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On “Baring One’s Breasts”: Representations of and Interactions with Non-Monogamy in Pop Culture
Liz Borden
While representations of non-monogamy have grown in the last decade, non-monogamous lives and experiences remain extremely underrepresented in popular culture, political discourse, and academic research. Additionally, present representation is characterized by systems of privilege that are constructed by heteronormativity (and to a related extent, homonormativity and polynormativity), settler colonialism, and racism. Through an autoethnographic narrative and a critical reading of Wanderlust (2018), Newness (2017), and Black Mirror “Striking Vipers” (2019), I address some of these gaps by considering various overlapping structures of hetero-/mono-/polynormativity, race and racialization, LGBTQI2S+ in/visibility, and the machinations of neoliberal capitalism and colonial sexuality embedded in the stories we tell (and are told) about non-monogamies in Western popular culture.
Keywords: Non-Monogamy, Popular Culture, Heteronormativity, Autoethnography, Queer Theory