony of white, hetero, male interpretation of family can be flipped on its head, then the same can be true of nation-state formation structures and logic.

As we learn from Renan, the wellspring of Western nation-state ideation, a nation is a “spiritual family” made of two parts: a "rich legacy of memories” and “present consent.”23 For the first part, the national family is made of shifted dates, reordered events, dropped incongruencies, and refined intent to fit a compelling national narrative. “Historical studies,” Renan began his lecture, “often constitute a danger for nationality.”24 because the reality, we can assume, would be uninspiring to national sentiment, so we must remake it.25 Anderson recast this process as “remembering and forgetting.”26 He wrote, "All profound changes in consciousness” are necessarily bound up with

20 Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. 21 Robbins, 102. 22 Ettelbrick, “Legal Marriage Is Not the Answer,” 1. 23 Ernest Renan, What Is a Nation?: And Other Political Writings, ed. and trans. M. F. N. Giglioli, Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History (New York : Columbia University Press, [2018], 2018), 260, https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb9358654. 24 Renan, 251. 25 Renan, 111. 26 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 201.

13 “characteristic amnesias.”27 In the act of conjuring a nation’s narrative we collectively forget what actually transpired. For the second part, Renan not only insists on consent, a “common will in the present,”28 but that it must be ongoing (even daily) affirmation. This is a collective will not subject to whims of individuals but is nonetheless predicated on satisfaction of and with the union. Renan sees the stable nation as both useful and necessary, but he does not think nation-states will last forever.29 “Human wills change; but what does not, here below? Nations are not something eternal. They had their beginnings, they will end.”30 He then goes on to anticipate the European Union but with little to no thought of imperial powers diminishing or that they have any desire to hold subjects and territories against their will.31 Consent is therefore limited to a very small, very Western, very male circle.

The narrative of nations has particular historical origins. As the “religious and dynastic” lost their salience, new ways of "linking fraternity, power, and time together"32 were needed. Capitalism and particularly print-capitalism are responsible, according to Anderson, for the spread and popularization of nation-state. Print-capitalism consolidated language in a handful of vernaculars but more importantly reproduced temporal and spatial connections between individuals in one place to otherwise dissimilar individuals and communities in another place. Previously, noblemen and dynastic relationships had operated on very real and . Before nation-ness, the bourgeoisie was the initial class to achieve solidarities with an imagined us of fellow bourgeoisie. Wherever literacy grew so did nationalism.33 Formations of legitimacy not in print became anomalies not worth noticing. The plurality of independent states lent more credence to the model of nation for pirating. The printed, pirated "blueprint" for nationalism made it hard for any country to deviate from early proscribed model(s).34 In much the same way as Benedict Anderson stresses the importance of printing as a unifier, we must also stress the importance of

27 Anderson, 204. 28 Renan, What Is a Nation?, 261. 29 It may be worth considering whether our dominant cultural obsession with the permanence of marriage (finding the one, your , and living happily ever after) is also tied up in the nation-state as being permanent. If the nation were a family you could pick and choose, leave and recreate and not bio-dependent then a strong simile of the nation-state’s legitimacy: the family, is undermined. 30 Renan, What Is a Nation?, 262. 31 Renan, 262. 32 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 36. 33 Anderson, 80. 34 Anderson, 134.

14 the pieces of paper issued by governments that give legitimacy to their citizens in the form of passports and marriage licenses. Possessing the correct papers makes you an “Us” or an “Other.” In those two examples, the paper is important for its symbolic value, but it is also tied to very tangible entitlement to rights, protections, and services.

Robbins offers a model for why and how national identity functions in relation to capitalism. In this way he treats nation-states and nationalism as uniform and of a similar type. The national bureaucratic infrastructure for Robbins includes language, bureaucracy, and education. The nation- state plays a critical role is supplying producers (capitalism) with labor, consumers, and future capitalists. For example, it provides roads for commerce, regulates health and safety to ensure a healthy and productive workforce, and stipulates the economy to encourage spending when needed. States prop up capitalism in order to ensure its own continued growth and power. The state’s legitimacy had to be reinvented and now hangs on the idea of nationalism. Robbins takes us through multiple examples of how nationalism is fostered through the discipline of education, through traditions (such as holidays and pledge of allegiance), through a common language, and finally by making these ties more real through bureaucracy and paperwork. The most powerful nationalism formation however is the creation of an “us” in opposition to an “other.” The role of citizenship as forming an “us” in contrast to an “other” in nation-building has long been understood as one of the most powerful forms of legitimation for the modern state in the absence of religious or dynastic claim.35 According to Hobsbawm, the nation-state’s role in effectively putting “[…] the blame for failure and weakness on enemies outside and traitors within. And there is plenty of failure and weakness to be explained away.”36

Anderson offers a process of national identity creation that is useful in also trying to understand how something so intangible and vague could be related to other forms of identity such as sexual and relationship identity. Like religious pilgrims who see another pilgrim and imagine they are connected by the journey, "absolutist functionaries"37who traveled back and forth between European dynastics and the colonies were also united. In their function, they see themselves not

35 E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1992., 1992), https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb2438585. 36 Hobsbawm, 144. 37 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 55.

15 as moving to a center, like a prince becoming king, but rather ascending a summit of increasingly tighter circles. Bilinguals continued to make that spiral journey, but then by the middle of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, due to the industrial revolution and technological shifts, this journey was not just for individuals but "huge and variegated crowds"38 made possible by industrial capitalism mobility increases; growth of bureaucracies and administrations which called for more specialization and bilingual workers; and modern-style education which emphasized the moral importance of knowledge. I want to suggest that we might still understand the nature of national identity formation in the United States as the same type of pilgrimage, but now it is happening sub-nationally. The most visible portions of CNM communities are privileged to move back and forth between their circles of practice in their CNM communities and dominant monogamous society at large. This back and forth journey creates comradery, shared hardships, shapes language and shared identity in the absence of religious or ethnic ties, as I believe we will see in interviews. Furthermore, people practicing CNM appeal to a particular national identity thread in America39 that promotes equity and freedom of choice as distinctly American. Monogamy, heteronormative marriage, and the nuclear family fail to fully capture the possibilities of their lives of all of what is possible as part of an American lived experience.

Anne McClintock takes nation-state theorists, such as Gellner, Hobsbawm, Anderson and even Fanon and their contemporaries, to task for neglecting gendered power in theorizing the nation- state.40 Moreover, they are not consigned to a theoretical realm but have real world consequences and policy implications. She writes, “nations are not simply phantasmagoria of the mind, but are historical and institutional practices through which social difference is invented and performed. Nationalism becomes, as a result, radically constitutive of people's identities, through social contests that are frequently violent and always gendered.”41 The nation has been domesticated. Time has been domesticated. Nationalism is a gendered discourse. Women often symbolize the nation but only men are configured as peers to men in other nations.42 For McClintock, family is important to theorizing the nation-state in two ways: 1) gives a natural form and shape for

38 Anderson, 115. 39 What Jill Lepore has termed “civil” or “liberal” nationalism. 40 McClintock, “Family Feuds.” 41 McClintock, 61. 42 This is even replicated in subtle ways in Hamilton where only men talk about the nation or to each other. King George sings estranged lover, the colonies,

16 sanctioned social (example: the paternal nature of the West in overseeing the missteps of the adolescent countries in the third/developing/emerging world). 2) Offers a natural trope for historical time that is simultaneously linked to historic place and time and is also timeless.43 As I understand her this is a complication of Anderson’s understanding of remembering and forgetting. We remember the masculine to forget the feminine. McClintock wonders, still within the boundaries of nation-state salience and existence, if “the iconography of the family [should] be retained as the figure for national unity, or must an alternative, radical iconography be developed?”44 Given the violence, the racial othering, and imperialism of modern nation-states, she suggests this question is of utmost importance.

In order understand the mechanistic nature of nation-states, the ways in which it is gendered, and in order to begin considering other possibilities, we will look at how secularism has functioned within American social and political discourse to facilitate the preference of monogamy over non- monogamies.

Secularism: Hegemonic Liberalism

Secularism, as a world ordering system that warps and reshapes categories to be secular and non- secular, is important and useful to this conversation to understand how a nation-state might mold good belief and eradicate bad belief to protect the state’s metaphysical and physical borders. In Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism, Coviello documents how Mormons eventually caved on polygamy to gain/regain access to whiteness and protections of the state, but his real target is secularism, the “encompassing structure” and “racialized theodicy of hegemonic liberalism.”45 Using political theology, Native Studies and queer critique,46 Coviello pulls apart the case of the early Mormons in the United States, to show how secularism splits good belief from bad belief and bad family (polygamy) from good family (a single man, and a single woman, and their offspring). He challenges us to consider secularism as

43 McClintock, “Family Feuds.” 44 McClintock, 78. 45 Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism, Class 200: New Studies in Religion (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2019], 2019), 47, https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb9830179. 46 Coviello, 4.

17 in new clothes.47 Secularism convinced itself that “salvation” can be reasoned out and found within itself. The promise of secularism then (and now) and monogamy then (and now) is of freedom, equality, and sustainability in contrast to a foreignized, racialized other. Pinning down a precise definition of secularism as deployed by Coviello is challenging. The first chapter of his book is dedicated to outlining seven axioms, a “queer structure” borrowed from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, which help us know what we think we know about secularism.48 I will venture to say that secularism to Coviello is the long-thought-to-be unpersuasive modernity, which it turns out is still very much vivacious in the languages of secularism. One of those languages is about “‘sexuality.’”49

It would be a mistake, Coviello warns, to conclude polygamy made Mormons the target of persecution but rather it was Smith’s theology of an unfallen world, of God being a man, and of men being embryonic gods that stirred up violence. The practice of polygamy functioned as the justification for violence and as the concession that brought Utah into statehood. As Coviello tells us “[The Mormons] commitment to polygamy had given to a secularizing America the nearest-to- hand way to excise the Mormons from any embracing conception of the national public, so strongly did it violate both the foundational fantasy of national familialism and, with it, the codes of secular- liberal embodiment that fantasy did so much to solidify.”50 In this way polygamy was a shortcut to punishing Mormons for a far graver sin: for abandoning Protestant, capitalist ethics and claiming their place within appropriately-ordered patriarchal hierarchy. Referring to Native populations to whom Mormons were deemed comparable, failure at monogamy amounted to failure at gender.51 Distorting the proper family structure of monogamy was to obfuscate the proper relationship of men to women and men to the state as land cultivators and amassers of wealth. Coviello tells us, “To fail at gender differentiation was to fail at civilization.”52 He continues, “From the perspective of the state, Native ‘offenses’ to civilization were not solely about property or sex […] but rather, and quite explicitly, a fused compound of erotic depravity, disordered intimate and economic life (disempowering to the man who would be “head of a family).’”53 For this thesis, the implications

47 Coviello, 44. 48 Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods. 49 Coviello, 42. 50 Coviello, 162–63. 51 Coviello, 185. 52 Coviello, 186. 53 Coviello, 186–87.

18 from Coviello are many, but the one I will carry forward is that the individual is not private. It is a public entity regulated by secularism within the nation-state that is invested in marriage as a social institution for its citizens.

What Marriage is to the State

Nancy F. Cott, in Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, offers a historicized understanding of the relationship between marriage and monogamy in the United States from the country’s gestation to present day. For this thesis Cott addresses the following questions: 1) why marriage is important to the state; 2) why it must be monogamous marriage; and 3) how marriage is important to both the personal self and the nation self.

According to Cott, in the case of the United States, marriage first became important to the state because it reflected the relationship of the state to its citizens as a husband to a wife.54 Pushed thus into the public sphere, it became the state’s domain and therefore must be regulated. If we agree with Coviello, then regulation of the private in the public sphere was subject to secular bifurcations. Secondly, it was a way of separating and controlling races with anti-miscegenation laws and then in the next century to control same-sex couples. She writes, "By incriminating some marriages and encouraging others, material regulations have drawn lines among the citizenry and defined what kinds of sexual relations and which families will be legitimate"55 She echoes Coviello’s findings stating, "the marital nonconformists most hounded or punished by the federal government were deemed “racially” different from the white majority. They were Indians, freed slaves, polygamous Mormons (metaphorically nonwhite), and Asians. Prohibiting divergent marriages has been as important in public policy as sustaining the chosen model"56 Thirdly, the modern nation-state must concern itself with marriage because of population and reproduction of its citizenry, 57 furthermore, if we bring in Robbins, this is so they can become laborers, consumers, and capitalists. As Cott writes,

No modern nation-state can ignore marriage forms, because of the direct impact on reproducing and composing the population. The laws of marriage must play a large part in forming “the people.”

54 Cott, Public Vows, 15. 55 Cott, 4. 56 Cott, 4. 57 Cott, 5.

19 They sculpt the body politic. In a hybrid nation such as the United States, formed of immigrant groups, marriage becomes all the more important politically. Where citizenship comes along with being born on the nation’s soil as it does here, marriage policy underlies national belonging and the cohesion of the whole. Therefore, the federal government has incorporated particular expectations for marriage in many initiatives, and especially in citizenship policies58

While we might accept the analogy of marriage to the state, we must further explore why this is specifically understood to be marriage of a monogamous character. Monogamy was not a foregone conclusion at the founding of our country. There were other models on the continent and around the world, so why monogamy?59 Baron de Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws "influenced central tenets of American republicanism, the founders learned to think of marriage and [republicanism] and marriage as mirroring each other."60 Their Montesquieuan thinking tied the institution of Christian-modeled monogamy to the kind of polity they envisioned; as a voluntary union based on consent, marriage paralleled the new government." She places the plan squarely at his feet, writing,

[Montesquieu’s] work initiated what became a formulaic Enlightenment association of polygamy with despotism. The harem stood for tyrannical rule, political corruption, coercion, elevation of the passions over reason, selfishness, hypocrisy—all the evils that virtuous republicans and enlightened thinkers wanted avoid. Monogamy, in contrast stood for a government of consent, moderation, and political liberty.61

Monogamy, from the country’s inception, was a stand-in for that was right and good about the United States and polygamy was despotic, unrepublican, and therefore ruinous to the new nation. In the 19th century the state’s stake in monogamy matured, was legislated, and more importantly enforced. The post-Civil War period was especially important because the federal government flexed control over monogamy and marriage (Mormon polygamy, miscegenation laws) and so state and local authorities followed suit.62 At the beginning of the 20th century, there was an important shift in how monogamous marriage related to the individual if not the state: marriage became less a reflection of state virtue but more of economic choices and incentives so wrapped up in other layers that they became impossible to distinguish from one another. She writes, "the

58 Cott, 5. 59 Cott, 10. 60 Cott, 10. 61 Cott, 22. 62 Cott, 126.

20 economic figuration of marriage blurred lines between public policy, law, economy, and society; it was inescapable."63

Finally, we need to understand why marriage is important to the self and particularly to national identity formation. As mentioned earlier, Cott identifies three levels of public authority. These are 1) "the immediate community of kin, friends and neighbors, state legislators and judges set the terms of marriage and , and federal laws, policies, and values attach influential incentives and disincentives to marriage forms and practices."64 Law and society are circular feeding back into to one another and enforcing pressure and reflecting dominant culture back through legislators and courts and then "public authority frames what people can envision for themselves and conceivably demand."65 Given her definition of these different levels, she would likely place local government, such as city councils as operating at the state level but being closely related to the community of kin, especially dependent on city size. To her levels, I would add the individual self as a further level borrowing from Foucault on self-regulation but also his understanding of neoliberalism, the state, and the individual.

