This article offers a reading of historical discourses around non/monogamy with
attention to their ‘racial resonances’. These 19th-century
discourses helped to naturalize monogamy and to establish it as desirable, moral and
feminist (and alternatives as undesirable, immoral and un-feminist). The
article’s aim is to suggest that, like those surrounding other aspects of
sexuality, discourses around non/monogamy cannot be adequately contextualized-or
challenged-without attention to the ways in which they are constituted through race.
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