I’m not included in most legislation these days, but me and my people, we’re the ones they’d want to legislate against.
Kate Bornstein
Abstract
This paper aims to understand the extent to which monogamy operates not only as a constitutive element of marriage-like institutions but also as a meta-judicial source of frequently overlooked forms of state violence. Drawing on the case of the Spanish law, it explores the privilege-driven logic that regulates the access to a complex set of economic benefits and legal protections, including immigration related rights, in order to show the extent to which monogamy is part of the grounding structure of an exclusionary constitutional citizenship. In addition, drawing on semi-structured interviews held with Spanish poly activists and biographical interviews held with LGBTQ non-monogamous people, it offers a view of non-monogamous communities as paramount spaces of resistance when it comes to re-imagining the relationship between the state and the intimate realm, beyond the mere inclusion of poly and other non-monogamous intimate relationships in certain pieces of legislation.
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Notes
Constitución Española, Título I, Capítulo II, Art. 32.
Constitución Española, Título I, Capítulo III, Art. 39.
A difference that marks an advantage over other countries that, like Spain, are marked by the weight of deeply rooted catholic traditions, such as Italy, whose constitution defines “family” as a “natural society based on marriage” (Constitution of the Italian Republic, Tit. II, Art. 29).
Ley 3/2007, Art. 7.
The national tax system recognizes yet another form of family unit for tax purposes, made up of one parent and his/her children (Agencia Tributaria 2014: p. 7).
There are some differences between autonomous communities in this regard. In Valencia, for example, inheritance rights are almost the same between marriages and de facto unions (for a summary of these differences, see Écija 2013).
Ley 35/2006, Disp. Adic. 23.
Real Decreto 2066/2008, Art. 1.2.
Ley 39/1999, Cap. I, Art. 1.
Ley 39/1999, Cap. I, Art. 2.2.
Ley 39/2006, Cap. II, Art. 14.
Ley 41/2002.
Penal Code, Tít. XII, Art. 217.
That is to say, as someone who finds intelligence the most sexually attractive feature (regardless of gender).
Anonymized BNIM interview with Jackie.
See Against Equality. Queer Revolution, not Mere Inclusion for a recent collection of queer criticism to LGBT activism’s prioritization of the struggle for gay and lesbian marriages (Conrad 2014).
Anonymized BNIM interview with Alex.
Anonymized BNIM interview with Alex.
Leaving polygamous marriage laws aside, Brazil is possibly the only country were some timid advances have been made for the legal recognition of non-monogamous relationships. Since 2012, when the first “poliaffective union” was regularized by a Tupa’s registry office employee as a “stable relationship” a reduced number of relationships have followed the example (Liberato and Gomes 2014: p. 228).
As the Loving More Magazine survey (2012) showed with a sample of 4062 participants. When comparing these results with Hadar Aviram’s previous study (2008), Hadar Aviram and Gwendolyn Leachman make the interesting remark that a certain “politicization of multiparty marriage” has arisen in the US as a result of “the LGBT movement’s same-sex marriage campaign” (Aviram and Leachman 2015: p. 308).
A collective named after The Ethical Slut, dealing with non-monogamies but also other communities: “Golfxs promotes a positive approach to non-conventional sex –polyamory, swinging, BDSM, kink, LGBT and queer—through publications, activities and services”. See http://www.golfxsconprincipios.com/en.
Miguel Vagalume is the translator to Spanish of well-known books on polyamory and non-monogamous relationships, such as The Ethical Slut. A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships and Other Adventures (Easton and Hardy 2009).
Expert interview with Miguel Vagalume.
For an overview of her work on both fronts, visit http://perderelnorte.com/.
Expert interview with Brigitte Vasallo.
Expert interview with Cuca.
Which was active throughout the year 2010. That was the first time that a poly group participated in the LGBTQ pride, both in the “official” March and the queer, “alternative” one which was perceived by the group as a “better protest space” (Polyamoria 2010).
Expert interview with Aphra Ben.
Whose manifest can be found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KVD9lJe-BBl0vqC0-4dc9UdvpxQ7l9B-ZZk3OA51AxY/edit. During the final revision of this article, yet another non-monogamous block participated in Madrid’s queer, alternative pride March (El País 2016).
Both by Miguel Vagalume, who is also the organizer of Golfxs con Principios.
STS 4764/2009.
We are referring to the ‘formal public order,’ which is concept defined “jurisprudentially and doctrinally and makes reference to the general order of society” (Belloso 1988: p. 234).
Legal Scholar María Lourdes Labaca Zabala, for example, considers monogamy to be “an integral element of the public order” (Zabala 2009).
For a comprehensive discussion of the literature on “intimate” and “sexual citizenship” from the point of view of non-monogamies (beyond their relation with the law as such), see especially The Spectre of Promiscuity (Klesse 2007: pp. 142–151).
A similar point made in a blog article that was shared in Golfxs con Principios web was one of the initial inspirations for this part of the essay: “The problem is not (has never been) the management of the assets, but the position of the spouse in a myriad of laws” (Vimes 2013).
As Melita J. Noël has persuasively argued, and however we concretize them, this kind of flexibilizations would need to go hand by hand with a consistent attack on the privilege-driven logic of the ‘full package or nothing’ conception of marriage and would be therefore linked with the project of what she calls a “progressive polyamory”. One that would be not only able to deal with its inner diversity—establishing a solidaristic ethos between different non-monogamous communities—but also to develop strong coalitional bonds with other forms of relational diversity beyond the monogamous/non-monogamous divide (Noël 2006: p. 615).
Anonimized BNIM interview with Daniel.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement “INTIMATE - Citizenship, Care and Choice: The Micropolitics of Intimacy in Southern Europe” [338452], under the coordination of Ana Cristina Santos.
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Pérez Navarro, P. Beyond Inclusion: Non-monogamies and the Borders of Citizenship. Sexuality & Culture 21, 441–458 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-016-9398-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-016-9398-2