For academics in the English-thinking sphere,66 Foucault’s position on neoliberalism can be understood as nestled in the posthumously translated work of The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979,67 lectures that came 3 years after the History of Sexuality Vol 1. There were twelve lectures from January to April 1979 on topics ranging from universalism to homo oeconomicus and American Neoliberalism.68 The Birth of Biopolitics is where we might understand how Foucault connects between the neoliberal state in the United States and sexuality and a grid of intelligibility and sexuality.

Conveniently, Foucault in the “Course Summary” of the Birth of Biopolitics states quite clearly to my mind how marriage even today continues to be so important. He writes, “American neo-

63 Cott, 158. 64 Cott, 5. 65 Cott, 8. 66 I will not pretend to speak for the French or other language-speaking spheres 67 Jason Maxwell, “KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE: FOUCAULT, NEOLIBERALISM, AND THE AUTOIMMUNITY PARADIGM,” Cultural Critique 88 (2014): 160, https://doi.org/10.5749/culturalcritique.88.2014.0160. 68 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics : Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke [England] ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008., 2008), Index, https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb5759651.

21 liberalism seeks […] to extend the rationality of the market, the schemas of analysis it offers and the decision-making criteria it suggests to domains which are not exclusively nor primarily economic: the family, the birth race, for example, or delinquency and penal policy.”69 However, it is not simply enough to take this statement until we understand how it functions.

In his 21 March 1979 lecture titled “The market economy and non-market relationships,” Foucault tells us that neoliberalism presents the problem of “an inversion of the social to the economic.” Particularly in American neoliberalism this works out as an expansion of the economy beyond monetary forms. Surrounded by cassette records, he states from the stage of a packed amphitheater:

First, the generalization of the economic form of the market beyond monetary exchanges functions in American neo-liberalism as a principle of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment of social relationships and individual behavior. This means that analysis in terms of the market economy or, in other words, of supply and demand, can function as a schema which is applicable to non- economic domains. And, thanks to the analytical schema or grid of intelligibility, it will be possible to reveal in non-economic processes, relations, and behavior a number of intelligible relations which otherwise would have appeared as such—a sort of economic analysis of the non-economic.70

He then goes on to detail how a neoliberal might overlay an economic model grid on a - child relationship or to a family, but he then comes back to the grid of intelligibility using homo oeconmicus. Neoliberalism, he reminds his audience of the previous week’s lecture, shifts our point of view away from the capital or economic mechanisms to focus on the individual who either chooses to work or not to work. In this way we step to the side of the individual and view them “through the angle, the aspect, the kind of network of intelligibility of his behavior as economic behavior.”71 Then most critically, “[…] economic behavior is the grid of intelligibility one will adopt on the behavior of a new individual. It also means that the individual becomes governmentalizable, that power gets a hold on him to the extent, and only to the extent, that he is homo oeconomicus. That is to say, the surface of contact between the individual and the power exercised on him, and so the principle of the regulations of power over the individual will only be this grid of homo oeconomicus.”72

69 Foucault, 323. 70 Ibid, 243. 71 Ibid, 252. 72 Ibid, 252-53.

22 In trying to decipher his meaning here and further into the lecture, I find myself straying back to more familiar and grounding concepts from his “genealogical period.” That is I come back to power. Whether or not this is appropriate, I am unsure. The knowledge-power neoliberalism produces is a prototype called homo oeconomicus by which every individual can be measured, and it is that cold, economic prototype that interacts with the individual’s government, not the warm, anthropological individual. Therefore, individuals also, their characteristics, their histories, and lives are interchangeable, perhaps irrelevant, and may in the future no longer be the focus of power, which therefore, I think Foucault understands to be liberating and freeing to minority and fringe groups if they are no longer the target of reform. He gives us a glimpse of this future. “On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally, in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals.”73 “Grids of intelligibility” will allow us to work through and focus at systemic level change instead of somehow misguidedly thinking that systems, such as the global economy, government, can be changed at the level of the individual. He promises to go back to the topic in the next week, but as happens throughout the lecture series, that promise is not kept.

Ann Laura Stoler provides an additional lens through which we can understand how the state interacts with the private individual and the public citizens in contrast to their undesirable counterparts. She places identifying markers of otherness, markers that are critical to the West’s own creation of self, into a useful framework for how we might understand ways in which the attribute of family operates in the nation-state. The “[…] discourse on bourgeois selves [a fabricated, ideal as distinct from an impossibly imperfect other] was founded on what Foucault would call a particular ‘grid of intelligibility,’ a hierarchy of distinctions in perception and practice that conflated, substituted, and collapsed the categories of racial, class and sexual “others” strategically and at different times.”74 Being deficient or abnormal in one category means being

73 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 259–60. 74 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Duke University Press, 1995), 11, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377719.

23 deficient or abnormal in all. Categories of difference work together and on each other to constitute the “other” and therefore “us” by what “us” is not. Stoler writes,

It is this combined palpability and intangibility that makes race slip through reason and rationality. For it. like nationalism, is located in "invisible ties" and hidden truths, unspoken assumptions about morality and character. […] If the truth of ourselves has been construed to reside in our deep sexual desires, and it is race that has been construed to differentiate who has what desires, then the sorts of knowledge produced about the bourgeois self in a European imperial world must be seen in a grid of intelligibility that includes both.75

In this way, anything said about racial, sexuality, or class categories are at times interchangeable, stand-ins for each other, and at times, have equal weight and pull on each other. National identity (and monogamy or non-monogamies), passing through this grid of intelligibility, marks a person in any of those categories as a citizen to be trusted or an outsider to be feared.

______

“[These] were decades of ‘sexual ,’ when all laws that governed sexuality identity and behavior seemed to be breaking down. [It] was precisely in periods of cultural insecurity, where there are fears of regression and degeneration [that] the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender as well as race, class, and nationality, becomes especially intense.”

Gay rights activist, Urvashi Vaid, quoting literary critic Elaine Showalter on the decades of 1880 and 1890

Chapter 3: Mormons and Queers, Early Period

Using the case studies of social and political debate over polygamy in the U.S. territories during the 19th century and contemporary marriage equality in the United States from the 20th century leading up to legalization of same-sex couples, we can understand how non-monogamies

75 Stoler, 206.

24 functioned as a liability for both groups that kept them from assimilation. As stated in the introductory chapter, the selection of cases has little to do with the temporal or spatial commonalities and everything to do with their thematic similarities, differences, and at least one matter of interconnectivity. They represent significant challenges to monogamy as the dominant family formation regulated by the state. Both cases are of an oppressed group shedding their more fringe and deviant members in a bid for inclusion and respectability. Most importantly, the through line between the case of Mormon polygamy and same-sex marriage equality and CNM is that the current American monological exclusion of CNM relies on reaching back into a past (but still very present) understanding of Mormon polygamy, which in turn relies on the racialized exclusion of Native, Asian, and Middle Eastern peoples.

I will ground these two early periods of social and political discourse in the writings of various figures, which best represent the positions adopted by the state, the assimilation arguments of the oppressed group, and finally the resistance mounted by polygamists on the one hand and CNM activists on the other. For the Mormon case, Francis Lieber, professor at Columbia University and advisor to the Lincoln Administration, offers the dominant view adopted by the state in the 1800s. Wilfred Woodruff, 4th President of the LDS Church and author of the 1890 Manifesto officially banned plural marriage in the church provides the oppressed group’s acquiescence. In the case of same-sex marriage and CNM, Bryan Fischer, a Stanford graduate, pastor, and blogger for the American Family Association, represents the lingering fears of moral borders being physical borders. Andrew Sullivan, conservative political pundit and gay activist offers the winning compromise of more traditional-looking same-sex marriage. Finally, Michael Warner, Paula Ettelbrick, and Urvashi Vaid represent the resistance to framing of the gay and lesbian movement as strictly monogamous. My aim is to outline the trajectory of events so that we can understand their shape, similarities, and differences.

The Twin Relics of Barbarism: Polygamy and Slavery – 1850s to 1890s

First. we must understand what Mormon polygamy meant in the 1800s and how it was managed to understand how it still affects social and political discourse today. In 1856, four years after the

25 Mormon church claimed polygamy as church doctrine76 the newly formed Republican party made the “Twin relics of barbarism: polygamy and slavery” their party platform at their first national convention. The reasons for doing so may not be abundantly clear until we consider the matter in terms of sex and family as intimately tied to expansion and retention of territory in the United States.

David Prior, writing in 2012, looks at political discourse on Mormon polygamy leading up to the American Civil War as being akin to slavery in the South.

Brigham Young and his associates, most Republicans believed, sought to rule vast stretches of the western United States as their personal kingdom. A lust for unchecked power, so the argument went, motivated the Mormon leadership just as it did domineering Southern aristocrats eager to protect and expand slavery. The same premise led Republicans to describe the Mormon practice of , more commonly referred to as polygamy, as akin to Southern slavery -- or as the 1856 Republican platform put it, the two were ‘twin relics of barbarism.’77

In both cases, Republicans connected taking “sexual liberties” to national integrity. Francis Lieber, an influential thinker and academic of this period, engaged in discourse and pronouncements on “the state from ethical concerns with religious, familial, and other social formations.”78 Lieber was a professor of History and Political Science of Columbia University. His most lasting contribution was the Lieber Code, a set of military codes drafted for Union War Department which later inspired particular developments in international humanitarian law.79 He was “the president of the anti-slavery New York Loyal Publication Society, a best friend of Charles Sumner, and a trusted advisor to Lincoln and his war department.” He also owned slaves in South Carolina and had a son who fought in the Confederate Army.80

76 Irwin Altman and Joseph Ginat, Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996, 1996), 33, https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb7145981. 77 David Prior, “How Mormons and African Americans Criss-Crossed Political Identities | History News Network,” October 15, 2012, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/148761. 78 Bruce Burgett, “On the Mormon Question: Race, Sex, and Polygamy in the 1850s and the 1990s,” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2005): 83, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2005.0002. 79 Frank Burt Freidel, Francis Lieber, Nineteenth-Century Liberal (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State Univ. Press., 1948), 334, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015003636159. 80 Samara Trilling, “A Tale of Two Columbias: Francis Lieber, Columbia University and Slavery” (Seminar Paper, Columbia and Slavery, New York, Columbia University, 2015), https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/eric-foners-report#/_edn11-8, https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/tale-two-columbias-francis-lieber-columbia-university-and- slavery#/_ftn3.

26

In 1855, Lieber wrote an article for the Putnam’s Monthly titled "The Mormons: Shall Utah Be Admitted to the Union?"81 In this article, he distances Mormons from the normal American character and posits them squarely in a racialized category of otherness, specifically “Asiatic.” He calls upon fears of interracial mixing, even though by his own standards of any other kind, Mormons would have been classified by their whiteness. Lieber explains, ‘Americans’ may be similar to ‘Mormons,’ since both belong to ‘an emigrating and settling race,’ but they are also different due to the Mormon disdain for the ideal of republicanism. The Mormons are thus barbaric with respect to American civilization in two ways: their political and domestic practices.”82 Polygamy becomes a stand-in for fears of the Non-American, racialized “other” as Burgett observes:

It is imagined as an antirepublican domestic practice that exists outside of the geographic borders and modernist chronology of Euroamerican civilization, that characterizes and racializes populations that threaten to contaminate the "jural consciousness" that those borders protect, and that can be at least partially distinguished from southern slavery on these grounds. The trouble is that by the 1850s both the spatial and the temporal halves of this Orientalist chronotype were beginning to collapse into one another. In studies of the period's popular print culture, Jennifer Rae Greeson notes that in the 1840s and 1850s abolitionist and anti-prostitution literatures often portrayed southern plantations and northern brothels as "harems.”83

Referring to the same article in the Putnam Monthly, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich further interrogates Lieber’s conflation of monogamy, right to citizenship, and the racialized other.

The real question for Congress, [Lieber] argued, was whether granting such a request would infuse ‘a foreign and disturbing element’ into the American system. It was not an issue of religious freedom, he continued. Mormons were free to believe anything they wished. It was a question of whether they should be allowed to undermine monogamy, which in his view was “one of the elementary distinctions—historical and actual—between European and Asiatic humanity.” Unless Congress stood firm, the foundation of the nation might collapse. Another state or territory might adopt French or “become so filled with Chinese that the whites were absorbed,” or worse yet, “become bona fide Africanized.’”84

81 I was unable to locate a copy and so am accessing the letter through Burgett and Ulrich’s readings of Lieber 82 Burgett, “On the Mormon Question,” 84. 83 Burgett, “On the Mormon Question.” 84 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “An American Album, 1857,” The American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (February 2010): 4, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.1.1.

27

Monogamy, as family territory, maintains the boundaries of racialized citizen territory. The nation- state is expected to legislate the fears of the “other.” Where and when direct racial and class regulation is deemed inappropriate, family formation remains a legitimate mode of discrimination.

Congressional Acts followed all of this political and social discourse: the Morrill Act for the Suppression of Polygamy (1862); the Poland Act (1874) a jurisdiction ruling which made it possible for polygamy convictions to go to the Supreme Court, which in turn lead to mass convictions such as United States v. Reynolds, a test Case of the Morrill Act; and the Edmonds Act (1882) which prohibited co-habitation and absolved prosecutors of the need to prove an actual marriage had taken place.85 In other writings Lieber offhandedly, and somewhat sardonically, called for a constitutional amendment banning polygamy. “It may be wise to consider the propriety of constitutionally declaring polygamy a crime (including , for what does not happen in our days!).”86 But perhaps the final blow came in as Edmunds/Tucker Act (1887) which “struck at the heart of plural marriage practices.”87 It effectively stripped Mormon polygamists of access to citizenship. Intervening legislation attempted to eradicate plural marriages by preventing polygynists from acting as judges, officials, or jury members in cases involving plural marriage; barring polygynists from holding political office; depriving of the right not to testify against their ; confiscating properties of those evading prosecution for being polygynists; barring polygynists from becoming naturalized citizens, extending federal control over all criminal, civil, and chancery court cases; and placing the offices of the territorial attorney general and marshal under federal authority” 88

In some ways, these restrictions it should be added were not uncommon for unincorporated territories89 but while the practice of polygamy remained, statehood and citizenship rights would be out of reach.

85 Shayna M Sigman, “Everything Lawyers Know About Polygamy Is Wrong,” Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, Fall 2006, 16, no. 1, Article 3 (2006): 87. 86 Francis Lieber and Daniel Coit Gilman, The Miscellaneous Writings of Francis Lieber. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1881), 173, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001432631. 87 Altman and Ginat, Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society, 33. 88 Altman and Ginat, 33. 89 Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2011., 2011), 46, https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb6972206.

