“Communicate, communicate, communicate” – building ethical subjectivities within polyamory
Daniel Cardoso
Cardoso’s input was on the constitution of a polyamorous ethical subjectivity, and how does that subjectivity relate to other social discourses, from the analysis of the e-mails of the first mailing list on polyamory.
Daniel Cardoso may be contacted via or through his website.
Non/Monogamies
Meg Barker
Polyamory – intimate practice, identity or sexual orientation
Christian Klesse, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
Polyamory means different things to different people. While some consider polyamory to be nothing more than a convenient label for their current relationship constellations or a handy tool for communicating their willingness to enter more than one relationship at a time, others see it as an anchor for aspects of their core identities. This paper looks at identity narratives around polyamory.
How do polyamorous identities relate to other sexual identities? The paper rejects the common conflation of polyamory with bisexuality. But what is polyamory? Is it just one more category of sexual orientation? Do modes of polyamorous identification undermine hegemonic categorisation of sexual identities along the lines of sexual object choice?
Are there any accounts on poly desire which have the potential for ‘queering’ our current understandings of eroticism and sexuality? The term polyamory matches rather novel accounts of socio-sexual identification. Contemporary theories on sexual identities still have difficulties to accommodate them within their paradigms.
Christian may be contacted at
Queering non/monogamy: an anarchist approach
Jamie Heckert
