A Decolonial, Queer Praxis of Anti-Mononormativity in Therapeutic Practice
15 min read | Listen to the essay instead (footnotes and bibliography included)
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This essay was originally written for an undergrad course on Queer and Trans of Colour Theorizing. It is an academic essay with the intended audience of QTBIPOC, mental health practitioners, and folks who have been practicing polyamory without an anti-colonial lens. Please reference the footnotes for references and extra notes. For personal examples of how I aim to practice anti-mononormativity in my relationships, check out my Substack, Ji’s Musings, as I will be publishing two conversations with friends on queering friendship. As always, take what resonates and leave the rest.
As a therapist, I am skeptical of the pedestalization of therapy as a primary mode of healing. I worry about the overemphasis on a service that individualizes wellness and is implicated in neoliberal and capitalist structures of care. I worry about relegating emotional support needs to a professionalized individual, rather than committing to cultivating a more generous web of relationships that can help address our many emotional needs. In resistance to neoliberal tactics that divert the need for sociopolitical change to the mental health industrial complex, my goal as a therapist is to help client community members need/rely on me less. Unfortunately, due to the decentering of intimate platonic relationships and community care, it is quite common (among those who can afford therapy) for a therapist to be the main person on whom people rely for emotional support, potentially after a romantic partner. While therapy definitely has its benefits and can be incredibly valuable as a life-long support for many, I would prefer to see more decentralized care webs in which therapy is one of many sources of care.
In reflecting on what prevents us from decentering therapy and cultivating emotional intimacy in a variety of relationships, I’ve been pondering on how mononormativity, often manifesting as relationship hierarchy and compulsory monogamy,¹ intersects with capitalism to devalue community-oriented relationships and thus, care. I argue that unlearning compulsory monogamy and relational hierarchy can help us resist the growing commercialization of care and refocus more of our energy on cultivating cultures of care and radical love through community-oriented relating. Given the settler colonial, white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal and capitalist design of mononormativity in Canada and the US, resisting mononormativity is a political, liberatory practice.
This essay is organized into three parts. I will first outline how the state-sanctioned relationship structure of a monogamous, cis hetero nuclear family unit, with specificity to compulsory monogamy, is rooted in the settler colonial foundations of white nation-building and how it impacts care dynamics. I will then invite folks into resisting mononormativity through a decolonial, queer politic, from whatever relationship structures folks resonate, whether it’s through the forms of monogamy, non-monogamy, polyamory, and everything in between and beyond. Lastly, I will situate how anti-normative therapy can help facilitate practicing alternative ways of relating with one another to build communities and webs of care, which fosters a decentralized network of care.
Given that my embodied and situated knowledges shape my ideas, I share that I write this essay as a queer, Corean femme settler living on stolen Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Territories, in what is colonially known as Vancouver, Canada. This writing is informed by my experiences as a justice-oriented therapist ish and psych survivor who has benefited from years of therapy since my youth. I also write on this topic as someone who has been exploring anti-mononormative relating in the past couple of years, aiming to queer gender, sexuality, intimacy, and care in my every day and embodying a community-oriented polyamorous-ish framework of relating as liberatory practice. Much of this exploration has been and continues to be shaped by the knowledge and practices of QTBIPOC community members and thinkers, including Sick and Disabled and polyamorous QTBIPOC.
1. State-Sanctioned Monogamy Under Settler Colonialism
While we often categorize many relationships as personal, intimate relationships are a site of state regulation. Queer of Color critique illustrates how the state designs and enforces normative structures of relationships that are shaped by intersecting systems of power.² Black feminist scholar Cathy J. Cohen argues that “many of the roots of heteronormativity are in white supremacist ideologies which sought (and continue) to use the state and its regulation of sexuality, in particular through the institution of heterosexual marriage, to designate which individuals were truly ‘fit’ for full rights and privileges of citizenship”.³ The regulation of sexuality is required to produce the cis hetero nuclear family unit as the ideal relationship structure. In the perspective of a neoliberal state-economy, a hetero nuclear family with distinct gender roles keeps the capitalist machine running: men work in the “public” workforce and are able to do so due to the unpaid domestic labour of women. From the point of settler colonial countries such as Canada and the US, the institutionalization of heterosexual marriage is also ideal for creating a white settler futurity through the reproduction of those who are considered ideal citizens. Historically, racialized people in Canada and the US were obstructed from the legalization of marriage and were then rendered deviant. Black men and women in the slavery system were not allowed to marry, as it would disrupt property rights.⁴ In the 20th century, legal policies in both countries also prevented East and South Asian migrant workers from getting married, to prevent their long-term settlement in what was meant to be a white man’s nation.⁵
Expanding on race, state-sanctioned relationship structures are also shaped by settler colonialism in North America. White settler scholar Scott Lauria Morgensen describes settler sexuality as “a white national heteronormativity that regulates Indigenous sexuality and gender by supplanting them with the sexual modernity of settler subjects”.⁶ One of the key components of the settler colonial project of Canada and the US was the attempt to assimilate Indigenous peoples into this settler sexuality. Indigenous peoples were rendered sexually deviant by European colonizers for their queerness, gender variance, and kinship structures that did not fit into European notions of civilization such as the gender binary and heteronormative social roles. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes that in many Indigenous nations on Turtle Island prior to colonization, queerness “was so normal it didn’t have a name”.⁷ Because Indigeneity and what we call queerness in English can not be separated, the Indian Residential School System largely targeted Indigenous gender variance and sexualities by forcing Indigenous children into strict European gender roles and heteronormative dynamics.