28 In an act of political expediency and possibly fear of annellation, Fourth LDS President Wilford Woodruff issued the “1890 Manifesto” ending polygamy as official church doctrine.90 It is clear according to various sources that the Mormon Church abandoned the practice reluctantly and under duress. As evidenced by the fact that “other church authorities at the time did not sign the [manifesto], its opening statements departed from customary format, no penalties were introduced for disobeying the manifesto, and the document did not say that was "wrong," only that it should not be practiced because of secular laws.” 91 In either case, this renouncement allowed Utah to finally gain statehood in 1896.92

The Twin Relics of Barbarism Revisited – 1960s - 2010s

Motivations and rhetoric for opposing non-monogamies may appear to be vastly different between the 1850s and 2010s. In certain ways, U.S. institutions (and the individuals operating in them) have become more guarded and coded about racism, classism, and heteronormativity. This is not new but neither has it gone away. The respectability and sustainability of monogamy on the one hand and the instability of non-monogamies on the other is still tied to citizenship in American social discourse.

On July 12, 2019, “The Twin Relics of Barbarism” were conjured once again by American Family Association (AFA) radio host and blogger, Bryan Fischer. Fischer, a far-right, extreme Christian conservative, joined AFA is 2009 in a climate of anti-Obama fervor and quickly became a vocal national opponent of the “homosexual-rights movement.”93 In a relatively short but punchy post, Fischer reminds his readers that the Republican Party fought to end slavery and protect the sanctity of marriage. That institution, he writes is again under attack by the American Psychological Association (APA)94 which had created a taskforce reviewing consensual non-monogamies. Fischer writes,

90 Jessie L. Embry, “1890 Manifesto,” in Encyclopedia of Politics of the American West, ed. Steven L. Danver (Washington: CQ Press: SAGE Knowledge, 2013), http://www.doi.org.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/10.4135/9781452276076.n149. 91 Altman and Ginat, Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society, 37. 92 Prior, “How Mormons and African Americans Criss-Crossed Political Identities | History News Network.” 93 , “Bully Pulpit,” , June 18, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/18/bully-pulpit. 94 The APA has indeed formed a task force, through its Division 44: Society for the Psychology of and Gender Diversity (SPSOGD); the goal of this particular task force is to generate research, create

29 Then here comes the American Psychological Association […] While they once, for example, rightly considered to be a form of mental illness, now they want to bring back polyamory […] Their latest effort is to get rid of the “stigma” of what they call “consensual non- monogamies,” which is just gibberish for adultery. […] Every form of sexual expression outside the conjugal union of one man and one woman in marriage is unethical, immoral, and culturally corrosive. At the beginning of the gay marriage debate, we argued that if we as a culture accept sex between gays as normal, there is simply no place to stop.95

In 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labeled the American Family Association (AFA) an “anti-LGBTQ ” after Fischer declared homosexuality responsible for Hitler’s atrocities. Far from being the absurd rantings in some far-right-wing corner, the AFA has powerful supporters: 22 members of Congress, House Speaker-Designate John Boehner and the governors of Louisiana, Minnesota and Virginia, were some of conservatives who signed on to a public statement in defense of AFA and other organizations labeled hate groups by the SPLC.96 According the SPLC dossier on him, “Fischer has called for a ban on Muslim immigration to the U.S., said that inbreeding may have affected Muslim intelligence and sanity, and claimed that the Bill of Rights grants freedom of religion only to Christians. He has also continued his virulent anti- gay propagandizing, calling for the regulation of homosexuality in the same manner the U.S. regulates cigarettes"97 (“Bryan Fischer” n.d.). Measuring the impact of Fischer rhetoric is challenging. The AFA distanced themselves from some of his statements, particularly the one claiming homosexuality created Hitler. He was demoted as AFA spokesperson but not fired.98 Furthermore, while his conservative AFA talk show, Focal Point, “home of muscular Christianity,” has 24,000 followers on Facebook and fewer than 11,000 followers on Twitter, the show airs and is featured weekly on American Family Radio, the broadcast division of AFA which boasts “180 radio stations in over 30 states across the country.”99 Fischer’s worldview, though

resources and advocate for the inclusion of consensual non-monogamous relationships in the following four areas: basic and applied research, education and training, psychological practice, public interest. Consensual non- monogamies Task Force is one of four task forces listed in this division. The other three are Disability Issues; Religion and Spirituality; and On Racism. 95 Bryan Fischer, “One of the Twin Relics of Barbarism Makes a Comeback,” American Family Association, July 12, 2019, http://www.afa.net/the-stand/culture/2019/07/one-of-the-twin-relics-of-barbarism-makes-a-comeback/. 96 Mark Potok, “SPLC Responds to Attack by FRC, Conservative Republicans,” Southern Poverty Law Center, December 15, 2010, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2010/12/15/splc-responds-attack-frc-conservative- republicans. 97 “Bryan Fischer,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed December 9, 2019, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting- hate/extremist-files/individual/bryan-fischer. 98 Steve Benen, “AFA Ousts Bryan Fischer as Group Spokesperson,” MSNBC.Com, January 29, 2015, https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/afa-ousts-bryan-fischer-group-spokesperson-msna516746. 99 “American Family Radio - Who We Are,” accessed March 15, 2021, https://afr.net/who-we-are/.

30 perhaps more incendiary, is very much in line with the AFA’s overall message on marriage, the family, homosexuality, and the country as a Christian nation in danger. The AFA has cultural power and political influence. For example, it is able to rally support in large numbers over topics such as transgender bathroom usage in their Target boycott of 2016, which they claim has had over 1.5 million supporters.100

I want to make three points about Fischer and the AFA. First, it is absolutely appropriate for Fischer to link the LGBTQ movement with polyamory. The degree to which gay activists decry that move, is one of temperament, flexibility and a selling out of other queers for normalcy and acceptance. We will return to this point. Secondly, whether or not he actually believes his claims— like this one: American chattel slavery was the result of ignoring Christian values and following Sharia law101 (Fischer 2019b)—is irrelevant. He either thinks or knows his readership will believe his arguments, repeat them, and vote accordingly. Thirdly, although he does not make any direct references to the LGBTQ movement as a threat to national identity in his “Twin Relics of Barbarism” post, this is a theme that can be threaded through his other posts.

Using gross mischaracterization and galvanizing language, Fischer writes the “New American Civil War”102 is the ever-widening gap between the left and the right.

The chasm between them is created by the stark differences in their view of the world. One camp - constitutional conservatives - believes in the Bible as the Word of God, it believes in religious liberty, the sanctity of human life, , the nuclear family, capitalism, lower taxes, less regulation, local control of education, secure borders (including a wall), a strong military, originalism in our jurisprudence, and proud, unabashed allegiance to the Republic. 103

In one fell paragraph he sums up the acceptable American national identity. To fail in one area is to fail in all. To be outside one of these approved categories is to be on the other side of the divide

100 Tim Wildmon, “AFA.Net - Target Boycott,” Sign the Boycott Target Pledge!, accessed March 14, 2021, https://www.afa.net/target. 101 Bryan Fischer, “New York Times Gets History of Slavery All Wrong,” American Family Association, August 20, 2019, http://www.afa.net/the-stand/culture/2019/08/new-york-times-gets-history-of-slavery-all-wrong/. 102 Fischer credits “Leftist” Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira, writing for the Medium with the phrase “New American Civil War” 103 Bryan Fischer, “Taking America Back: Step 1 Complete, Step 2 on Tuesday, Step 3 in 2020,” American Family Association, November 1, 2018, http://www.afa.net/the-stand/culture/2018/11/taking-america-back-step-1- complete-step-2-on-tuesday-step-3-in-2020/.

31 entirely. American social and political discourse on monogamy echoes and supports Fischer’s claims even if some (hopefully many) Americans would distance themselves from his odious language and logic.

Fischer represents what American historian Jill Lepore has called “illiberal nationalism,” based in an appeal to ethnic, nativism, and racism. She contrasts this one type of nationalism with a second , “liberal nationalism,” which values civic ideals of freedom and equality, particularly for oppressed minorities.104 Fischer represents a residual fear once exhibited by the nation-state leading up to the Civil War, a period Fischer points us back to in his “Twin Relics of Barbarism” post: the country’s structural integrity and legitimacy is at stake. It is porous and vulnerable at both its moral and physical borders. Or as he puts it in a more recent blog post entitled, “Diversity Cripples” he writes, “America became the greatest nation the world has ever known - freer, stronger, more prosperous, more stable - for one reason: an unshakable commitment to common core values and standards. That’s not diversity, that’s unity.”105 Set in contrast to this, liberal nationalism embraces diversity as one of the critical components of our success as a country, but this diversity may be the very reason monogamy has been so strongly enforced and tied to our national identity because in our diversity we lacked a unifying theme, so we have imagined a monogamous one.

The Compromising Bid for Same-Sex Marriage Equality

Throughout U.S. history, there have been opportunities to break from monogamy. One recent opportunity not taken was in the what is convinced of and remembered as the “gay and lesbian” fight for marriage equality. In the decades-long debate over gay and lesbian civil rights, access to the institution of marriage become a central demand.106 Far from breaking with norms around marriage and family, the gay and lesbian movement, in a bid for legitimacy and access to citizen

104 Jill Lepore, This America : The Case for the Nation, First edition. (New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, [2019], 2019), https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb9608787. 105 Bryan Fischer, “Diversity Cripples,” American Family Association (blog), January 26, 2021, http://www.afa.net/the-stand/culture/2021/01/diversity-cripples/. 106 Paula Ettelbrick, “Legal Marriage Is Not the Answer,” 1997, https://search-proquest- com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/docview/198679367?pq-origsite=summon.

32 rights organized under the institution of marriage.107 They shed sex and non-monogamies as part of the queer portfolio, abandoning other types of families on the sidelines to win acceptance and respectability. The fight for marriage equality “reduced the gay movement to a desexualized identity politics.”108 Marriage equality advocates adopted the dominant cultural structure of two individuals entering into a monogamous union even though non-monogamies were practiced and more accepted in gay and lesbian communities. I place gay and lesbian two-person families in the traditional family category; for while there is still much work to be around this issue and discrimination persists, perception of certain queer families, namely white, cis-gendered, middle class families, has shifted towards traditional and normal.109

Michael Warner, author of The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, enumerates reasons the institution of marriage in the United States preserves inequalities. So many privileges, prohibitions, incentives, and disincentives by the state, civil society, and cultural normativity are tied to one’s marital status. Those rights, he tells us, should be uncoupled from the institution not accepted.110 Why did this happen? For Warner it amounted to sexual shame. Americans have a lot of shame around sex. “Of all the nations, it is the most obsessed with sex, and of all the nations it is the most easily scandalized”111 This leaves us two options: stop having sex or pin the shame onto someone else. Americans chose the latter. Warner points to Gayle Rubin’s essay “Thinking Sex” and sexual value systems as offering the de-sexualized or appropriately sexualized “us” and the hyper-sexualized or inappropriately sexualized “other.” Writing in 1985, Rubin’s charmed circle vs. outer limits having staying power. According to this system, sexuality that is “good,” “normal,” and “natural” should ideally be heterosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive, and noncommercial. It should be coupled, relational, within the same generation, and occur at home. It should not involve pornography, fetish objects, sex toys of any sort, or roles other than male and female. Any sex that violates these rules is “bad,” “abnormal,” or “unnatural.” Bad sex may be homosexual, unmarried, promiscuous, nonprocreative, or commercial. It may be masturbatory or take place at , may be casual, may

107 Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, 1st ed. (Boston : Beacon Press, c2003., 2003), 53, https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb4381127. 108 Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal : Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York : Free Press, c1999., 1999), 25, https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb3283409. 109 Calls in the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v Hodges may make this claim seem tenuous, but this to me is all the more reason to have a discussion around family and the rights and respectability tied to the institution of marriage. 110 Warner, The Trouble with Normal, 108. 111 Warner, 21.

33 cross generational lines, and may take place in “public,” or at least in the bushes or the baths. It may involve the use of pornography, fetish objects, sex toys, or unusual roles.112

Building on Rubin, and thinking with Stoler use of Foucault’s grid of intelligibility, markers of race, class, citizenship, and national identity can be added to the “good, normal, and natural” and “bad, abnormal, unnatural” groupings of these sexual . Furthermore, this split and grouping into good and bad behavior calls our attention back to Coviello’s understanding of secularism. Within in the realm of social movements, these categories can further be seen to follow streams of assimilation and resistance.

The gay movement, activist Urvashi Vaid wrote in 1995, was divided into two groups one calling for legitimation and the other for liberation. “Stonewall-era ideal[s] of liberation and radical social change ceased to dominate […] gay and lesbian politics nearly twenty years ago, in the late 1970s. From that period on, the gay and lesbian political movement pursued social, legal, cultural, and political legitimation--what I call mainstreaming--rather than social change.”113 In contrast, liberation "looks for a transformation in social institutions--in government, family, religion, and the economy."114115 She is sympathetic to mainstreaming but sees gay liberation as vitally linked more broadly. She writes, "the elimination of homophobic prejudice is intimately related to the end of gender inequality, the end of racial prejudice, and the institution of a moral economic system."116

The gay liberation movement ended in the 1970s for a variety of reasons, but one cannot overstate the impact of the AIDS Crisis that came in the 80s. "There is no question that AIDS forced the gay and lesbian movement to institutionalize, nationalize, and aggressively pursue the mainstream."117 The first public call for same-sex marriage was “in 1987 at third National March on Washington

112 Gayle S. Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Duke University Press, 2012), 151, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394068. 113 Urvashi Vaid, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation, 1st Anchor Books hardcover ed. (New York : Anchor Books, 1995., 1995), 36, https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb2774726. 114 Vaid, 36. 115 Vaid, 57. 116 Vaid, 37. 117 Vaid, 74.

34 for Gay and Lesbian Rights.”118 Andrew Sullivan, conservative gay political commentator, represented one faction of mainstreaming. Sullivan, part of the Independent Gay Forum (IGF), the self-proclaimed new center of "the gay movement," steered the conversation away from "democratic egalitarian goals"119 and to a "minimal state, achieved by the neoliberal privatization of affective as well as economic and public life."120 As the gay movement clawed its way out of the AIDS crisis, Andrew Sullivan remade the "homosexual" as a public identity rather than a private collection of sexual acts.

