[hammertimeprojects] READING GROUP! This Friday @ noon!

From: "Hammer Time!" <hammertimeprojects@xxxxxxxxx>
To: hammertimeprojects@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2010 10:23:53 -0600

YAY! Reading Group article!

REMEMBER:

*We meet on FRIDAY's at NOON @ the Bean Cycle.*

see below.
This is a good one. Only takes like 10-30 minutes to read. It's from the
summer 2010 addition of Slingshot.

also here is the link if you prefer.
http://slingshot.tao.ca/displaybi.php?0103001

resisting the monocore,
Krista

--
Krista Martinez
vive.paz.y.solidaridad@xxxxxxxxx
970.596.4179 cell

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless
means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ”
— Paulo Freire

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Beyond Emotional Exclusivity - Resist the Monogcore!
By Kermit

Figuring out how to be in relationship with another human being is
complicated, it is a process of continued engagement. Any structure that
encourages us to check out of that engagement – to deny emotional truths or
the extent to which possibilities for connecting to one another exist –
impoverishes our lives. Material conditions and channels of power that force
us to focus on our survival within a system are certainly examples of this
kind of structure, but even when our needs for material safety and
well-being are more or less met, the ways that we are expected to engage
with people is often circumscribed by established stories about what is
socially and emotionally acceptable. Monogamy is the centerpiece to a
network of stories that we are told about the way that intimate human
relationships are supposed to function.

When I say that I am against monogamy, I am not talking about being against
people who are choosing to have sex with one partner at a time, or even
people who are choosing to settle down with one person for a lifetime.
Relationships are complicated and no one should feel bad about trying to
engage in whatever kind of emotionally consensual relationship meets their
needs. What I am against is the hegemonic system that views this form of
relationship (two people being each other's exclusive sexual partners and
principal support system) as the best way to be in the world, as the only
way that can bring someone a full and happy life, and the way that all other
people are ideally expected to conduct their sexual relationships and build
family structures. Several of my friends use the word monogcore to describe
any social experience or cultural form that reinforces the dominance of this
system.

For some people, beginning to consider non-monogamous models grows out of
being in monogamous relationships that do not work for them either sexually
or emotionally. For me, being critical of hegemonic monogamy is informed
most by not having been in sexual relationships for the bulk of my adult
life. When I was younger, accepting the ubiquitous narrative about happiness
and human relationships often meant painting myself into a corner where I
could never be fully present or alive without telling myself that I was
building to a point where I would be part of a monogamous coupling. In this
mental trap, the thought that I might never find a sexual partner to be
monogamous with was enough to send me spiraling into despair; to turn myself
into a person I did not want to be, into someone who bored me.

At some point, I made a decision to reject the idea that my life was empty
if it did not involve significant monogamous sexual relationships because I
did not want to become a person who was shaped so wholly by the presence or
absence of that element. As a consequence, the whole way that I thought
about the possibilities of friendship and the level of intimacy that I was
interested in exploring in my friendships shifted. Coming out was not only a
process of acknowledging that I like to have sex with men, but also a
process of letting go of the idea that I had to find a monogamous partner in
order to be happy and build relationships with people that I could call
family.

• • •

Monogamy serves as a major theme in stories about how adults seek intimacy
with other, unrelated adults and what the rules and limits of that intimacy
are. Non-familial relationships are fit into a framework and hierarchy in
which sexually monogamous partnership occupies the apex. Other relationships
are necessarily subordinated to this one relationship and are only allowed
to grow in specific ways and to certain limits. Many of our most powerful
words are affected. The way that we commonly talk about family, honor,
fidelity, happiness, betrayal, intimacy, integrity, love and commitment are
all tied up with this idea.