While monogamous marriage can be described as the institutionalization of heteronormativity, it can also be helpful to analyze monogamy through the lens of settler colonialism. White settler scholar Mark Rifkin argues that the nation state enforced “a network of interlocking state-sanctioned policies and ideologies that positioned monogamous hetero couplehood and the privatized single-family household as official national ideals by the late nineteenth century”.⁸ Enforcing monogamous hetero couplehood individualized Indigenous peoples, and thus their collective land from their tribal formations. By destroying Indigenous kinship structures, these policies broke apart collective identities as well as land, into smaller, individualized units to which small plots of land were allotted per “head of household.” In this allotment process, much of the land of Indigenous nations was lost and their kinship structures were rendered illegitimate. Rifkin makes connections between individualism, monogamy, and Indigenous land dispossession, illustrating that “individualism is inseparable from the broader process of privatization, which is naturalized through the representation of monogamous marriage and the single-family dwelling as the self-evident basis for true intimacy and human reproduction”.⁹ The individualization process of monogamous couplehood also separates the couple from the rest of the community and other intimate relationships. Simpson argues that relationship hierarchy is promoted with hetero, monogamous couplehood as the primary and utmost important relationship “to the exclusion of all other intimate partnerships”.¹⁰ While relationships within the nuclear family dynamic are acknowledged and encouraged by the state, other intimate relationships or relationship structures outside of this norm are rendered less valuable and legitimate.
2. Resisting Mononormativity through a Decolonial, Queer Politic
Compulsory monogamy, relationship hierarchy, and couple-centricity all interact in shaping normative relationship structures and dynamics, which also show up in care dynamics. In much of the dominant West, there is a societal expectation that our one romantic partner fulfills most of our emotional needs.¹¹ If they aren’t able, purchasing care and intimacy, such as therapy, is encouraged as the secondary option. The prioritization of a professionalized, inaccessible service over cultivating communities and cultures of care maintains individualism and feeds into neoliberal tactics. Mononormativity normalizes the narrowing of sources of intimacy, emotional support, and care, by devaluing the intimate and healing possibilities of platonic and non-platonic relationships outside of the one romantic partner and professionalized services. For example, folks may allow themselves to experience deep emotional vulnerability with a romantic partner and/or a therapist but feel hesitant about being witnessed in that level of vulnerability in platonic, non-professionalized relationships. Mononormativity can also show up as being more willing to have conversations around intentional relationship-building in romantic partnerships or therapeutic relationships and less so in friendships.
Given that mononormativity promotes individualism, isolation, and scarcity around relationships, I encourage us to explore outside of it. Resisting mononormativity, like cisheteronormativity, as “a system of regulation and normalization”¹² in our intimate relationships can offer many possibilities in how we relate to one another, beyond the identity categories and binaries of being cis/trans or gay/straight or monogamous/non-monogamous. In situating these state-sanctioned norms in the ongoing settler colonial project that intersects with white supremacy and capitalism, resisting mononormativity can be a part of a decolonial queer politic. Kwakwaka’wakw scholar Sarah Hunt and white settler scholar Cindy Holmes emphasize the importance of a decolonial queer politic in the “intimate geographies of the home, the family, and between friends and lovers… [that] is not only anti-normative, but actively engages with anti-colonial, critical race and Indigenous theories and geopolitical issues such as imperialism, colonialism, globalization, migration, neoliberalism, and nationalism”.¹³ Their description of an anti-normative praxis aligns with and adds further complexity to Queer of Colour critique by situating intersecting systems of power in North America in the settler colonial context and connecting it to imperialisms that oppress Indigenous peoples around the world. Queer of Colour praxis and decolonial queer praxis are not about fixed identities of being queer/straight, racialized/white, Indigenous/non-Indigenous, monogamous/non-monogamous but are centered around shared values and practices in relation to power. This means that everyone and anyone can practice a Queer of Colour or decolonial queer praxis in resisting mononormativity.