Sullivan suggested depravity in the gay community existed because homosexuals have not been properly incentivized to abandon promiscuity for monogamous family structures. He writes, "There is little social or familial support, no institution to encourage fidelity or monogamy, precious little religious or moral outreach to guide homosexuals into more virtuous living" the solution to which is "to construct social institutions and guidelines to modify and change that behavior for the better" respectable, monogamy.121 He means marriage: "homosexuals have much to learn from heterosexual culture. The values of commitment, of monogamy, of marriage, of stability" and "Without an architectonic institution like that of marriage, it is difficult to create the conditions for nurturing such virtues [...]."122 Sullivan tries to make a larger point that heterosexual culture has a lot to learn also from the childless but still creative homosexuals,123 but the attempt falls flat. His work and words are remembered for the former not the latter sentiments. Duggan tells us "Sullivan upholds the most conventional and idealized form of marriage as lifetime monogamy--he says that he has tried to construct for himself the 'mirror image of the happy heterosexuality I imagined around me'--in utterly prefeminist terms (the operative word is imagined, and clearly from a husbandly point of view)." 124 Sullivan thus imagines his place in U.S. community in a traditional heterosexual marriage structure in what McClintock saw as the yearning of men for a nation-state made by men for men in male gendered structures. In the next

118 Mary Bernstein and Verta Taylor, Marrying Kind?: Debating Same-Sex Marriage within the Lesbian and Gay Movement (Minneapolis, UNITED STATES: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 3, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unc/detail.action?docID=1204685. 119 Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?, 65. 120 Duggan, 66. 121 Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal :An Argument About Homosexuality, 1st ed (New York :, 1995), 107, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.32106011235659. 122 Sullivan, 202. 123 Sullivan, 204. 124 Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?, 61.

35 breath Duggan tells us Sullivan's position on gay marriage is "the linchpin for his broader political vision [...]. Marriage is a strategy for privatizing gay politics and culture for the new neoliberal world order."125

In the U.S. Supreme Court case Obergefell v Hodges dissent, Chief Justice Roberts opens with the argument that making marriage a U.S. constitutional matter is at once an egregious outstepping of federal government on states’ jurisdiction and an affront to one-man-to-one-woman marriage, the overriding precedent in human culture. “the Court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the States and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. Just who do we think we are?”126 This is itself an interesting claim of alliance with global human societies in this regard, and a similar although reverse claim in made further on in the dissent. One immediate question invited by the majority’s position is whether States may retain the definition of marriage as a union of two people. Cf. Brown v. Buhman, 947 F. Supp. 2d 1170 (Utah 2013), appeal pending, No. 14- 4117 (CA10). Although the majority randomly inserts the adjective “two” in various places, it offers no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not. Indeed, from the standpoint of history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world. If the majority is willing to take the big leap, it is hard to see how it can say no to the shorter one.127

There is more precedent in human societies for plural marriage than for same-sex marriage, so why did the majority limit their definition of marriage to only two. On July 1, 2015, five days after same-sex marriage equality was passed, Loving More, a national polyamorous non-profit, posted a press release titled, “Is Polyamorous Marriage on the Horizon?”128 on their website. The press release led with Chief Justice Robert’s dissent. Andrew Solomon too, in a March 22, 2021 Issue

125 Duggan, 62. 126 C. J. Roberts, Obergefell v. Hodges, No. 14-556 (United States Supreme Court 2015). 127 Roberts. 128 “Is Polyamorous Marriage on the Horizon?,” Loving More Nonprofit, accessed March 10, 2021, https://www.lovingmorenonprofit.org/lmupdates/is-polyamorous-marriage-on-the-horizon-2/.

36 of the New Yorker, Annals of Domestic Life, titled “How Polyamorists and Polygamists Are Challenging Family Norms” highlighted Robert’s dissent.129

Marriage, for some, was not an institution worth joining. Paula Ettelbrick, a “leading legal figure in the lesbian and gay rights movement,”130 first proposed that marriage as an institution has oppressed women and enforced the supremacy of whiteness. Secondly, a support-or-oppose binary negates the larger conversation Ettelbrick wanted to have about marriage. The fight, she pleaded, must move beyond a “rights” framework. She is careful to make clear that she is not opposed to ceremonies or commitment. Marriage, the institution, has been held up as a badge of citizenship: bound to legal, capital, and state interests but also to what it means to be a contributing member of society. It is the “upholder of exclusive nuclear family.” Settling for marriage as it is currently configured in the United States, she argues, will result in two outcomes: 1) marriage will continue to entrench sexual hierarchy, which obliterates individual sexual expression; and 2) marriage will reinforce a single-family formation.131 The state of marriage, she writes is, “the linchpin in the definition of the family. A better approach for our community would be to expand the definition of family, rather than confine ourselves to marriage. This approach would open up much broader possibilities for recognition of all lesbian and gay family relationships.”132

The Cost of Assimilation

In 1997, the same year Ettelbrick declared “Legal Marriage Is Not the Answer,” Kath Weston’s ethnography of gay and lesbian kinship in the Bay area come out. Families We Choose provides another angle on the question of whether to assimilate or challenge. Interestingly, Weston’s interviewees did not see themselves as Americans first. They saw themselves first as belonging to gay and lesbian subculture and community which, in terms of identity politics “cast gays as part of an ethnic minority.”133 Part of this she writes was that, "By the 1970s both gay men and lesbians

129 Andrew Solomon, “How Polyamorists and Polygamists Are Challenging Family Norms,” The New Yorker, March 15, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/22/how-polyamorists-and-polygamists-are- challenging-family-norms. 130 David W. Dunlap, “Paula L. Ettelbrick, Legal Expert in Gay Rights Movement, Dies at 56 - ,” New York Times, October 8, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/nyregion/paula-l-ettelbrick-legal- expert-in-gay-rights-movement-dies-at-56.html. 131 Ettelbrick, “Legal Marriage Is Not the Answer.” 132 Ettelbrick, 3. 133 Weston, Families We Choose, 123.

37 had begun to picture friends and lovers as two ends of a single continuum rather than as oppositional categories"134 She never directly discusses polyamory or polygamy, but her language is descriptive of non-monogamous arrangements which are allowed to grow and change over time.

The LGBT community appealed to Western ideals of individual rights, free choice, gender equality, and even to the family. In doing so they may have, as Weston warned, become more conservative and as Ettelbrick wrote allowed dominant heterosexual cultural to continue dictating the rules of relationships. As Weston writes, "Though less hotly contested than in former years, debate continues as to whether or not the struggle to relocate lesbians and gay men within the domain of kinship will, in the long run, move gay people in a conservative direction."135 By conservative I take her to mean a more traditional-looking arrangement, more patriarchal in its construct (even if gender in a couple is the same) and less open to possibilities. This conservativism could be seen as tied to the move of legitimation and mainstreaming, that assimilation and acceptance will also carry forms of deviance shedding, ostracism of some further marginalized group. Coviello cautions against this type of mainstreaming compromise at the end of Make Yourself Gods. He writes that what happened to the early Mormons should be a warning to us about the “high costs of liberal success and the narrow promises of secular belonging.”136

______

D.C. is the capitol of the United States, right. […] Cuz Somerville’s a small place. Berkley is a bigger place in Cali and it wasn’t a surprise. When I heard Berkley, I was like, “Okay that makes sense.” But if it’s in DC that will inspire and also inform the rest of the country and hopefully start an avalanche of, “We need to do this here too. We need to do this here too.” […] So, to have it happen at the seat of power in the country would cause ripples.

Chris Smith, co-author of the “Right to Family Act,” Personal Interview February 8, 2021

134 Weston, 120. 135 Weston, Families We Choose, 198. 136 Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods, 239.

38

Chapter 4: Polygamy and CNM, Present Day Period

A 2004 update to a prior 1997 report for the Defense of Marriage Act, conducted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “identified a total of 1,138 federal statutory provisions classified to the United States Code in which marital status is a factor in determining or receiving benefits, rights, and privileges,” an increase of 89 from the initial report in 1997 of 1,049.137 These benefits, rights, and privileges are subdivided into thirteen categories, including social security and housing; veterans’ benefits; taxation; employment benefits; immigration, naturalization, and aliens; indigenous peoples; trade, commerce, and intellectual property, just to name a few.138 These benefits have only increased in the last two decades. A recent New Yorker article titled “How Polyamorists and Polygamists Are Challenging Family Norms” mentions 1,163 federal benefits, including discounts to national parks.139

As discussed in the previous chapter, the outcome for non-monogamy in both the case of Mormons in Utah and in the case of gays and lesbian legitimation movement in the United States, was shedding of their non-monogamous and deviant parts. This chapter considers those outcomes as dynamic and sensitive both to time and arterial resistance. This chapter examines the present-day challenges to exclusion made by polygamist Mormon activists and CNM activists. We will consider the case of Somerville, Massachusetts; decriminalization of polygamy in Utah; and then conclude the chapter with the “Right to Family Act” in Washington D.C. which seeks to add “relationship structure” as a basis of nondiscrimination in the country’s capital. This chapter allows us to consider whether legal recognition is desirable. On the surface polygamy would seem to have a greater stake in legal recognition; however, when we delve into respectability politics, the motivations for consensual non-monogamies are complex. What is at stake? Recognition. Respectability. Very tangible social concerns are also at stake, including housing, healthcare, raising children, pathways to citizenship, ability to travel, wealth accumulation or just economic

137 Dayna K. Shah, “Defense of Marriage Act: Update to Prior Report,” U.S. Government Accountability Office (Washington DC, January 23, 2004), www.gao.gov/assets/gao-04-353r.pdf. 138 Shah. 139 Solomon, “How Polyamorists and Polygamists Are Challenging Family Norms.”

39 survival. In this way pieces of paper, in the form of marriage licenses, come back into play. Benefits and therefore discrimination and removal of benefits are so tightly linked that it can be hard for people, in these cases, local government, to see that in the absence of marriage, discrimination can still take place. This insight was developed and is most clearly represented in the District of Columbia City Council meeting.

Situating Polygamy and Consensual Non-Monogamies

Polygamy continues to be highly stigmatized and scandal-ridden.140 Of the numerous examples, Warren Jeffs, president of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints serving out a life sentence for child sexual assault, is most frequently cited in the current debate. Tom Greene is also raised because had so rarely been prosecuted and his case involved child rape resulting a pregnancy by his then thirteen-year-old wife.141 Tom Greene and Warren Jeffs are used by anti- polygamist groups to illustrate the harms of polygamy, but these examples are also by polygamist advocates to mark and distinguish themselves from what they not: sex traffickers and child rapists.

Today, consensual non-monogamies also carry stigma in the United States but to varying degrees and for different but related reasons. There is a plethora of cultural references. At regular intervals a scandal or a new TV show will pull non-monogamies into the national spotlight.142 Polygamy and CNM, have been and continue to be conflated and racialized in subtle (and not so subtle) ways. There is a growing body of research143 to suggest more Americans have practiced or are practicing

140 Mimi Schippers, Polyamory, Monogamy, and American Dreams : The Stories We Tell about Poly Lives and the Cultural Production of Inequality (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020., 2020), https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb9728248. 141 Nate Carlisle, “Tom Green, Polygamist Whose Utah Trial Made International Headlines before the 2002 Winter Olympics, Dies,” The Salt Lake Tribune, March 3, 2021, https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/03/03/tom-green- polygamist/. 142 While representation in media or popular culture is not the focus of this paper, there are numerous rich examples. See www.thisamericanlife.org/95/monogamy as a problematic (and racially “otherized”) exploration, particularly in Act Three: “Istanbul.” 143 Melanie Elyse Brewster et al., “A Content Analysis of Scholarship on Consensual Nonmonogamies: Methodological Roadmaps, Current Themes, and Directions for Future Research,” Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice 6, no. 1 (March 2017): 32–47, https://doi.org/10.1037/cfp0000074.

40 consensual non-monogamies.144145 In the Haupert et al. nationally representative sample of nearly 9,000 people in the United States, 1 out 5 participants had engaged in some form of CNM relationship during their lifetime.146 They used a fairly inclusive and broad definition, asking participants if they had ever “an agreed-upon, sexually non-exclusive relationship.”147 Non- monogamies are prevalent enough to prompt sex advice columnist Dan Savage to coin the term “monogamish”148 and popular /hookup apps such as OKCupid, Match, and Tinder to offer non-monogamous relationship status options.

Consensual non-monogamies (CNM) is a widely accepted umbrella term for three subcategories: open relationships, swinging, and polyamory where consenting adults enter “‘an agreed-upon, sexually [or romantic] nonexclusive relationship.’ This phrasing captures the element of sexual [and romantic] nonexclusivity that links all three subtypes of CNM.”149 The operative word is consent, which suggests not all non-monogamous arrangements are consensual. CNM communities in the United States seem to still view themselves as distinct from the historical practice of polygamy. Identity claims are rooted in gender equality, sexual freedom, and often queer orientation. Polygamy, as it is portrayed in U.S. media and more broadly in social discourse, is seen to promote unequal gender hierarchy, deny women agency, and perpetuate financial/social dependency.150 Polygamy is furthermore understood to encompass religious practice whereas polyamory is secular and homosexuals as a group are not generally welcomed by these religious minorities.151 In some CNM spaces they are characterized as bad non-monogamy and in others as having similar aims and goals of challenging monogamy in the United States.152 As legislation and activists who want legal recognition push for domestic partnerships, protections against

144 M. L. Haupert et al., “Prevalence of Experiences With Consensual Nonmonogamous Relationships: Findings From Two National Samples of Single Americans,” Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 43, no. 5 (July 4, 2017): 424– 40, https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2016.1178675. 145 In a recent CBS interview, researcher Amy C. Moors noted, “That’s as common as how many people in the U.S. own a cat or the number of people who speak a language other than English at home” www.cbsnews.com/video/a- deeper-look-at-the-non-monogamy-task-force. 146 Haupert et al., “Prevalence of Experiences With Consensual Nonmonogamous Relationships,” 438. 147 Haupert et al., 431. 148 Mark Oppenheimer, “Married, With ,” The New York Times, June 30, 2011, sec. Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/magazine/infidelity-will-keep-us-together.html. 149 Haupert et al., “Prevalence of Experiences With Consensual Nonmonogamous Relationships.” 150 Schippers, Polyamory, Monogamy, and American Dreams. 151 Abbie E. Goldberg, The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies (2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, California 91320: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2016), https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483371283. 152 Solomon, “How Polyamorists and Polygamists Are Challenging Family Norms.”

41 discrimination, and perhaps eventually the legalization of multiple person marriage, CNM will begin to look more and more definitionally like polygamy. As these definitional lines blur, polygamy must also be examined from another quarter, from polygamists who claim alliance with alternative family structures represented in the queer community.

Somerville, Massachusetts

The online Somerville City Council meeting of June 25, 2020 began with the Pledge of Allegiance to a video clip of an American flag waving in an otherwise empty blue sky. Then a council member led the council in reciting the Serenity Prayer. Moments of silence were held for 30 residents who died of Covid-19. Among many other matters they heard a motion to replace Bunker Hill Day153 (June 17) with Juneteenth (June 19)154 but decided to keep both holidays. Councilor Wilfred N. Mbah, leading the Juneteenth motion, said that it was a “symbolic step in the right direction for Black people in this country, and Somerville can lead that effort for the rest of the nation.”155 This perhaps offers insight into how some residents view Somerville at the center of both national history and progressive change. When it came to the domestic partnership ordinance however it does not appear the council intended to set a precedent for other cities or begin a national dialogue on family formation. Rather, it was an 11th hour adjustment156 to one council member’s critique that domestic partnership should not be limited to just two people. The progressive council could see no reason to object, so they passed it. They had more pressing issues to address, such as affordable housing, eviction moratoriums, and ending city use of prison labor (Interview 2020).

