Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities (Intersections Book 13)

Claiming that heterosexual culture dictates monogamous couples, Mimi Schippers argues that people won't reach real sexual freedom until monogamy is ignored or turned away. For example, identifying himself as neither straight or gay, a man might be simultaneously in love with a woman and a man. If both of them agree with that, there is nothing wrong about it. On this point author's thesis is that monogamy is a block that hinders people from experiencing real satisfaction and it is no better than any other sexual relationship.Overall, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in polyamorous relationships and sexualities.

Deeply provocative and theoretically groundbreaking, Beyond Monogamy is a must read for anyone interested in gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, and cultural criticism. With sophisticated and sharp analyses, Schippers draws from cultural sources and her own experiences as a polyqueer subject to explore the queer, feminist, and anti-racist potential of polyqueer relationships and sexualities. I recently taught this book to my graduate seminar in Sociology of Gender & Sexuality and my students were electrified by Schippers' writing. They found the book to be at once theoretically dense and challenging but also profoundly engaging and accessible. I would absolutely use this text again in a graduate course.I want to emphasize that this is NOT a how-to-book for those interested in exploring polyamory, rather, it is a sociological text that asks us to consider how mononormativity and compulsory monogamy produce social and sexual subjectivities; ultimately reinforcing gendered, raced, and classed inequalities. Beautifully written and methodologically nuanced, Schippers provokes readers to consider the queer possibilities of a world beyond monogamy.

What wifie said:This is possibly one of the worst books I've ever read....It's fairly dense and academic, which makes it inaccessible to any lay person who might benefit from learning about how they might view their own relationships. However, that's not my biggest problem. I'm familiar with academia, so it wasn't an obstacle. It's the actual content....In addition, she takes the liberty of "explaining" pivotal works of Black and bisexual literature, using page after page to summarize and quote them with only brief notations of her interpretation in between....This book [is] wholly unsuitable for anyone who wants to understand plural love and sex more fully. This book is not a starting point for a person exploring outside monogamy... Give it a pass and find a book with broader scope.

Well-researched book on polyamory, written by an expert in the field who actually his experienced what she writes about. This is not a self-help book or a how-to book, this is a serious compendium of information about polyamory with some interesting real-life vignettes.

Mimi Schippers calls out sociology -- and rightly so -- for rarely examining one of the most fundamental institutions of American life: monogamy. She makes a convincing case that it's a pillar of not just gender inequality, but race and class inequality, too. A must read!

I found this book very useful in understanding Polyamory and the potential for Polyamory to create healthier relationship dynamics and stronger communities.

I dont remember buying this book

This is possibly one of the worst books I've ever read. I had high hopes, given the title and the description, but it failed to deliver on every front.It's fairly dense and academic, which makes it inaccessible to any lay person who might benefit from learning about how they might view their own relationships. However, that's not my biggest problem. I'm familiar with academia, so it wasn't an obstacle. It's the actual content.This book is one very long erasure of bisexuality. For someone claiming the "queer" label (which I do not believe she should as a straight person), she certainly has no interest in actual queer people or what our relationships look like. She's incredibly judgmental about the wide variety of poly relationships which differ from her own; in particular, she is harshly critical of what she calls "MWW" relationships (a man with two female partners). She appears to believe these are based in "fake" bisexuality performed solely for the sake of the male partner, ignoring bisexual women who are, in fact, the center of the triad. In her world, the only women with genuine sexual agency are those with two male partners.In addition, she takes the liberty of "explaining" pivotal works of Black and bisexual literature, using page after page to summarize and quote them with only brief notations of her interpretation in between. The problem is that she refuses to refer to the men as bisexual, only as "polyqueer," and her interpretation is not new--it was already in existence, claimed by the Black men for whom these books and stories are written.Her citation of Jane Ward is highly problematic, given that Ward is a controversial figure at best among bisexual men. Ward is one of a number of references, most of which are outdated and also ignore or minimize bisexuality as a stable identity. Even her incorrect use of "mononormativity" is erasive. The word she thinks she coined was already in use by bisexual people to refer to the view of orientation toward one gender being preferable (i.e., monosexuality) over orientation toward multiple genders (i.e., bisexuality).The erasure of women loving women, people of genders other than male/female, ignorance about the poly community, and the reduction of "polyqueer" sexuality to her particular relationship preference makes this book wholly unsuitable for anyone who wants to understand plural love and sex more fully. This book is not a starting point for a person exploring outside monogamy. It's one person's fairly narrow view. Give it a pass and find a book with broader scope and which doesn't speak over the voices of queer people.**I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review**