601 - Polyamory as a Political Movement with Dr. Kim TallBear

Welcome back, Dr. Kim Tallbear!

We last had Dr. Kim Tallbear on the show eight years ago and we’re so excited to welcome her back to talk about polyamory as a political movement. Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate citizen) is Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She is also a regular media commentator on topics including Indigenous peoples, science, and technology; Indigenous sexualities; and the politics of non-monogamy. You can also follow her Substack newsletter, Unsettle: Indigenous affairs, cultural politics & (de)colonization.

Kim addresses these topics and questions throughout the episode:

• Why is it important to be critical of a community or practice you’re a part of?

• How did you come to study sexuality and intimacy, and how does that connect to your earlier work on science, identity, genetics, and Indigenous peoples?

• Over the time that you have been writing about, studying and teaching these subjects, what have you seen change in the non-monogamous community, for better and for worse?

• How do you see polyamory? In what ways is how we relate to one another always political?

• From a listener: I am new to non-monogamy (just since April) and I've been interested in decolonial and other revolutionary politics for many years before that. I find myself a bit skeptical when people call enm a radical political practice. For instance, when someone adopts a relationship style that takes up significantly more of their personal time, we might expect them to be left with less capacity for all the activities that go into decolonial work (i.e. reading theory, staying informed, participating in political actions, community support work, etc.) Is there evidence to suggest that people in ENM relationships are more or less politically active than the general population?

• Can you explain "settler sexuality" for listeners who haven't encountered the term? How does it shape the way most of us learn to love?

• How are the ways in which a person should recognize that even if they are non-monogamous, they may still be deeply “settler" in their assumptions about love?

• From a listener: I am always curious to learn about how much of my own experience is due to my conditioning - I come from a settler, Christian purity movement background and these attitudes that I grew up with have actually affected my heart and body in a way that I would consider abusive (not being able to listen to myself, feeling intense shame, believing that sexuality is all harmful all the time, basically). I am healing, my paradigm is shifting - and I am really eager and encouraged to hear more about how decolonization can help us heal out of unhealthy worldviews - and understand and connect in more loving, authentic, and radically healthy ways.

• You've written about "caretaking relations." How does that idea differ from how most of us think about relationships and partnerships?

• Why is it important that we recognize and are critical of the ways in which most humans are speciesist and hierarchical in their thinking about which life matters and which does not?

• What are your thoughts on the legal recognitions polyamory and non-traditional relationships are receiving in various cities across the country? What would a politically engaged non-monogamy look like in its organizing, its alliances, and its priorities?

• Which movements (queer, Indigenous, feminist, housing, etc.) should non-monogamous people be more in conversation with?

• From a listener: I have definitely seen how the skills and belief systems I’ve learned in polyamory have crept into the ways I interact with the world outside of my romantic/sexual life, particularly at work and in the way I show up with my colleagues and employees. It has started to feel political for me in that way - practicing and encouraging this kind of strong communication, supporting and encouraging others to hold healthy boundaries, trying to foster a culture where productivity or perfection doesn’t constitute worth, and so much more. But it’s of course much harder to embody these values that are beyond romance and sex when others in the “real world” hold very different values and belief systems. It’s hard enough to unlearn certain things and consciously practice new ones in the confines of my partnerships - how do you manage showing up as my same authentic self with these same skills in spaces outside of polyamory or relationships? Without even going into the topic of being openly out or not, I struggle to know what belief systems and skills I have will be viewed as too radical in a place like work, and which ones could really benefit our team and organization. Practicing polyamory has absolutely shaped how I interact with the world as a whole - and as a lifestyle, it can be lonely and draining.

• What are you reading, watching, or in conversation with right now that's shaping your thinking and teaching?

• If a listener takes away one shift in thinking from this conversation, what would you want it to be?

To find more about Kim and her work, follow her on Blue Sky and check out her Substack!

Transcript

If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Kim: My whole project, no matter what topic I'm taking on, whether it's geneticists and scientists and colonialism or sexuality and colonialism, everything to me is about disrupting this idea that there are these hard categories around the objects of nature and sexuality. And I want us to think more about how we relate in the here and the now. If we're attuned to that and saying, what I do here affects this part of the web over here, I think we need to stop hoping for some transcendent future utopia. What we do in the here and now, that's what I think is really important. Harm reduction, alleviating suffering in the here and the now, sustaining each other, whether that's sustenance through food or intimacy in intellectual work, sustaining each other I think is really important. And we all get sustenance in different ways.

Jase: Welcome to the Multiamory podcast. I'm Jase.

Emily: I'm Emily.

Dedeker: And I'm Dedeker.

Emily: We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past.

Dedeker: Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you, and we're here to help.