Squeezed in between Cambridge and the Mystic River, Somerville is more densely populated than Boston.157 Comparing City and Town Population Totals U.S. Census data from 2019158 to the

153 An American Revolutionary War victory that took place in Somerville on June 17, 1775 154 The day enslaved people were emancipated in the United States in 1865 and was under discussion due to heighten awareness around Black Lives Matter movement. 155 City of Somerville City Council: Regular Meeting: Meeting by Remote Participation (Somerville, MA, 2020), http://somervillecityma.iqm2.com/Citizens/Detail_Meeting.aspx?ID=3160. 156 According to interviews the change was requested 1-2 hours before the meeting and edits to the document were made during the actual meeting updating the language from two people to plural and ungendered “they/them” pronouns. More lines were added for additional names on the application form. 157 In multiple interviews this was the first response to the opening prompt, “Tell me about Somerville.” 158 US Census Bureau, “City and Town Population Totals: 2010-2019,” The United States Census Bureau, accessed December 15, 2020, https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/time-series/demo/popest/2010s-total-cities-and- towns.html.

42 areas of each city, Boston has 14,309 residents for every one of its 48.4 square miles compared to Somerville’s 19,371 residents for every square mile crammed into its four-square miles. Somerville is “’thickly settled’ as they say here.”159 Housing is expensive and hard to come by. The importance of living in the city for some residents is captured both in words and property values. As one resident indicated, people want to be close to “culture” and pay a premium for that proximity.160 The density of the city and lack of affordable housing comes into play with the domestic partnership ordinance for at least two reasons: it protects CNM practitioners from a city rule known as the “no-more-than-four” clause which prohibits more than four unrelated adults to live together161162 secondly, forming a multiple partner household requires space and resources. Consequently, while their union might be legally recognized in the City of Somerville, if a multiple partner family wished to all live together, they might choose to move to in a neighboring city or suburb.163 They might have to go “back in the closet” in order to get a house and a backyard.

The explanation for the ordinance offered to news sources was growing concern about access to partners’ healthcare as the pandemic continued,164 but to be clear there was no CNM community pressure or discussion leading up to the introduction of the domestic partnership ordinance. While there has been interest expressed by residents in forming multiple partner relationships, no domestic partnerships with multiple partners were formed165 for many months.166 According to the City Clerk’s office, from July 1, 2020 to April 5, 2021, there were 258 marriages recorded in Somerville. Of the 60 domestic partnerships formed, three were multiple partner (3 persons in all three partnerships).167 According to one interview with a long-term resident, the low number of

159 Somerville Resident, Personal Interview, Zoom, October 14, 2020. 160 Susan A. Ostrander, Citizenship and Governance in a Changing City : Somerville, MA (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2013., 2013), https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb7393585. 161 Danielle McLean, “Group Calls for End to Limit on Unrelated Tenants in Somerville Housing,” Somerville Journal, accessed January 5, 2021, https://somerville.wickedlocal.com/article/20160127/NEWS/160126306. 162 Stated reasons for this clause, for which I have yet to find an original date, are to combat slumlords, brothels, and fraternities in quiet residential areas 163 Somerville Resident, Personal Interview. 164 Ellen Barry, “A Massachusetts City Decides to Recognize Polyamorous Relationships,” The New York Times, July 1, 2020, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/us/somerville-polyamorous-domestic- partnership.html. 165 When I called the City Clerk’s office to inquire, I was directed to email the City Clerk directly. The staff person at the City Clerk’s office referred to my request as information about “polyamorous” domestic partnerships even though I had used the term “multiple partner” domestic partnerships. 166 Somerville Resident, Personal Interview. 167 John Long, “UNC Grad Student Inquiry on Multiple Partner Domestic Partnerships,” April 6, 2021.

43 multiple person domestic partnerships could be the result of several factors: 1) the current political climate under the Trump administration where even same-sex marriage equality seemed to be under threat created an air of uncertainty and hesitation but 2) more immediately that the ordinance as written did not work for many multiple partner relationships and families who had already come up with creative ways of navigating a mononormative system. For example, the ordinance as currently written, stipulates partners must share the same residency. Partners can also not be currently married to another individual. These two factors may be prohibitive to some relationships. As we will see in Chapter 5 in the interview analysis, there may be other more complex reasons in play. Legal recognition is not desirable for everyone.

The details of how this ordinance come into being may be indicative of the chaotic and disjointed way in which such events generally unfold. Later narratives, facts, and context are woven together as history as both Anderson and Renan highlight. The construction of history would typically drop this incongruency for a more satisfying and purposeful narrative. It is only in the aftermath that intent and relevance are assigned to those moments. Nonetheless, the Somerville Domestic Partnership Ordinance is significant. This “watershed moment,” one resident and CNM activist agreed,168 has the potential to strengthen or break the in the United States between monogamy and citizenship, between monogamy and national identity as part of nation- state formation. It is a “truly exceptional and part of the queer imagining of the future.”169 There are rumblings that a handful of other cities around the country are considering similar ordinances or have just passed similar ordinances such as in Cambridge where the language of “non-nuclear family” is used to encompass single-parent and multi-generational households as well as polyamorous.170

If we can accept the premise that monogamy up to the present has operated as a marker of national identity in the United States, then what possibilities does the legal recognition of a multiple partner union by a city government, in defiance of a very long American tradition of enforcing monogamy

168 Kimberly Rhoten, Personal Interview, Zoom, September 25, 2020. 169 Kimberly Rhoten. 170 Elizabeth Nolan Brown, “Cambridge Will Recognize Polyamorous Partnerships and Other Domestic Arrangements With More Than 2 Adults – Reason.Com,” Reason Foundation, March 10, 2021, https://reason.com/2021/03/10/cambridge-will-recognize-polyamorous-partnerships-and-other-domestic- arrangements-with-more-than-2-adults/?utm_medium=email.

44 represent? The ordinance, as it was introduced by Council Lance Davis, was meant to remove government from the process of defining family; however, in practical terms, it actually expands the definition of family and incorporates another form of family, which is still subject to rules and approval by the state. Through incorporation, does this ordinance begin to move the marker of non-monogamies into the categorization of what it means to be American? Does recategorization apply to all forms of non-monogamies, including polygamy, or does polygamy still remain in the categorization of Other and non-American?

The State of Polygamy in Utah

On March 29, 2020, just as pandemic lockdowns around the United States were consuming most media attention, Salt Lake City Fox 13 News reported that the Utah State Senate decriminalized polygamy for consenting adults.171 The Governor signed it into law on March 28, 2020.172 This brought the offense down from a felony to an infraction on par with a traffic violation. “SB102 does not legalize polygamy, so it does not violate Utah's constitutional prohibition on it.”173 There were 21 co-sponsors. The bill unanimously passed the Senate174 and was approved by the House by 70 to 3 vote.175 The bill’s sponsor, Deidre M. Henderson, then Senator and now Lieutenant Governor of State of Utah, saw the bill as corrective to Utah law that pushed polygamy underground and provided cover for child abusers.176 Sen. Henderson […] argued that making bigamy an infraction for consenting adults could help free people to report problems and seek help without fear their entire life is prosecuted.177 She also told the New York Times just before the bill

171 Ben Winslow, “Polygamy Is Essentially Decriminalized in Utah under a Bill Signed into Law,” Salt Lake City, March 29, 2020, https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/polygamy-is-essentially-decriminalized- in-utah-under-a-bill-signed-into-law. 172 Deidre M. Henderson, “Bigamy Amendments,” Pub. L. No. SB0102, accessed April 15, 2021, https://le.utah.gov/~2020/bills/static/SB0102.html. 173 Winslow, “Polygamy Is Essentially Decriminalized in Utah under a Bill Signed into Law.” 174 Benjamin Wood, “Utah Senate Votes Unanimously to Decriminalize Polygamy,” The Salt Lake Tribune, February 14, 2020, https://sltrib.com/news/politics/2020/02/14/utah-senate-votes. 175 Ben Winslow, “Polygamy Bill Passes the Utah State Legislature,” Fox News Salt Lake City, February 26, 2020, https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/polygamy-bill-passes-the-utah-state-legislature. 176 Deidre Henderson, “Utah’s Polygamy Law Creates a Culture of Fear and ,” The Salt Lake Tribune, February 7, 2020, Special to The Tribune edition, https://sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2020/02/07/deidre- henderson-utahs. 177 Ben Winslow, “Polygamists Cheer Bill to Make Bigamy an Infraction in Utah, Opponents Hope to Defeat It,” Fox News Salt Lake City, February 5, 2020, https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/polygamists-cheer-bill-to- make-bigamy-an-infraction-in-utah-opponents-hope-to-defeat-it.

45 went into effect in May, 2020 that the bill was a long-term solution and “The intent is to lower the barrier to socialization.”178

Polygamist Joe Darger, who first met Senator Henderson in 2008,179 is credited, along with Alina, Vicki, Valerie, his three wives, with challenging socially accepted views of what polygamy looks like in the United States. The process was more complicated. There were other families and organizations involved,180 but I am interested in for this thesis are the claims and logic surrounding the Darger family that has been brought into national social discourse comparing polygamy and polyamory.

On January 5, 2021 the New Yorker published a short film on the Darger family titled, How One Polygamous Family Changed the Law. The family had previously been in the news some years back, including on the cover of Times Magazine, and was the inspiration for HBO series Big Love. The eleven and half minute video features the very large polygamous family of four , twenty-five children, and seventeen grandchildren. The family points to the death and investigation of their five-month-old daughter as why they decided to “becoming more public” as polygamous. Religious minority protection arguments failed to gain legal traction, so they switched tactics and claimed freedom of speech issue.181 They appealed to the common practice of men in society sleeping with multiple women and having children which was not illegal but calling those women “wives” made it a felony. In a jarring combination of logics, they appealed to monogamous cheating culture as a justification for continuing their own practice, American values of individuals, and to broader, liberal framing of the issue. The New Yorker film ends with polygamist Joe Darger saying the following:

If we just hold on to the nuclear family versus being more accepting, then we continue to ignore what is in society. What it is is single , polygamous families, it's gay families, it's polyamorous families. […] However somebody wants to organize themselves to create the future, we need to accept that, because that is America, and that is who you can be for the world.

178 Christine Hauser, “Utah Lowers Penalty for Polygamy, No Longer a Felony,” The New York Times, May 13, 2020, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/us/utah-bigamy-law.html. 179 Solomon, “How Polyamorists and Polygamists Are Challenging Family Norms.” 180 Such as the Libertas Institute, a Utah-based libertarian think tank (https://libertas.org/impact/) 181 Watch How One Polygamous Family Changed the Law | The New Yorker Video | CNE | Newyorker.Com (Condé Nast, 2021), https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/how-one-polygamous-family-changed-the-law.

46

Darger claims alliance with single parents, gay families, and polyamorous families. There is an effort here but then more directly in the subsequent New Yorker article, to demonstrate how both polygamy and polyamory182 are “challenging family norms.”183 By secular standards however Mormon polygamy may still “bad religion” and will be met with caution, skepticism, or rejection. These reactions are reflected in Chapter 5 interview analysis of people practicing CNM.

District of Columbia

In February 2021 the “Right to Family Act Letter” was submitted to the District of Columbia City Council requesting the enactment of the “Right to Family Amendment Act of 2021”. In this letter, the signers ask for the following amendments to the:

DC Human Rights Act of 1977 to include “relationship structure” as part of the definition of discrimination on the basis of “familial status” and amend the Health Care Benefits Expansion Act of 1992 and § 32–702 of the Code of the District of Columbia to expand the definition of domestic partnership to 2 or more.

Unlike the Somerville domestic partnership ordinance, this letter is a very intentional and strategic piece of activism meant to draw national public attention. It came out of a Poly Leadership Network discussion at the “Open to Love” conference in Philadelphia four years prior. It explicitly outlines relationship structures to include the whole constellation of consensual non-monogamies.

“Relationship structure” refers to the number of consenting adults involved in an intimate personal relationship and/or the number of intimate personal relationships in which each consenting adult is simultaneously involved. It also includes an individual’s disposition or desire for a certain relationship structure, regardless of whether the individual is currently in that type of, or any, relationship. “Intimate personal relationship” means an interpersonal relationship between two or more adult individuals that involves romantic, physical, or . This includes multi- partner/multi-parent families, diverse family structures, and consensual sexual relationships, including relationships involving consensual non-monogamies.

182 The term he uses in the New Yorker article 183 Solomon, “How Polyamorists and Polygamists Are Challenging Family Norms.”

47 The authors tie these changes to tangible citizenship rights, goods, and services.

The residents whom these terms cover face hardships that interrupt their right to peacefully pursue fulfilling lives free from fear for themselves and their families. Too often, they encounter employment and housing discrimination, restricted access to public accommodations, discrimination in services, public humiliation, bullying in educational environments, and unfair treatment in legal proceedings, including child custody cases.

City-level activism was a conscious and strategic choice to model what is possible at the state and national level. I was able to interview Christopher (Chris) Smith, one of the D.C. letter co-authors, about the impetus and strategy for the act. As Chris put it, their goal is to establish model(s) at the local level for national modeling and then push to get it in front of the Supreme Court as a case.184 He sees CNM tied to larger social issues such as housing discrimination and healthcare. “If instead of two people who may only make $50,000 a year, why don’t you have four? And why don’t you build that community together? And that means everybody gets a break. Nobody has to work two jobs. And you can support each other as a family.”185 City action lays the groundwork for viability and practical solutions to what seems to be now, in a monogamously-centric state, a logistical and legal hell scape. These arguments will also feel very familiar as they are similar to the narrative used by gay and lesbian activists’ decades earlier. These appeals related to healthcare, child custody, and how family and social structures were in adequate to accommodate same-sex couples. The connections to social issues are obvious to Chris Smith but not as obvious to local government officials.

Three days after the letter was submitted, the authors were invited by a DC Council staffer to raise concerns of “Multi Partnered and Consensually Non-Monogamous people in the District of Columbia” at the March 5, 2021 virtual meeting of the Committee on Government Operations and Facilities.186 At the meeting, Chairperson Robert C. White, Jr. asked Mr. Smith to elaborate on how people were being discriminated against and if a number could be placed on the DC city residents affected. Among the panel witnesses present there were two lawyers, Sarah Steele, an

184 Christopher (Chris) Smith, Personal Interview, Zoom, February 8, 2021. 185 Smith. 186 Robert C. White, “Performance and Oversight Hearing,” § Committee on Government Operations and Facilities (2021), http://dc.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=6211 http://dc.granicus.com.

48 Atlanta-based lawyer who specializes in "alternative " communities and Jonathan Lane, a DC area lawyer and an expert on family law. Several segments of the meeting in their entirety illuminate important ways in which social discourse at the local level operates.

Minute 51:28 Chairperson White: Mr. Smith, do you have information or statistics on non-monogamous families here in the district, either having, facing discrimination or limitations on child custody? Or um yeah. Let’s start there.

Chris Smith: To collect those statistics, people are afraid of coming out because of the stigmatization behind it, so it is hard to garner those statistics. […] because of the highly stigmatized nature of the identity as well as it being erased as something that is real, it is very hard to collect that data.