For folks who practice non-monogamy and/or polyamory,¹⁴ it is also crucial to interrogate whether we are complicit in perpetuating other systems of power. Dr. Kim Tallbear, a member of Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate and descendent of the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma who ran the currently archived blog The Critical Polyamorist, critiques “increasingly mainstream forms of polyamory that are whiter, more heteronormative, couple-centric, and unquestioning of state-sanctioned marriage” which also maintain relationship hierarchy.¹⁵ For those who identify as polyamorous or are practicing polyamory, Tallbear calls for critical polyamory/non-monogamy that is community-minded and systems-oriented. In the recognition of mononormativity as a system that maintains a state-sanctioned norm engrained in settler colonial structures, Tallbear encourages “critical non-monogamous relating as a move against settler-colonial structures, and not simply a personal lifestyle choice or an identity grounded in biology”.¹⁶ In this orientation, critical non-monogamous relating is a political, embodied practice that also requires the refusal of couple-centricity and relationship hierarchy.
Folks who deeply resonate with having one romantic partner can also be anti-mononormative while identifying as monogamous or engaging in monogamous relationships. Refusing compulsory monogamy, relationship hierarchy, and couple-centricity are all possible in whatever relationship orientation, just as resisting cisheteronormativity is possible and liberatory for all cis and/or hetero folks. This may look like blurring the binary of platonic and non-platonic by cultivating moments of romance and/or eroticism in platonic relationships.¹⁷ It could look like valuing platonic relationships and intimacies just as much as romantic ones or celebrating intimate platonic partnerships. The unspoken but normalized expectations of care and intimacy in monogamous romantic relationships can be questioned and intentionally applied in platonic and non-familial relationships with consent.
This type of “community-oriented polyamory” is not limited to polyamory partners rooted in platonic/non-platonic binaries and is more aligned with cultivating kinship structures. Simpson describes the expansiveness of queer Indigeneity beyond sexual orientation, as “a web of supportive, reciprocal, generative relationships that we often do not have names for in English and that exist outside of the hierarchy and the imagination of heteropatriarchy— [resisting the colonial] hierarchy that places the relationship of cisgendered, married, monogamous men and women at the top, and de-emphasizes or erases all other relationships”.¹⁸ To refuse the de-emphasis and erasure of these other intimate relationships is to intentionally practice community-oriented relating through cultivating multiple types of intimate relationships that queer normative relationship structures.
The terms polyamory and non-monogamy are limited due to mainstream and white co-optations, but “we can work toward and within Indigenous and other anti-colonial, anti-capitalist frameworks and languages toward terminologies and practices for relating that might be unbound from settler-conceived properties and property”.¹⁹ Whatever we want to call it, whether it’s critical polyamory, kinship-building, community-oriented relating, or something else, we can expand beyond normative categories of relating and decentralize sources of love, care, and intimacy to a web of radical relationships in comparison to one romantic partner as the primary source.
3. Decentralizing Care as Anti-Mononormative Practice in Therapy
Although mainstream therapy in North America is implicated in white, individualistic, and cis-hetero-mono-normative notions of wellness and social relations, therapy that is committed to a politics of refusal for collective liberation can be a space to practice alternative, more liberatory ways of relating. In the recognition that the mental health industrial complex grows in response to neoliberal tactics to individualize and commercialize care, we can dream of a world where the mental health industry is minimally needed because traumas and mental health diagnoses stemming from systemic oppressions are minimized and caring for one another is normalized through cultures and communities of care. This requires mental health practitioners to be committed to addressing systemic oppressions within and beyond therapeutic sessions through transformative justice, political organizing, solidarity efforts, and mutual aid projects. It also means that we help client community members (and ourselves) unlearn compulsory monogamy and decentralize sources of care such that the therapist is not always the first or second main person they go to for emotional support.
