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.
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