White: Okay, and in terms of housing discrimination, what is the discrimination? Why would housing providers care whether the tenant or potential buyer is a uh—in a polyamorous family or in a non-monogamous relationship—What would be the basis of discrimination there?

Smith: Well, you would look at capacity. A lot of homes have certain capacity regulations, whether it be apartments or even rented condos or the like and some of them have stipulations within their contracts that people who are not on the lease cannot stay there for a certain amount of time. Also, you look at people who have certain benefits from the government whether it be EBT, Medicare, Medicaid and it has certain restrictions on adult capacity within homes. However, those restrictions do not take into account the intersectionality of the people who are receiving those benefits, particularly housing benefits. A lot of these individuals, even if there is another adult in the household, still may not make enough money to properly support. So, there is just a lot of what we would call mono normative thinking surrounding a lot of legislation as well as lack of consideration for people’s decisions and way of living.

White: I'm trying to figure out if these are issues with a code, whether our code or laws set capacity limits based on the size or number of bedrooms in a home. Is there some overlap with that or discrimination without some type of limitation in the code or both?

Smith: There's discrimination based off of capacity, but there's also discrimination based off of the fact that people may not want—let's say an owner of an apartment—may not want to rent to somebody who has a multi-partner family because of bias or lack of understanding of the consistency and the authenticity of the relationship. Relationship. okay, all right. I'm glad we'll have some other witnesses on this subject later.

Minute 1:42:56

49 White: For Sarah Steele or Jonathan Lane, this is a new issue for me so I’m trying to wrap my head around it. The issue of discrimination and the idea of adding this to a protected characteristic, what would the protected characteristic be? Let me start there.”

Lane: There are a variety of ways to go about it. In terms of specific legislative language, I would defer to the proposal that was brought to the committee’s attention which I believe involved “relationship structure.”

Steele: I believe the specific language was “relationship structure notwithstanding” or something to that effect. Instead of saying ‘family’ or ‘couple’ ‘relationship structure’ was going to be the new verbiage because that could include family of two, to three to five to ten, you know because I do know people in polycules who have ten members actually.

White: As statutory language ‘relationship structure’ strikes me as unclear? Which is why I ask. But that is not the main issue here. What is—what other protected characteristics whether in DC or elsewhere—because Sarah I know you’re not in the district—what protected characteristics are most like this. So, if we say this is like another protected characteristic—cuz I’m trying to conceptualize it, and obviously there is discrimination against an endless number of things, and I am trying to understand if this type of characteristic is in line with other protected characteristics in DC or elsewhere.

Steele: I think it very similar to whenever marriage equality became federal law finally. You know because a lot of LGBT people were discriminated against just on the basis of who they are and what they did in their bedrooms. And I think this goes along very similarly because there is a large community of heads much higher than mine and the psychological and counseling community that says that being a non monogamous person is just as much of an ingrained trait as being LGBT and so any protections we’ve seen along in the last years in regards to them could easily transfer over to people who are consensually non monogamous. I even said myself after DOMA was finally stricken down for the last time I was oddly enough at the Stonewall bar in NY whenever it happened. I was visiting, and I said, “What coming next is poly.” That what we term we used then was polyamory and consensual non monogamy is part of our umbrella. And I believe that for the exact same reasons, this is why this is coming down the pipe. It’s already happened in Massachusetts in two different places. It’s like what Mr. Smith mentioned, it’s been brought up in California, and now it’s being brought up here. It’s coming. It is absolutely coming.

Lange: If I could just add, I would definitely agree with the LGBTQ community [statement], and I think that as to where this fits in and I would say that it fits in in terms of the EFFECTS, the chilling effects basically the threat of discrimination and how these issues have been interpreted particularly in court when there have been you know who have been unsympathetic judges who haven’t had anything restricting them from using this as a judgment and that’s some that was very common in gay and lesbian communities certainly in the 90s. It’s become less common in the country and of course in DC we have specific legislation that addresses that.

50 White: There are some contexts where this makes sense to me. I understand the argument like custody, but there is some context that I can’t understand, that I don’t understand yet, specifically estate planning and housing discrimination, so with estate planning, unless polygamy is legal, I don’t understand the discrimination.

Firstly, local government officials may not, or at least in this case did not, immediately see a connection to discrimination and social issues. Smith attributes this to mononormative culture, which cannot or will not even entertain other possibilities of relationship creation and therefore rigidly replicates mononormative policy and structure. Secondly, the legal panelists point to parallels between CNM discrimination and same-sex marriage equality. Moreover, Sarah Steele suggests the connection goes deeper because CNM maybe an “ingrained trait” similar to sexual orientation. Finally, Chairperson White frames the presence or absence of discrimination in terms of legal marriage by stating that if polygamy is not legal, then what is the basis of discrimination.

______

Chapter 5: CNM and National Identity Interviews

Introduction

Because monogamy is still pervasive as the idealized norm in the United States and non- monogamies continue to be stigmatized, it felt important to include the perspectives of people who have broken with monogamy in intentional and overt ways.187 The purpose of these semi- structured interviews is to broadly understand how persons who are polyamorous, in an open relationship, or are practicing other forms of consensual non-monogamies (CNM) view their personal identity in relation to CNM and to national identity, citizenship, and belonging; and finally to determine whether or not legal recognition is desirable for them. I selected this group, as opposed to persons practicing polygamy, primarily for two reasons. First, this population has a greater online presence and is generally more accessible for interviews. Secondly, CNM

187 Non-monogamies after all are actually quite common but because it is conducted in secret (aka cheating), it does not address or challenge structural or societal norms around family and relationships.

51 practitioners, as boundary transgressors, represent further secular splits between good and bad non- monogamies in a way that help us understand the possibilities of queer futures that might incorporate other non-monogamies, including polygamy, or alternatively secular futures that leave them behind.

Barker and Langdridge identified a tension in emerging scholarship on non-monogamies that on the one hand “celebrate non-monogamies as a potentially feminist, queer or otherwise radical way of structuring and managing relationships” and on the other “highlights their limitations, and the way in which they may reproduce and reinforce hetero- and mono-normativity in various way rather than challenging them.”188 This tension is also reflected in the sentiments of interviewees. Some people’s relationship structure suggested the primacy of one relationship. Others were sick of being the third to couples who would ditch them when the relationship became inconvenient for their dyadic pairing. But still other interviews opened up possibilities that undermined structural inequality beyond relationships.

I approached the topic and developed the interview sections with the following research questions in mind: 1) What are motivating factors and philosophies for people practicing CNM to break from monogamy? 2) How do persons practicing CNM understand their identity in relation to citizenship and being “American”? 3) What does the recent multiple partner domestic partnership ordinance in Somerville, Massachusetts mean to persons practicing CNM? 4) In what ways do persons practicing CNM see their practice as in alliance with or as distinct from polygamy?

My assumptions were first that breaking such a strong societal norm would entail well- remembered and processed factors as well as complex relationship and life philosophies. Secondly, if monogamy is a marker of national identity, people practicing CNM will feel less American and/or be treated as less American because of their practice. Thirdly, people practicing CNM will be excited about Somerville but hesitant to pursue that for themselves. They will have an overall complex view of marriage as an institution. Finally, people practicing CNM will see their practice as distinct from polygamy on many levels and wish to distance themselves from polygamy which they associate with Mormons, cults, and abuse of women and children.

188 Barker and Langdridge, Understanding Non-Monogamies, 4.

52

Methods

Over the course of two months, I conducted semi-structured interviews in English with seventeen individuals who currently or within in the past five years had practiced some form of consensual non-monogamies, were 18 years of age or older, and live in the United States (citizenship was not required). Participants were recruited on known CNM online forums, and email listservs, including the Polyamory Researchers group forum, the Center for Positive Sexuality, the American Psychological Association CNM Taskforce, Black and Poly and others (See Appendix, Table 2 for full list). There were also several participants who came through Research for Me, the university’s research study posting affiliate. Finally, a handful of interviews came through word of mouth. Questions were grouped into sections: 1) how various demographic markers related in importance to their identity; 2) how they understood and practiced CNM; 3) how they thought CNM was practiced in the United States and was related to being or not being “American;” 4) their reactions to the Somerville Domestic Partnership ordinance and whether or not legal recognition was desirable; and in the final section 5) they were asked about similarities and differences between polygamy and CNM. These polygamy questions were arguably the most sensitive and uncomfortable in most interviews for everyone involved. In anticipation of this challenge, I left it to the end. Interviews typically lasted between one to one and half hours, with the exception of one which was a wide ranging 3.5 hours, full of gorgeous (mostly-on-topic) detail. All of the interviews were rich and illuminating to the discussion in some way.

Descriptive statistics are presented in Table 3. There was a wide range of geographic location from across the country. As an added layer of confidentiality, I have only indicated location at the regional level. No single state had more than two participants. The age range was twenty-one to eighty-six but skewed older, twelve of the of the seventeen were over forty. I believe this is partially due to selection bias and the sites of recruitment than representation within the general population. I did not, for instance, recruit on social media, and these long-standing forums and organizations have long-time members and likely attract a middle-age demographic. Consequently, many of the participants had a longer relationship history and emphasized change over time, both in terms of their relationship philosophies and how social norms have changed. Education and career varied considerably from high school completion to doctor of medicine.

53 Where formal education was absent, participants emphasized self-learning and surrounding themselves with highly intelligent people. Work experience and career included small business owners, homemaker, student, music industry, odd jobs, medicine, education, military, theater, bus driver, and adult entertainer/martial arts instructor.

Most participants described their race and ethnicity as White and European. One participant indicated they were American-Chinese with former citizenship in China which was given up at the age of five since dual citizenship with China and the U.S. is not permitted. One participant offered that their mother was Filipino and so they identify as “broadly, Asian” and as “biracial.” Another participant identified as White Hispanic. Perhaps unsurprisingly few people indicated that religion was important to them or their sense of identity or they sought out some form of unorganized religious practice or spirituality. Responses included, “agnostic” “atheist and failed Unitarian”, “secular humanist,” “left hand path pagan.” As one person put it, “Religion is not important to me. But spirituality is important to me.” Two participants from the same household were active in more active organized religion, a “liberal religious fellowship.” Political party affiliation was more varied than expected. One person identified as “democratic socialist. Burn it down.” Ten people were affiliated with the Democratic party, but more than half expressed ambivalence toward any one party. Some responses included statements like, “I would consider myself a Democrat. Although I don't particularly identify with their purpose. I think that the Democratic Party has changed quite a bit over the years […] it's less that I hold the same beliefs as that is party that I align closest with.” And “I guess if I had to choose I would go with Democrat.” Over a third said that they were independent. One person (somewhat reluctantly) indicated they occasionally vote Republican saying, “Now? I jumped back and forth.”

Seven participants were feminine-of-center, of which two indicated cisgender and one trans, seven were masculine-of-center, of which one indicated cisgender, and three were gender queer. The rigidity and boundedness of gender expressed in this sample was low. For instance, one participant identified as "male with soft edges," another as “gender fluid […] for now.” Another participant expressed a degree of self-deprecating humor when asked about gender. They responded, “as boring. I gender identify as the statistical problem in the world. I am a heterosexual male.” Gender identity is presented in Table 4 as stated exactly. With the exception of two people who identified

54 as heterosexual, most participants indicated their sexual orientation was queer in nature. Anyone who had identified as bisexual signaled that they should or had shifted to the term pansexual to be inclusive of gender nonconforming partners (See Table 4).

Finally, I will address relationship structures and legal marital status. Relationship structures were considerably varied. Some people practiced what could be defined as “solo polyamory,” others “” where hierarchy and coupledom is avoided, some were in an or more dyadic relationship, and only two were in a polyamorous marriage. Those two participants were “married” to each other, but only one of them was legally married to their third who did not interview. Of the fifteen people who provided legal marital status, eight were married, four were single and three divorced. However, of the married individuals three were separated and either were still married to maintain health insurance or in one case because the divorce process was ongoing. Several married people had only done so for marriage related benefits such as healthcare, VA benefits, retirement, or because they had been expecting a child.

For this thesis I will not do an in-depth analysis but will provide a broad overview of themes and pieces of interviews that seemed most relevant to discuss and will point to areas where further analysis would be fruitful. Themes could be viewed as encompassing four spheres: motivations for breaking with monogamy, understandings of their own practice in opposition to societal norms, their relationship to deviance and norms, and how they viewed their practice in contrast to polygamy.

Discussion

First Encounters and Philosophy I was particularly interested to learn how people first encountered CNM and how their philosophy around relationships has developed and changed over time. To prime this question, I first asked them to tell me when they first encountered monogamy as a norm. That question was typically met with some variation of, “when I was born” or once they first learned about relationships. Their first CNM encounters tended to happen in their teens or early 20s with a very wide range of introductions.

55

Oh, well, I’d say growing up in America, it was basically as soon as I knew about marriage, that that was just the norm. And that non-monogamy was something that other people did, I guess, like in other countries or in certain, like small groups in the United States, but like, as a whole, it was just the norm to marry or be in a relationship with one person at a time (South, Transwoman, 21).

Growing up in the monogamous mindset, say, My God, and you can actually be in love with more than one person. That was a major understanding that you didn't have to get married. And in fact, I stopped getting married in 1977. But I've not been alone that whole time. Because it was a wonderful freeing of exploration and sexual variety was, in course, part of that whole thing. And in spite of all of that experience, I'm still living with one monogamous woman. […] It can be 100 different ways. And it's fluid. And it changes as you go through your various stages of life. It's different. You may want to be monogamous when you're in your 20s or 30s, and have babies and all that sort of stuff. But then maybe that will change and you don't want to be monogamous after X number of years. And the poly community allows you to do that. But in the traditional monogamy, you're stuck. Even though you hate each other (South Atlantic, Male, 86).

When I was 16? Well, as a possibility, it's always around because you always cheat on people. You always can. You shouldn't. But you can. Now when I was 16 years old, I had a . And I also fell in love with my best friend at the same time. And I was like, I remember distinctly having this thought, and I was, you know, contemplating this, I'm like, What is so wrong with being with both? Why can't I have both of them? They both make me happy. I want them to be happy (Pacific West/West Coast, Gender fluid for now, 31).

Um, when I was in my early 20s I didn't know that there was a word for it. But I was in a relationship with someone who was with a man who was bisexual and I was bisexual, I thought [I was], but I wasn't sure. And so, we like, researched and talked about and, like, decided to have an open relationship in order to be with same sex partners at that time. And like, in that time, I discovered the book, the Ethical Slut, and like, sort of it was like, Oh, this is like, a thing that people write about and talk about, you know, so sort of by our own, like, desire to seek that for ourselves, we found that there was a definition for it too (Northeast, cis woman, 40).

We had just come back from overseas; my husband had been injured [where he was stationed in the military]. And we went to meet with a local Meetup group of a spiritual nature. And there was this six-foot-two red head, that she kept walking around, and my husband's like—he could see the energy between us—And he was like, you need to explore that. And I was like, I'm not I've never been with a woman alone. And he's like, No, you need to go look at this. So, her and I wound up being in a relationship for seven years. And that was my first exposure to polyamory (West South Central, Female, 53).