So much of what I know and practice around community care stems from Disability Justice (DJ). Disability Justice highlights the embodied knowledges and brilliance of Sick and Disabled, Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (SDQTBIPOC), especially disabled and racialized femmes, in regard to emotional and care skills. When the state and non-disabled people abandon disabled folks, represented by the lack of accessible, appropriate, and consensual care, disabled peoples have survived by caring for one another and “not abandon(ing) each other” through immense hardship and obstacles.²⁰ Disabled, brown, non-binary femme writer and movement worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha describes participating in networks of care with fellow disabled community members as a disabled superpower: to bring one another food, clean for a friend, or offer immense emotional support. Disabled and currently non-disabled folks can learn so much from Disability Justice about what it means to build care webs with community members when there are many needs and the state and institutions can not be relied upon.
Inspired by Disability Justice and my own lived experiences of debilitating mental illness, one exercise that I share with clients is to make one list of needs, a second list of actions or resources that would help meet these needs, and a third list of trusted community members. Rather than making assumptions about who can/should fulfill which needs, I encourage folks to present the varied list of helpful actions/resources to each community member and ask what they may have the capacity, desire, and willingness to help address. Disability Justice teaches us that no one’s needs are “too much” and that people “contribute from what [their] particular body[mind] can do”²¹ at that particular moment, depending on their capacities and situations, thus forming a type of permaculture. Piepzna-Samarasinha argues that “The more systems are not a monoculture, the more sustainable they will be. The more there are a lot of different kinds of folks giving and receiving different kinds of care, the more there’s room for boundaries, ebbs and flows, people tapping out and people moving up. Care doesn’t have to be one way. It can become an ongoing responsive ecosystem.”²² This is significant in contrast to the expectations of care that may be placed on a monogamous romantic partner and the outsourcing of care to institutions before asking for support from friends, extended family, and other community members. While friends can not be a therapist and help us process trauma, folks can learn to receive and offer emotional support, care, and forms of healing through our friendships and other intimate relationships. A significant portion of needs that are addressed in therapy, such as empathy, connection, and creativity can be cultivated in many different types of intimate relationships through consent-oriented, reciprocal, and boundaried care skills. In resistance to individualism that prioritizes and builds the mental health industry, a significant part of my work as a therapist is to help clients cultivate communities of care in their lives, outside of romantic relationships and therapy.
Cultivating community care also requires a critical analysis of the gendered expectations that relegate the tasks of emotional labour and care work to femmes. Communities are definitely not utopias and systems of harm can be perpetuated. Our communities and cultures of care must be shaped by a “fair-trade emotional labour economy”²³ that represents the distribution of care work amongst genders in resistance to cisheteronormative dynamics of care. This requires cultivating emotional vulnerability and skills among masculine people, such that masculine folks aren’t primarily relying on femmes and women for emotional support. Much of this community-building, anti-normative work can be facilitated in therapy by questioning how state-sanctioned norms, shaped by interlocking systems of oppression, influence our automatic assumptions around care and intimacy, and then brainstorming and practicing alternative and creative ways of navigating care in our relationships.
Given that so much of therapeutic work is about how we relate to one another, there are infinite possibilities in how therapeutic spaces can facilitate more liberatory forms of relating and caring. I invite fellow mental health practitioners to explore therapeutic practice that decenters therapy by situating therapy as one of many potential sources of care in our client community members’ lives. While therapy may be incredibly valuable, growing industries of care will not liberate us. Instead, professionalized and commercialized offerings can be one branch in a diverse ecosystem of care that values interconnectedness and collective wellness. By facilitating the unlearning of compulsory monogamy, relationship hierarchy, and couple-centricity, we can help client community members value and cultivate multiple intimate platonic/non-platonic relationships in which their emotional, social, care, and intimacy needs can be met. My hope is that we shift from an end-goal vision that centers industries of care, to cultivating more expansive cultures and communities of care, perhaps alongside deeply political professionalized services. By recognizing how mainstream forms of therapy uphold individualism, mononormativity, and couple-centricity, mental health practitioners can explore the ways in which therapeutic practice can help experiment with anti-normative, queer and decolonial forms of relating that are community- and kinship-minded. Like any other political praxis, therapists are also invited to do the work of unlearning compulsory monogamy and practicing decentralized frameworks of care and intimacy for ourselves as embodied practice. May these alternative, decentralized, expansive, and more sustainable frameworks of intimacy and care liberate us into more loving futures.
