The Love of the Future: Openness/Totality

  • Artemy Magun
  • Oxana Timofeeva
  • Yoel Regev
  • Galina Rymbu
  • Yelena Kostyleva

Abstract

Emerging in 1990s America among the educated white middle class, polyamory is not so much a trend or a movement, not so much a practice or theory, as a new ethic of human relationships that has long found no place within the framework of the nuclear family and cannot be described within its terminology. That which is commonly referred to as the crisis of the traditional family is, in essence, the emergence of new forms of the same, but until the appearance of the term “polyamory” these forms had no language to describe themselves except in negative terms with regard to traditional social mores. In its doctrine, polyamory has brought together the most recent pop- ular achievements of European humanitarian thought, including gender theory, feminism, and queer theory. In principle, it represents a kind of collection and complex of explanations of why it is that entering into in- timate relations with multiple people can be just as acceptable from the point of view of the wider society as doing so with a single partner, and of how this can be done in an ethical manner without adversely affecting, oppressing, or causing suffering to anyone (utopian components are, of course, just as present in polyamory as the sadomasochistic).

References

Anapol, Deborah M. (1997). Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits: Secrets of Sustainable Intimate Relationships. San Rafael, CA: Intinet Resource Center.

Easton, Dossie, and Janet W. Hardy (2009). The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures, 2nd ed. Berkley, CA: Celestial Arts.

Engels, Friedrich (1993). The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/origin_family.pdf.

Sheff, Elisabeth (2014). The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple­Partner Relationships and Families. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction Library. Polyamory Bibliography. Last modified December 2008.

www.kinseyinstitute.org/library/Pdf/ Polyamory%20Bibliography.pdf.
Published
2016-07-20
How to Cite
Magun, A., Timofeeva, O., Regev, Y., Rymbu, G., & Kostyleva, Y. (2016). The Love of the Future: Openness/Totality. Stasis, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-2016-4-1-182-220