56 Others mentioned encountering CNM in an AOL chat room, in science fiction novels,189 at camp, or after having an affair that led to a . Philosophies surrounding relationships were also as varied as relationship structures but contained several common elements: consent, constant communication, taking pleasure in other people’s satisfaction even at their own expense, that one person cannot and should not have to be everything all at once forever.

We are restricted by our real world, that kind of resources. There's only so much time in the day, there's only so much energy I have, there's only so much money I have. But the love the capacity to care and emote with other people is infinite. Like, I could love everyone the same exact way, I can't show it to them, because I'm not rich, I don't have as much time. But that doesn't mean that I don't love them just as much.

So, for my philosophy, it's like, I don't see the I don't see the benefits of restriction for relationships. Like, I don't see why it's such a good thing to have a single person be your everything, as a monogamous as a monogamous discourse would kind of tell you that you know, your husband, your wife, your partner, your single partner is supposed to do everything. They're supposed to be your best friend, they're supposed to be your ride or die partner in crime. They're supposed to be your emotional support, blah, blah, blah. […] But really, like, that's just a fundamental difference. Um, so yeah, I don't see why there's such a benefit to restricting to just one when people and human experience and everything is so complex, and so messy anyway, that's like, we're just like, take care of each other (Pacific West/West Coast, Gender fluid for now, 31).

Okay. I tend to have a pretty secure attachment style. So I don't, I've never really developed a sense of or possessiveness. So, I approach relationships in a way that I need to stay safe. So, I guess my personal relationship style is, I am permissive of basically, anything that my partner does as long as they're committed to being a good person. And I expect the same of my partner. And I don't have particular rules or specific, emotional or sexual boundaries. Because I feel like I want to explore a range of different relationship dynamics. And that is sort of okay (New England, Cis woman, 29).

Three absolutely horrid monogamous marriages. I mean, between emotional abuse, physical abuse, on both parts […] The only thing I had sticking to any of this was my parents marriage. And other than that, it was like I kept seeing all these marriages fall apart with everybody, all the lies, the deceit, the abuse. And so when my husband and I got together, I had realized I didn't need a man to take care of me, I wanted a partner in life. And I think that's what set the platform to finding polyamory. Since I've become polyamorous almost 20 years that we've been polyamorous (West South Central, Female, 53).

189 American author Robert Heinlein came up twice.

57 National Identity, Americanness and CNM I expected to find that people who practice CNM would feel that they are less American and are treated as less American, but this was not the case. Most people expressed confusion or disagreement with the notion that they would be treated as less American. While they might feel ostracized they still felt American. One explanation for this is that race, ethnicity, and skin color are still how we predominately understand, register, and are treated as American or un-American. A further explanation is that because the majority of the participants seemed to move and socialize in progressive, liberal circles, they did not regularly encounter more conservative Americans who are more vocal about distinctions between what being an American entailed.

As one participant put it: I know that a lot of people especially in more conservative demographics, do not view nonmonogamy as something that should happen, especially in America. And whenever it's talked about by a lot of older people, [nonmonogamy is] something that happens outside of the country or only in like certain small groups that are sort of off the beaten path and alternative within America (South, Transwoman, 21).

One of two participants who occasionally lean Republican also still holds what might be considered more conservative views, such as pro-gun ownership; Blue Lives Matter190 support (while also attending Black Lives Matter protests); and expressed disgruntlement over gender neutral pronouns. He had more occasion to interact with conservative, right-leaning people, but often clashed with them over issues he deemed fell under the “golden rule” and basic human decency.

Interviewer: Do you feel that other people treat you as American?

Interviewee: Sometimes? Yes, mostly Yes. The last 40 years, sometimes not so much. You know, when you get into the political arguments of it, there's it's become more of a politicized thing. If you're not on my side, then you're not an American. And I really think that's that kind of makes me a little sad.

Interviewer: So do you feel like people on the right challenge your Americanness when you defend people [Muslims, Asians, migrant workers]?

190 Support for police in the face of Black Lives Matter protests

58 Interviewee: Oh, actually do they've told me that they told me I'm a communist. And I should go back to Mother Russia because I believe in and stuff like that.

Interviewer: Do you think that's the same would apply to consensual nonmonogamy from those quarters? Would they see that as un-American?

Interviewee: Yes. Um, most of the people I know that are on that extreme side are very religious. They can't see that, you know, big. Their view is that if you're not emotionally tied to one person for your life, that you're not being honest with those people. Again, you're not you're not in that relationship. You're not looking at it from the same point of view. And a lot of them again, I see it coming they what the other person doesn't know doesn't hurt them. Well, that that information can always be found out, and especially nowadays, holy cow. When you walk your walk in a dangerous line, they're thinking that stuff not going to get found out (Northeast, Male, 53).

When coming into regular contact with conservative Republicans it may be easier to draw direct association between CNM and un-Americanness. Furthermore, cheating is more American than CNM. I think this statement in particular highlights Coviello’s arguments and what he refers to as hypernormativity, “the striving for inclusion within life expressed as an allegiant to patriarchally, to the racial state”191

More people expressed general disillusionment with what it meant to be American. They expressed anxiety over the current conditions in the United States but hoped for improvement in the future.

I am not particularly proud to be an American recently, for a lot of reasons […] particularly ever since 2016, when Trump was elected […] But it's like, it's not that anything significantly changed. It's just the decorum changed, right? Like, you know, Obama was still drone bombing civilians in the Middle East. So, I struggle with like having anything positive to say about being an American right now. But what I do, I guess what I, what I if I was to like, hold that little bit of hope that there is something good about America is that I appreciate this commitment to freedom and to personal liberty. And I don't think it's equitably applied to everybody within our society (Mountain West, Gender queer, 33).

The Question of Legal Recognition There is a large degree of ambivalence towards marriage exhibited even by those who were still currently married. Some participants who were excited about legal recognition, especially for the

191 Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods, 234.

59 family of three wives, one of whom is only legally recognized. For others there was skepticism or flat out rejection of marriage.

Plenty of consensual non-monogamies practicing people are not interested in having multiple partner marriage. Some of these relationships are, you know, beautiful and fleeting. And when you're talking marriage, you're talking, in my opinion, a larger commitment then, ‘I am going to love you all the way through Burning Man,’ for instance. Definitely had a Burning Man long192 relationship, and it was lovely (Female, bisexual/pan, 44).

I think marriage should be de-legalized. […] I don't know why anybody thinks legal marriage is something that ought to happen. I couldn't get that. At some point, you need to protect children, but you protect children, whether people are legally married […] whether you went and got that piece of paper or not. And if you're religious, I would you would think that marriage is a sacrament. And you might think that the government has no business meddling and sacraments (Pacific West, Cis male, 77).

As indicated above the topic of legal recognition is also strongly tied to CNM as relating to a multitude of other social issues including how it is becoming harder to be “self-sufficient.”

Oh, yeah, there is a popular internet joke that like nowadays, you really can't, you need to, like, have multiple partners in order to afford rent. There's no way you're gonna be able to just have one person to cohabit with and still afford rent, might as well just start dating another one. Then you can finally like, get into that three-bedroom apartment. (New England, cis woman, 29)

They then proceeded to point me to this meme titled “imagine being monogamous, in This economy!” (See Figure 1). In this Twitter repost, one person asks if anyone would like to fall in love and split rent, to which another responds “You need to be in a minimum 3 person polycule to live comfortably these days.” There are thirty-three additional comments.193

One person who has worked extensively in medical insurance said the following: I think I would say that we're not going to be able to have these relationships other than an isolation until we have national healthcare. Right? Our healthcare is too tied into who you're related to, by law.

192 Burning Man is “an annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance” and although now boast global events is largely associated with the largest gathering in the U.S. desert region of Nevada. Burning Man typically lasts nine days, burningman.org/event/preparation/faq 193 localbearcryptid, “Imagine Being Monogamous, in This Economy!,” Reddit Post, R/Polyamory, December 4, 2020, www.reddit.com/r/polyamory/comments/k6gxiw/imagine_being_monogamous_in_this_economy/.

60 And there's still very little room for polygamist or polyamory families to be legal entities, it's very difficult to do (Pacific, queer/bisexual, 63).

Distinctions from and Alliance with Polygamy In the same vein as CNM, I offered a definition of polygamy and asked participants to modify or provide their own. I defined polygamy “as a broad term to refer to marriage to multiple spouses.” In some cases, participants were confused on the term but even if they were aware of the distinction between polygyny and polyandry, the term “polygamy” first and foremost conjured up the Mormon context of men marrying multiple women. Because these questions came at the end of the interview, participants were undoubtedly tired, but there also seemed to be general discomfort around the topic, for some more than others. Few people mentioned , the Middle East or Africa. It was raised, but not as frequently as I had expected given the global context.194

When it comes to a romantic or sexual relationship, we're programmed to think that if it does not lead to a lifelong marriage, it is in some way a failure. And that's why I think that polygamy as a term is loaded, because it still pushes a marriage agenda where my point is, all relationships are valid, even if they're five minutes long. So, I think consensual nonmonogamy being a wider term that just says multiple relationships of multiple levels could all be legitimate, is I think, a better term than polygamy, which still pushes the marriage agenda (Pacific West, Male, 49).

The public view of fundamentalist Mormon polygamy is the third marrying 14-year olds. Now I don't think anybody thinks that's a good idea. […] But I don't think polyamorous or other you know, swingers, other people want to be mistaken for fundamentalist Mormons. But you know, Mormons don't want to be mistaken for those guys either (Pacific West, cis male, 77).

So, I think that consensual non monogamy and I think I talked about this earlier, um, consensual non monogamy is a two way street, right? So, everyone can have their needs fulfilled however that may look. Polygamy, how it is currently defined in my brain based off the socialization, right, is that it is very much a one way street, where one person gets to have multiple relationships, but then those individuals within that don't get to access that same freedom and flexibility (South, Transwoman, 21).

Sister Wives, Big Love. Fairly hetero normative. Very sexist. Really very misogynistic. Honestly, I think polygamy is very misogynistic. That's the first image of course, of, you know, one cisgender. Man, multiple wives. Multiple female partnerships. I usually think of it very been very restrictive. But it's like, you know, it's the women kind of vying for the

194 There could be several reasons for this, but one possible explanation is that Americans have Mormons as a “buffer” between them and racialized other that is still very much in the background.

61 guy's attention not necessarily they might have relationships with each other they probably don't have relationships with people outside of the polygamous marriage. I very much see it as a massively misogynistic thing (Pacific West/West Coast, Gender fluid for now, 31).

Polygamy offers finite possibilities whereas CNM offers infinite possibilities. Perhaps the most succinct and clear distinction measurement of the difference between polygamy and CNM would be as a complex equation. “I think there are a whole bunch of different ways that consensual nonmonogamy can happen […]. The variation in terms of the equation and makeup can be different in one and it's very, it's a very simple formula and the other, polygamy is an example of consensual nonmonogamy” (South Atlantic, Gender queer, 45). CNM can be any number of combinations and configurations whereas polygamy, as it has been historically presented, like monogamy, is limited in its scope. One of the people interviewed for the New Yorker article expressed frustrations over these comparisons between polygamy and polyamory even as they agreed to participate, stating, “I’m ready for a *mainstream outlet* long-form piece focused on non- monogamy in queer and trans communities that isn’t juxtaposing it or comparing it to polygamy.” They see this as a cis and hetero-centric discussion (See Figure 2), which would possibly include this thesis.

The reactions to Joe Darger’s claiming alliance with single people, gay, and polyamorous families were mixed. Some people were pleasantly surprised. Others were still uncertain and qualified their response. While still others rejected that alliance.

I think if I didn't know anything about like, Mormon religious practices, that would sound really nice. But I have the impression that Mormon marriages are not really nice. Like, isn't it usually like one and a bunch of women? And it's because the man is powerful that he is able to get all these women is not necessarily very conceptual. So that's my impression. Maybe you can correct it if you know more, butI do not know more. I am not I'm not helpful in that regard (New England, cis woman, 29).

If I had a chance, I would prefer to I mean, and I'm not trying to end the interview, but you're gonna make me think about these issues because they're common in our culture. And I my fear of polygamy is that it comes out of a cult. It doesn't come out of a cult, and it is just part of them. And that's fine. And if the rights of children are protected, it's fine (Pacific, Female, 63).

I think that that is a stretch, but I agree with everything else he said. […] I don't know that we would claim him. Because it's Utah, I would ask him how he feels about his religion. Being a part of his

62 polygamy, okay, and how he feels about those of us who come from different religious traditions, claiming polyamory or gay or lesbian or everything else (South Atlantic, Gender queer, 45).

If this person who is a straight dude wants to identify with, well, he can identify with that, and maybe the people that he's wanting to identify with are on board with that, because they see mutual benefit. Or maybe they're like, you know, what, fuck off, you know, and, and thanks, I'll pass. […] (Mountain West, “male with soft edges,” 37).

Well I think it's a useful political device for all involved because I think the biggest barrier to having legal protection is having monogamous people realize that they're not the only people out there but I grew up among a lot of people in the LDS church and all of them who were in favor of polygamy it was always very much in the format of women being subservient and not having any choice in the shape of their lives and I thought man that is problematic for me, so that's a tough one (South Atlantic, Female, 46).

Consent was emphasized as a distinguishing marker of consensual non-monogamies. After all, it is in the name. As part of the interviews, I offered a definition of CNM in the introduction and then asked participants to provide their own definition or modifications to my definition. The definition I used was intentionally very broad and vague “as an umbrella term for participating in multiple encounters or relationships of a sexual, romantic, or other nature.” Most choose to modify my term and several people noticed that consent terminology was absent and should be included.

There were also several unexpected themes that emerged through this process. Those are of the existence of overlapping deviant behavior, deviant thinking, or social ostracism that people raised in the interviews. These included sex work, the adult film industry, homelessness, physical disability, and mental health. Borrowing from Coviello and queer theory, a further theme could be called “other worldmaking.”

Deviant Behavior Two people mentioned the criminal aspect of being on the fringes of normal: One because of sex work and the other because of serving in the military, “conduct unbecoming to an officer.” Without prompting over half of the participants mentioned involvement in power exchange, rope, BDSM or another form of kink in some way from practicing it as part of one or more relationships to making adult films to owning a kinky bed and breakfast. When asked if they saw themselves

63 first as members of the CNM community or the kinky community, most if not all claimed the former as more important.

Other Worldmaking One woman, a PhD student who studies ocean microbes and is in an open marriage with currently only one other partner, talked about her ideal future relationships in terms that could be seen as other worldmaking.

Ideally, we would all live a little commune together, co-raise each other's kids. And like, lots of alpacas (New England, cis woman, 29).

Later when asked about other worldmaking, she said the following:

So, I think part of the appeal of polyamory, polyamory is like to return to some form of intergenerational or like, communal living. Like right now, it's like, not in fashion to like, live with your parents. So, the new thing is now looking with multiple partners, for that kind of support […] (New England, cis woman, 29).