Notes
To be honest, I’m still quite new in getting the specifics of terms and relationships between ideas around mononormativity. Nayeli of @antimononormative on Instagram (who I learn so so much from!) differentiates mononormativity and compulsory monogamy by describing the former as an oppressive social institution and the latter as a social mandate that is a symptom of the institution. Read more at instagram.com/p/CTQyGbHHo8j.
Queer of Color critique is an intersectional framework, rooted in Black feminism, that complexifies queer theory through the analysis of varying power dynamics such as race, class, and nationality. See Cathy Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Queens” Roderick Ferguson’s “Queer of Color Critique”, José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, and Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures.
Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3, 4 (1996): 453.
Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens”, 456.
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
Scott Lauria Morgensen, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities,” GLQ 16, 1-2 (2010): 106. The white settler scholars in this essay were found through the citations in Dr. Kim Tallbear’s works. I name this explicitly as it’s important to keep in mind the politics of citation, especially in regard to white settler scholars writing about Indigenous peoples.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Indigenous Queer Normativity,” in As We Have Always Done (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 129.
Mark Rifkin, “Romancing Kinship: A Queer Reading of Indian Education and Zitkala-Ŝa's American Indian Stories,” GLQ 12, 1 (2006): 28.
Rifkin, “Romancing Kinship,” 32.
Simpson, “Indigenous Queer Normativity,” 127.
The intensity of this societal expectation is of course shaped by interlocking systems of oppression and thus, one’s social location/positionality.
Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens”, 447.
Sarah Hunt and Cindy Holmes, “Everyday Decolonization: Living a Decolonizing Queer Politics,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 19, 2 (2015): 156.
Non-monogamy is an umbrella category, in which polyamory is one type of non-monogamy. I learn so much from Alicia Bunyan-Sampson of @PolyamorousBlackGirl. Check out her descriptions of non-monogamy and polyamory on Instagram.
Kim Tallbear, “Identity is a Poor Substitute for Relating,” In Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, ed. Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and Steve Larkin (Routledge, 2021), 469-470. Tallbear currently writes on her Substack, Unsettle.
Tallbear, “Identity is a Poor Substitute for Relating,” 474.
This eroticism includes but also goes beyond the sexual, as a “life force,” “creative energy empowered,” and deep, intuitive knowing as Audre Lorde describes in her essay, The Uses of the Erotic. You can also listen to Lorde read her essay out loud on YouTube, and adrienne maree brown’s footnotes for the essay in Pleasure Activism are also worth reading, based on the exploration of all genders and bodies being able to tap into erotic power. I also know a gap that I want to address is in learning more about the erotic and desire from sex workers! A friend recently recommended a new book, Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex.
Simpson, “Indigenous Queer Normativity,” 134.
Tallbear, “Identity is a Poor Substitute for Relating,” 476.
Alice Wong, host, “Labor, Care Work, and Disabled Queer Femmes,” Disability Visibility Project (podcast), 2017, October 22.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “A Modest Proposal for a Fair Trade Emotional Labor Economy,” Bitch Media (2017, July 13).
Piepzna-Samarasinha, “A Modest Proposal for a Fair Trade Emotional Labor Economy”.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, “A Modest Proposal for a Fair Trade Emotional Labor Economy”.
Bibliography
Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ. 3, 4. (1996): 437-465.
Hunt, Sarah and Holmes, Cindy. “Everyday Decolonization: Living a Decolonizing Queer Politics.” Journal of Lesbian Studies. 19, 2. (2015): 154-172.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. “A Modest Proposal for a Fair Trade Emotional Labor Economy.” Bitch Media. (2017, July 13). https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/modest-proposal-fair-trade-emotional-labor-economy/centered-disabled-femme-color-working
Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities.” GLQ. 16, 1-2. (2010): 105-131.
Rifkin, Mark. “Romancing Kinship: A Queer Reading of Indian Education and Zitkala-Ŝa's American Indian Stories.” GLQ. 12, 1. (2006): 27-59.
Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Shah, Nayan. Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. “Indigenous Queer Normativity.” In As We Have Always Done, 119-124. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Tallbear, Kim. “Identity is a Poor Substitute for Relating.” In Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, edited by Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and Steve Larkin, 467-478. Routledge, 2021.
Wong, Alice, host, “Labor, Care Work, and Disabled Queer Femmes.” Disability Visibility Project (podcast). 2017, October 22. https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2017/10/22/ep-6-labor-care-work-and-disabled-queer-femmes/