Theme Song: Form myself to fit.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're discussing non-monogamy as a political movement with Dr. Kim TallBear. Kim TallBear, Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate citizen, is professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She is also a regular media commentator on topics including Indigenous peoples, science, and technology; Indigenous sexualities; and the politics of non-monogamy. You can follow her Substack newsletter, Unsettle: Indigenous Affairs, Cultural Politics, and Decolonization, and we'll have links to all of that in the show notes for you to go check out. Also, if you're interested in learning more about our fundamental communication tools we reference on this show all the time, check out our book Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships, which covers our most used communication tools for all types of relationships. You can find links to buy it at multiamory.com/book or wherever you like to get your books. Kim, thank you so much for joining us today.

Kim: Thank you. It's good to be back.

Jase: It's been 8 years. Hard to believe.

Emily: You were last on the show in July of 2018, which feels like a lifetime ago. And though it was a much simpler time back then, it was a very different time. That was episode 181, and we talked a lot about settler sexuality on that episode. You've described yourself as a critical polyamorist, and you wrote a blog with that title for many years. Why is it important to be critical of a community or a practice that you're a part of? And also, just generally, what's changed in your life since we last spoke to you?

Kim: A lot's changed.

Emily: Yeah.

Kim: So why be critical? I think in my PhD, one of my dissertation advisors was a feminist theorist, feminist science studies scholar, and she always said, and a lot of other feminist scholars say, that one should be invested in the things that one critiques. So you don't critique just for critique's sake, but you critique towards change and betterment of something. Because I was an Indigenous science studies scholar before I was a critical polyamorist, I learned to critique technologies and scientific practices in a way that I could be invested in them getting better. Any community that you're a part of, I think you want to think about how to do the things that you're doing in ways that are—I don't want to say more inclusive necessarily, because I have critiques of inclusivity—but that are more accountable to history and to the needs that people might have and the different limitations they might have. So the critical polyamorist blog, when I started it, it was really early on in my life experiment with polyamory. Because I'm an academic and because I work all the time, I don't have hobbies, I had to turn it into a research project if I was going to do it in a really mindful way. You don't want to take open non-monogamy on in a way that's not mindful. It's a lot of work to do it well. You can talk about critiques of that as well, but it's a paradigm shift for most of us. It takes deep study and consideration and thought. Part of what I brought to my study and my own life experiment was a familiarity with critical social theory. I am an Indigenous studies scholar. It was very quickly clear to me as I was circulating in what I would call normative, or more normal—is that too academic a word, normative?

Emily: No, that's fine.

Kim: We talk about heteronormativity. So people know what that is. In normative polyamory communities, I noticed a lot of things. I noticed how they weren't exclusively white, but they were pretty white. They weren't exclusively middle class, but they were pretty middle class. In my age group, I started out in 2013, so how old was I then? Maybe 45. A lot of people who were in long-term heterosexual marriages and were opening up their marriages. That's coming from a very particular place. Why were they opening their marriages? A lot of them were trying to save their marriage and save their financial stability. There was a very middle-class kind of propertied enterprise that they were engaged in. This was not super critical of colonialism or the settler state. That's what I do in my work. That's why I'm the critical polyamorist, or I was the critical polyamorist.

Jase: You've changed your focus some in your writing now. We talked about your Substack, Unsettle: Indigenous Affairs, Cultural Politics, and Decolonization. It sounds like to me from the title that one's less focused on the polyamory non-monogamy side of things and more back to your initial area of study that's been your professional focus for most of your life.

Kim: Right. Back in 2021 when I wrote my last post on The Critical Polyamorist, and it's still up. I'm still paying for the URL, but I said I'm going to start writing over at Unsettle now because I'm going to write about this topic in addition to all the other topics under an umbrella called Unsettle, which is about unsettling settler colonialism. Critical non-monogamy does unsettle settler colonialism. So I just stuck it under a broader umbrella.

Jase: Okay, so you're still writing about some of the polyamory stuff within that.

Kim: A little bit. I just gave a talk in Edmonton last week where I used to live before I moved back to the United States last year. I'm trying to find a way to talk about being post-non-monogamous, but I don't like that word. Andrea Zanin has a book out on—

Emily: Yes.

Jase: Yeah.

Emily: I've had them on the show.

Kim: Oh, great. I love that book. It's so helpful. I kind of don't want to have a non-monogamy versus monogamy. I'm really into disrupting the binaries of things, and I've brought what I consider core relational principles from my polyamory practice into—now I'm in a relationship that's only with one person, a romantic and sexual relationship, and it was important to them to be monogamous. But I still have these foundational principles that inform my polyamory that are really informing my approach—solo polyamory in particular—that inform my relationship to this relationship. I can't imagine being another way, ever going back to the territorial ownership-y kind of monogamy. I can't imagine that.