Another interviewee who runs a kinky bed and breakfast talked about her ideal future relationships in the following way: Oh, I mean, ideally, I would have multiple outbuildings for my assorted partners and their partners. And yeah, we all have a lovely central building for meals and communal activities. And someday I will make that happen. […] I've been very purposefully constructing my own reality outside of societal norms for a long time now. […] So, I've been able to sort of say, okay, society, I'll interact with you as much as I have to, but I've created this land that is, honestly, just for me. And, you know, while I'm very happy to take everybody else's opinions into consideration, I consider it more of a benevolent dictatorship than a democracy (Northeast, Female, 44).

Another participant in a relationship with a family who just moved to a different state is trying to determine what is next and also talked about their ideal future in communal terms that then tied back into larger social issues.

A commune. I always joked about this but I loved the idea of just like having like a Hacienda style, right, like shared kitchen and living space and then having all of us having our own like living areas. […] I really like living alone. But I also get really lonely because I'm an extrovert. And so, this last year has been very hard being an INFJ extrovert living alone. But yeah, I mean, like, I want to have a commune where it's like, we're not all like, romantically involved, necessarily, but we all

64 are contributing to something. And we're giving each other emotional, and intellectual and physical support.

I personally never wanted to have kids, but I love other people's kids, because I don't know, I'm just, I treat them like cats, and they love me and right, but like raising kids is really incredible. And like watching them grow, and like being part of like that development. And like, you know, it really makes you be like, how am I being intentional about this, right? So it's like, creating, like, instead of having these like, Oh, we have to do it alone in this nuclear family structure, you don't have to do it alone, it's a lot easier when you have a third or fourth adult around who can help out. Because that's how it that's how we're actually gonna be able to survive financially and in any way and the way that our society is currently going in like, right, the trajectory of capitalism is to force us to believe that we have to be an individual family units, but the reality is, is that we cannot survive that way unless you're making a lot of money. And I know that right, like, that's, it's silly to say it, but like, as I get older, I'm just like, that's what I want. Like, I don't want to have to be like that. I want to break free of American individualism. Because it is so isolating, and it is so unhealthy and you have much more fulfilling relationships when you have deep community. (Mountain West, Gender queer, 33).

Future Analysis and Expansions

There are other themes I am interested in exploring, including the role of science fiction in helping participants imagine breaks with monogamy, which came up in several interviews as important. In terms of the deviance, the role of criminality is intriguing, particularly for people who take a certain measure of pride and revelry in being on the fringes of society. I would also like to interview persons practicing polygamy in a variety of culture contexts. Furthermore, as Haupert et al called for in 2017, additional CNM research studies are needed that provide empirical data of random sampling in the general population, with an eye to include racial and ethnic minority lived experiences. Ultimately, these study findings, to me, points to further study of whether or not coexistence is possible without assimilation and conforming. Will we always have to belong to one group in opposition to another to establish our value and worth at all levels of belonging?

______

The last four years particularly has dug up the demons of the United States. And made us very clairvoyant how much of a place of liberty and justice that we have strived to be and how much we’ve failed at it at the same time. So, when you’re pushing legislation like this forward, it’s

65 another step in showing the world and claiming that national identity of being a place that’s equal for all. And actually, living to it and holding it in a very authentic way. I don’t even think it will shift our national identity. I think it will help us hold true to it.

Chris Smith, co-author of the “Right to Family Act, Personal Interview February 8, 2021

Chapter 6: Conclusion

Accepting the categorization of monogamy as the uninterrupted, unchallenged, and inevitable form of marriage and family blinds us to the ways that individuals inside family units, inside communities, have been incentivized, cajoled, and even threatened to conform to monogamy. Furthermore, the role of the state can be seen as actively engaged, regulatory, and violent in preserving monogamy as the only acceptable form of family. This comes through most clearly in the case of the early period for Mormon polygamy but is also present in the case of the gay and lesbian movement. Nation-state literature would seem to provide the answer of why monogamy has been preferred: creating an us vs. them dichotomy, but while this explanation may be necessary, it is not sufficient. Examining monogamy and non-monogamies as markers of national identity in the United States quickly leads us to ask why the state cares so deeply about the institution of marriage in the first place. Nation-states are imagined in shades of Western, whiteness, and hetero maleness with little room to express gender difference, to protest state violence, or to contest state sovereignty. Understanding the modern nation-state as the curator and controller of secularism, a revitalized modernity logic, allows us to explain the ways in which we have come to privilege patriarchal systems. These systems pull the private sexual and romantic lives of citizens in the public arena and then sort and split them between good and bad practice, between good and bad families. Where does this leave the individual? As we saw in Cott’s account of the history of marriage in the United States, the individual is unwittingly subject to a long and drawn out state preference for monogamous marriage. This state preference for monogamous marriage is reflected in the established proper state-to-citizen relationship, racial and gender social norm enforcement, and is finally chiefly concerned with “reproducing and composing the population” as a form of biopower. Because marriage is both a private and public matter, the individual relates to marriage and citizenship on multiple levels: communal, state, and national levels in a feedback loop that reinforces both relationships structures.

66

Early Periods

The early periods discussed in this thesis help us understand how marginalized groups, in reaction to or in anticipation of state censure shed deviance in order to assimilate. Monogamous marriage and family have historically been the sphere where individual lives reflected proper relationships at both the state and family level: both were gendered as masculine and hierarchical, of white men, creating families of future laborers, consumers and pursing capitalist interest and land acquisition. Any deviation from that equation, such as in the case of the early Mormons, resulted in public censor, violence, and legislation. The sin too of gay, lesbians, and other non-hetero-conforming persons was also that they abandoned their role of proper citizenship inside heterosexual families. Only by appealing to existing structures—asking to be included in the social institution of marriage and replicating mononormative productive citizenry and family formation—were they assimilated. This process of “disciplining the family” to be monogamous and heteronormative draws the private life of the citizen out into the public domain for the state to sanction or delegitimate. The early periods of both Mormons and gays and lesbian moment helps us understand how marginalized groups, in reaction to or even in anticipation of this process, chose to remake themselves as good belief and to shed bad belief, in particular non-monogamies.

The clearest ties to national identity and monogamy were captured in this thesis through the political opinions and writings of Francis Lieber in the 1800s and Bryan Fischer in 2010s. Though separated by a century, both were deeply concerned with preserving a white, male, hetero nation. One avenue of further inquiry is the relationship between anxiety levels around state preservation and a retreat to “traditional family” as the last bastion of hope for preserving national cohesion. The connection of family to state was at one point very strong and much more carefully guarded. As Nancy Cott suggests, on the eve of a civil war and in the aftermath of a worn torn country, the state became much more invested in the social institution of marriage as the symbolic union between the state and its citizens, a union that should never be broken. A century later, there was no similar threats to state disillusionment, but perceived threats remain and so also a dedication to monogamous marriage remains. If this is the case, then the question becomes whether or not non- monogamies have the potential to alter our understanding of family to nation and nation to citizen. As McClintock wonders at the end of “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family,” do

67 we need to find “alternative, radical iconography”195 to replace family as we imagine future national unity? What would that look like?

Present Day Periods

The present day case studies were set five years after same-sex marriage equality was won through Obergefell v Hodges. This victory, though a compromise and a temporary abandonment of non- conforming families and relationship structures, is now the foundation of disruptive logics appealed to by both polygamists and consensual non-monogamists. Ironically, conservatives like Chief Justice Roberts and Brian Fischer were right: legitimating same-sex relationships opened the institution of marriage up to further scrutiny. For my thesis the case studies are an exploration of whether or not such challenges are an augmentation and expansion of marriage or a real threat to the supremacy of heterosexual structures, including all of the social inequities that go along with those structures. There are on the surface-level 1,100+ rights, protections, and benefits at stake, but the matter goes deeper still to levels of respectability, worth, and who is valuable and cared for in our society.

Interviews with activists and people practicing consensual non-monogamies kept this research grounded in several ways. CNM, for activists like Chris Smith and others, is not just about relationship-structures but is tied to larger systemic, structural issues in ways that may not be readily apparent to the public or to government officials because of mononormative bias. Real social urgency is obscured by political and social discourse around marriage and family and only became apparent to me the more I talked with individuals practicing CNM about their lived experience.

There continue to be secular bifurcations between good and bad belief, good and bad practice, and defining belonging in contrast to a flat, unexamined other. Consequently, structure and systems go unchallenged. Secular splits seem to lead to further splits: as an oppressed group is absorbed into the secular whole, the remaining, unassimilated parts may stay separate as non-secular,

195 McClintock, “Family Feuds.”

68 unrespectable, and ruinous. Alternatively, they will in turn reconfigure and shed whatever is needed to be read as good belief and good practice. This latter process is what I believe is happening now within CNM communities who are appealing to secular virtues while shedding any association with polygamy as still a non-secular, ruinous wasteland of practice. These splits and continued debates of whether to assimilate or stay separate, who is deserving and who is not, has consequences. Assimilation is at its core, some level of acceptance of existing structures and logics, which are still very white, masculine, heteronormative. Furthermore, attention, as Foucault warned, is shifted to the individual and on fixing the individual’s relationships and good and practice. Instead change must come by keeping our attention fixed on the mechanisms of capitalism and economy. Far from making our nation-state exceptional, monogamy should be read as a way secular nation-state happen to have organized the world to fit capitalist systems that value neoliberal consumers, laborers, and capitalists. Consensual non-monogamies have the potential to push the United States towards true structural changes and challenge the boundaries we have established between who belongs, who is deserving of respect, and public services.

Future Directions

Through the work of this thesis, I have come to view consensual non-monogamies as an emerging social movement. What seems to have coalesced online is now stepping out as embodied citizens. They are pushing back against discrimination and outsider stigma; demanding access to affordable housing, healthcare, and other legal protections; and struggling internally to not be dominated by White, middle-class practitioners. Why in recent years has there been mobilization around legal recognition of non-monogamous households in the United States? This question is made more compelling by the decidedly negative and oppressive history towards polygamy in the US on the one hand and the general distaste for the institution of marriage in CNM and polyamory circles. To me this is fertile ground for understanding how claims on citizen rights through state-dominated social institutions, such as marriage, expose larger systemic problems.

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75 Appendix

Table 1. Similarities and Differences between Polygamy and CNM cases

Period Mormon Polygamy Same-Sex Movement/CNM Early Period 1850s – 1890s 1960s to 2010s

Social/Political Bad for women, bad for Bad for children, bad for traditional Discourse children, ruinous to marriage, ruinous to Christian nation whiteness/republic

Identity Markers Non-white, Asiatic, Sex-crazed, no boundaries, Unrepublican, violent unsustainable, no commitment, response okay conflated with polygamy (in which case all those identity markers apply)

State Response to Acts banning polygamy Defense of Marriage Act Monogamy Challenge

Shed non-monogamy 1890s 1970s and 1990s and assimilate

Outcome Statehood in 1896 Same-sex marriage recognized 2015

In-group Mormons without Gays and Lesbians without non- polygamy monogamy

Out-group Polygamists Polyamory, , swingers, open marriages

Period Mormon Polygamy Queer Movement/CNM Present Day 2020-2021 2020-2021

Legislation Decriminalization Multiple person domestic Spring 2020 partnerships Summer 2020 District of Columbia “Right to Family Act”

76 Relationship to Marriage Direct claim on marriage A threat to marriage and indirect/eventual possible claim on marriage Tradition Religious Secular Historic Origins Well established historical Still being told and researched origins Social/Political Cult, abusive to women Unsustainable, harmful for children, Discourse and children, immoral immoral

Table 2. CNM-related Organizations for Research Study Recruitment

Organization Website

APA CMN Taskforce www.div44cnm.org Polyamory Researchers Private Group

Poly Family Tree polyfamilytree.org/ listserv

Bay Area Open Minds bayareaopenminds.org

Black and Poly blackandpoly.org

CARAS (Community-Academic Consortium for www.carasresearch.org Research on Alternative Sexualities) Center for Positive Sexuality positivesexuality.org

Institute for Sexuality Education & Enlightenment instituteforsexuality.com (ISEE)

LGBT Bar Association lgbtbar.org Loving More www.lovingmorenonprofit.org

National Coalition for Sexual Freedom ncsfreedom.org

Polyamory Leadership Network polyamoryleadershipnetwork.org

Polyamory Society www.polyamorysociety.org Projects Advancing Sexual Diversity (PASD) www.projectsadvancingsexualdiversity.

org

Relationship Equality Foundation relationshipequalityfoundation.org

Multi-Partner Recognition Coalition hlslgbtq.org/mprc

Table 3. Descriptive Statistics

Region Gender Identity Sexual Orientation Age South Female (trans) Bisexual 21 New England Female (cis) Bisexual/pansexual 29 Pacific West Gender fluid (for now) Pansexual 31 Mountain West Gender queer Queer 33 Mountain West Male (with soft edges) Bisexual 37

77 Northeast Female (cis) Queer 40 Northeast Female Bisexual/pansexual 44 South Gender queer Lesbian 45 South Female Checks lesbian box but no good 46 descriptors Midwest Male (not super rigid) Bisexual/non mono sexual 47 Pacific West Male Heterosexual 49 Mountain West Male Heterosexual 52 Northeast Male Straight but have dabbled 53 West South Central Female Pansexual 53 Pacific West Female Queer/bisexual 63 Pacific West Male (cis) Bisexual, polyamorous, kinky 77 switch South Male heterosexual with homosexual 86 experience

Table 4. Gender Identification Verbatim

1. Cis woman 2. Cis woman 3. Female 4. Female 5. female she, her 6. Gender queer 7. I gender identify as genderqueer and I used a them their pronouns. I never really had language for my gender identity until I was in about 26/27. I always just felt…I felt very much out of my skin or like, and then the interesting lash back was trying really hard to be more feminine sometimes. And being really upset when people would call me sir, I'm like six foot three. So, and I have short hair. So, when I walk into a public bathroom, people oftentimes like sir, you're in the wrong room? And I'm like, No, I'm not. 8. I am a transwoman. I was born male, and I transitioned right before college, which was about three years ago. 9. Um, well, I guess I identify as male yet I don't know. I'm not super rigid about it. I am that's actually a really interesting question. Because I'm in the midst of kind of exploring that a little bit. I've mostly identified as cisgender for most of my life, but turn of events and changes have kind of leaned me towards playing with the idea of being nonbinary, like seeing kind of like how that's working out with me. I chopped my hair off in September. And when I did that, I looked at myself in the mirror and I'm like, I was nearly in tears. I was like, Oh my god, this is so real. Like, this is me that I'm looking at so like I felt so um, it felt so natural and it felt so like authentic. […] So, so well, we'll go with gender fluid for now.

78 10. Cis male 11. Male 12. Male, man, male 13. I am a guy […] that’s not going to change 14. as boring. I gender identify as the statistical problem in the world. I am a heterosexual male. 15. very much as female 16. Missing 2

Figure 1. Reddit Twitter Repost “imagine being monogamous, in This economy!”

Figure 2. Comparing Polygamy and Polyamory

79