The story that monogamy tells about itself is one that puts an enormous
amount of pressure on a single axis. It declares that each person should
find one other person and that those two people should make each other
responsible for meeting the bulk of their emotional and all of their sexual
needs, to consider each other as the only avenue to build family and have a
complete life. Living inside of this story can force you to become engaged
in emotional drama and participate in conversations and dilemmas that are
not your own; not necessarily connected to the stories you want to be
telling, or that the people you are engaged with want to be telling about
themselves. There are of course many people who do not end up in monogamous
situations, but their lives are often either invisible or seen as inferior,
as obviously less ideal than those bound by 'normal' sexual practices and
'traditional' families. One of the reasons I find it difficult to have much
enthusiasm for gay marriage is because of the way that the rhetoric around
it relies so heavily on the power of this story.

For people involved in a monogamous relationship that does not do all of the
things it has promised, staying faithful necessitates the scrupulous
building of a grand lie. A lie about how the meaning of a relationship is
obvious, self-evident and solid, a lie that makes it impossible to talk
about the ways that the significance of their relationship to each other
might be evolving, echoing as it does through the different geographies of
their individual lives and experiences. One of the more heartbreaking
aspects of monogamy as it is generally practiced is the way that its
emotional exclusivity is so serial. The expectation that the person you are
sleeping with is the one that you share the most emotional intimacy with
leads to the idea that you should have very little emotional contact with
former lovers and means that many people find themselves cut off from those
who they have been closest to in life.

In a patriarchal and hetero-normative context, monogamy is a tool that
severely limits the way that women are allowed to be in relationships with
men (and men with women) who are not their lovers or family members. The
fact that one's reputation hinges on their adherence to these rules means
that all sexual energy existing outside the context of monogamous coupledom
or potentially monogamous coupledom is viewed as threatening. People often
feel compelled, either explicitly or implicitly, to police social
interactions under the presumption of defending monogamy. This dynamic has
frustrated my desire to have relationships with people that are intimate and
life enlarging even when there is no explicitly sexual motive. I have often
felt pressure to alter my behavior, by either curbing my friendliness or
making myself more visibly queer, in order to have interactions with women
that are not viewed as inappropriate by someone in the room.

• • •

I resent the way in which stories about intimacy that hinge on monogamy
restrict our language, limiting the words we use to describe our
relationships to one another. I want words to describe what it feels like to
have a platonic romance – to become best friends with someone in a matter of
weeks. Words to describe my relationship to a person who I meet only once,
but who changes my life forever or for the person who I see at a distance
everyday for years and who knows things about me that no one else does; for
trysts that I have with authors who are long dead and for rituals that
commit me to people that I have no intention of marrying, or even
necessarily sleeping with.

Finding ways to build our own definitions of these things as we go along
which more accurately reflect our experiences with and desires for each
other is certainly more complicated than accepting the definitions we have
been given, but it expands the ways in which we are able to talk about
living with each other in the world. Certainly there are constraints in
every relationship and these constraints can be vital to the emotional
health and well being of the people involved. But, wherever possible, they
should be constraints that have been chosen by those involved according to
their own particular emotional truth, rather than obligations wholly
unconnected to the people making them.

There are, of course, people who are already doing this; people who are
opting for polyamory because it makes the most sense for them, having sex
with multiple partners in a variety of ways. People who are choosing to be
exclusive sexual partners with each other for their own reasons, and are not
threatened when other people make different choices. There are people who
build families with people who are not responsible for meeting their sexual
needs and people who have sex with people who are not responsible for
meeting their needs for family. There are those who, for various reasons,
choose not to have sexual relationships at all and people who are doing
several (or all) of these things at different points in their lives.

Imagine what the world would be like if the terms of our relationships with
each other were negotiated in every possible instance by the people involved
and not by some abstract ideal about what people should be to one another.
What grand possibilities would present themselves? How would the
difficulties involved speak more directly to the problems we want to be
tackling? I believe that our relationships are more meaningful when we are
openly engaged in the process of negotiating them; when we open ourselves to
the range of ways that it is possible to connect.

--
Build, fix, and get what you like.
hammertimeprojects.org

[hammertimeprojects] READING GROUP! This Friday @ noon!

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