Jase: Once you do a lot of the unlearning and relearning required for non-monogamy, it can feel like that. It's hard to go back even if your practice might look similar to monogamy. It doesn't feel like it. I can relate to being a little hesitant to the term post-non-monogamy. The main thing I don't like about that, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, is that saying post-non-monogamy implies the thing that I think a lot of people criticize polyamory or non-monogamy for, of like, oh, that's a phase, that's a thing you do while you're young, or you do it to save your relationship, and then you either get divorced or you figure it out, and then you stop. This idea that it's a thing you go through and get past.

Kim: Yeah. I would say my quote-unquote monogamous relationship is very non-traditional. It's—

Emily: In what ways?

Kim: Well, my partner is enrolled in a Southern California tribe. He's not leaving his tribal homelands. He goes between LA and rural San Diego County. It was very important to me to move home to Minnesota, to Dakota homelands, so we are like 1,700 miles apart. We don't see each other every weekend.

Jase: Right.

Kim: But he understands why I need to have a foot at home in Dakota homelands, and I understand why he will never leave Southern California. That's just how it is. I think most people can't understand that. I talk about in the talk I gave, I understand that his tribal homelands make the first claim to him and mine make the first claim to me. Our human connection does not supersede that. So I'm beginning to write about multiple relations in place and the way that I go back and forth between where he is and where I am. I've had to learn to be comfortable with that. It has some of the same challenges as going between human relationships.

Jase: That is an interesting idea of those preexisting relationships or people who will say, "My primary relationship is to my child, and so any relationship I have is going to be somehow secondary to that," or at least not going to supersede that. It's interesting to extend that beyond just those person-to-person relationships.

Emily: I want to get a little bit into why you're here today, and that's to talk about non-monogamy in more of a political sense, which I think is a hard concept for some people to wrap their heads around. I've even talked to my partner and said, we're going to have an expert on to talk about this subject. And he was like, how is non-monogamy political? Which is to some people very surprising that you would ever think that it's not political. But to many people, they view it as more of a lifestyle, or it is a way in which to better themselves and to live authentically, and it's a label that makes sense. How do you see polyamory, and in what ways can we use it to relate to the world at large and one another more politically?

Kim: I'd be interested in how your partner defines political.

Emily: View it as such.

Jase: I think that's part of the question. What does that even mean? Fair.

Emily: Fair. Yeah.

Kim: For me, there is nothing humans do that isn't political. Politics are so inherent to the way that we relate to each other as individuals, the way we relate an individual to the state, the way we relate among collectives. As I've written and spoken pretty extensively about, the relationship choices that we think it's possible to have, the ones that are sanctioned, that are approved of, that are there in the scripts, in all the songs and the movies and the stories, there's political roots at the source of all of that. Why are we so fixated on monogamous marriage, state-sanctioned marriage? There's very political reasons for that. Certain marriage practices were imposed on all of the people that came to be U.S. citizens and Canadian citizens. Not every culture across time and place has done sex the same, has done relationships the same, has done love the same, would even define something as love. I was talking about this to my students today. I said, I'm actually against the word love quite often because we use it and throw that word around like we know what it means. One of my students who studies the Ojibwe language and is a teacher, they said—this was so fascinating, I didn't know because I don't speak Ojibwe—they said actually one of the words for love that gets translated as love in Ojibwe kind of means stingy.

Jase: Interesting. Like to sort of covet something for yourself?

Kim: Yeah. It's territorial.

Jase: Interesting.

Kim: Yes.

Emily: Fascinating.

Kim: It is fascinating.

Jase: That is a nuance.

Kim: All these languages around the world will have different words for things that we might really lazily translate into something in English with no idea of what the deeper philosophical meaning is and the deeper values that inform it. So there's politics in all of that, in every single word in the English language. If you look at the etymology of the word in the dictionary, there's a political history to that word. There's nothing we can do that doesn't have those kinds of histories and power dynamics and hierarchies and enforced choices over other possibilities that are inherent in the way that we do things. We have a script that we're supposed to aspire to. You know what happens when you don't aspire to the script. It is hard to live against the script. You've probably talked about this on your podcast. It's a privilege in many ways to be able to live a life like this where you can live against the monogamy script. Not everybody can do that.

Emily: Certainly.

Jase: I think that actually gets to another question related to thinking about the way that you do your relationships as being political, where I think that for a lot of people, the resistance comes from feeling like, I'm doing so much work to break out of this norm myself, and now you're telling me I have to do all this political stuff? I have a listener question that's related to this that I think will be a good starting point for talking about it. So the listener says, I am new to non-monogamy and I've been interested in decolonial and other revolutionary politics for many years before that. I find myself a bit skeptical when people call ethical non-monogamy a radical political practice. For instance, when someone adopts a relationship style that takes up significantly more of their personal time, we might expect them to be left with less capacity for all the activities that go into decolonial work. For example, reading theory, staying informed, participating in political actions, community support work, etc. Is there evidence to suggest that people in ethically non-monogamous relationships are more or less politically active than the general population? I might extend that to be a question I've often heard is that, but do I have to? I don't have energy for that, to be political all the time. Am I doing it wrong then if I'm not?

