A stunning plurality: Unravelling hetero- and mononormativities through HBO’s Big Love

Abstract

Sexism, heteronormativity and mononormativity are constitutively entangled, but to what extent does undoing one undo the others? Through a reading of HBO's Big Love, a television series about a polygamous family that is conservative in every way except their plural marriage, this article argues that there are ways in which intimacy might be politically transgressive even as it reinforces gender and sexual norms. Expanding on the definition of 'mononormativity' through analogy to Berlant and Warner's (1998) 'heteronormativity' it is argued that in order to do justice to the complexity of intimate politics we must attend to relational norms and their transgression.

Hegemonic Heteronormativity: Toward a New Era of Queer Family Theory

“…Our conceptualization of the new sexuality binary reflects the hegemony of mononormativity, or the “broad constellation of practices, institutions and tacit organizing principles that privilege monogamy” (Kean, , p. 700) as right and inevitable. Schippers () validated this sentiment: “Polyamory and polyqueer desires are sublimated as not as much rivalry [to monogamy], but instead infidelity in need of a (monogamous) resolution… .…”

“One among many”? Relational panopticism and negotiating non-monogamies

“…In December of 2006, a Sexualities special issue on polyamory (volume 9, issue 5, edited by Haritaworn, Lin, and Klesse) reinvigorated academic research on non-monogamy(ies) and polyamory. Since then, a dramatic increase in research has begun to examine topics such as gender (Barker and Langdridge, 2010a; Fahs, 2014; Schippers, 2016); family (Dryden, 2015; Pallotta-Chiarolli, 2010; Sheff, 2011, 2014, 2015); law and public policies (Aviram and Leachman, 2015; Goldfeder and Sheff, 2013; Tweedy, 2011); sexual orientation (Séguin et al., 2016); capitalism (Klesse, 2014); sexually transmitted infections (Conley et al., 2012; Conley et al., 2015); deviance (Hutzler et al., 2016; Klesse, 2011); citizenship and the public sphere (Rambukkana, 2015); subjectivity, identity, and belonging (KL Benson, 2016; Frank and DeLameter, 2010; Kean, 2015; Portwood-Stacer, 2010; Robinson, 2013; Wilkinson, 2010; Willey, 2016); diversity (Rubin et al., 2014); as well as a timely edited volume covering myriad topics (Barker and Langdridge, 2010b). Much of this research focuses on the normative construction of sexuality—a central concern for the work of French social theorist, Michel Foucault.…”

Re-orientation: Marriage, heteronormativity and heterodox paths

“…So long as heterosexuality prevails as a majority orientation it will, almost by definition, repel efforts to 'make [it] strange, to frustrate, to counteract, to delegitimize, to camp [it] up' (Sullivan, 2003: vi). Heterosexual practices allied with queer sexualities tend to be non-mainstream -they may be polyamorous (Anapol, 2010;Kean, 2015) or BDSM-based (Better and Simula, 2015), or mobilise gender-queer desires and identities (Heasley, 2005), for example. Research into these practices and identities is clearly worthwhile.…”