Kim: I don't know if there's evidence. If somebody's written a new book I don't know about, I'd like to know about it. My general sense of it, having circulated through non-monogamous communities in a couple of cities and two different countries, is no, they're not more politically radical. I would say—

Jase: Or politically active is what they said here, actively participating.

Kim: Yeah.

Jase: No,

Kim: Not necessarily. I don't think so. Maybe a little bit more open-minded. But again, I date in my age group. I'm not interested in way younger people. Most people aren't. So I've been dating 40 and 50-year-olds and people in their 60s. I don't have a perspective on younger generations. I don't know what their demographics are like who are engaging in non-monogamy. In my generation and in my class group, you have a lot of people trying to hang on to their house or two houses and two cars and pay off their children's school debt. They're financially fairly comfortable. This is one reason not to get divorced.

Jase: Sure. Because that's going to make it all complicated again and cost a bunch of money.

Kim: Your standard of living goes way down with divorce quite often. I never say to people, you have to go do non-monogamy in a super political way. I understand it does take a lot of time to do it well. It's really important to pay attention to learning your new communication skills. This is a steep learning curve. It's unlearning jealousy, unlearning being territorial over people. I get it. It's really hard. I think back to some of the really inappropriate things I did in moments of fear and frustration and sadness when I was new to open non-monogamy. So I would never say you have to do that. For me, I had to make it into something politically critical, or I don't think I could have sustained it as a practice. That was just really important to me.

Emily: Has it also been important to the people that you have dated over the years as well? Is that almost a prerequisite for dating you?

Kim: That's a good question. No.

Emily: Okay.

Kim: I'm attracted to pretty normie men. What does that say about me? I think it's because I grew up in rural South Dakota. Why are they attracted to me? I don't understand. I'm usually the most politically critical one.

Emily: Interesting.

Kim: Yeah.

Jase: I feel like all of this is something that we've talked about more in the sense of empathy fatigue, feeling like I've really got to be helping my community and helping people, but that can just really burn you out and leave you with not enough left. It is something that's really interesting in the various communities that I'm part of. There's the polyamory communities, but there's also more queer communities, and then there's also just more politically minded communities. Seeing how for some people it's like, my identity in this space is a political thing, this is the thing I care about, this is what I want to talk about, focus my energy on. Then for other people, it's like, I don't have much left after this, and so I feel guilt or shame that I'm not doing more of that, but I don't feel like I can be the person who's out there trying to make change in these other ways or changing policy. It's such a range of how people show up, but I do feel like there can be this sense of guilt if you're not.

Kim: I have to say, the people that I've had relationships with don't have too much guilt about that.

Jase: Well, that's kind of nice for them in a way. Maybe this is a more younger and chronically online thing because I do think there's a lot of pressure within online non-monogamy spaces.

Kim: I think for younger people they may feel like they've got a longer runway ahead of them and they want to make change because they've got a lot of life to live. Whereas people in my age, and this is something really interesting about my transition to not actively doing non-monogamy right now. I'm postmenopausal now. I wasn't when I talked to you all 8 years ago. There's a lot that changes. You're looking at the end of your life and you're reexamining your decisions. You're being very careful about what am I going to do with the last 20, 25 years of my life if I'm lucky, or maybe 30 max. That's really different than the calculations I was making even 10 to 15 years ago when I felt like I had a long stretch in front of me.

Jase: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Emily: Yeah.

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Emily: Back in July of 2018, we spoke to you about settler sexuality. For those of you out there who maybe didn't tune in way back then or have not listened to this episode, can you explain exactly what that is? And then how does it shape the way that most of us learn how to interact with the people that we love.

Kim: This term actually, I cite a white queer theorist named Scott Morgensen who teaches at Queen's University in Ontario. Scott's really well known and he engages with a lot of Indigenous scholarship. He defines it as the heteropatriarchal and sexual modernity exemplary of white settler civilization. He also writes about homonormativity. There's another talk where I have some slides of political couples. In this one slide, I have a picture of the Clintons with Chelsea, and I have a picture of the Trudeaus before Justin Trudeau and his wife split and their two children. I have a picture of the Obamas and their two children and the Pences and the Bushes. I don't have Trump because that would just—

Jase: He's an outlier.

Kim: It's another kind of settler sexuality that you could even be more critical of. So these political couples of all races. Oh, and I also use Buttigieg. Is that how you say his name?

Emily: Pete Buttigieg. Yeah.

Kim: And his husband, Chasten. There's that Time magazine cover of these two guys in their really nice button-downs and khakis in front of a house with a white picket fence. That's settler sexuality. You've got to be married, monogamous, respectable. We're never going to elect a president who doesn't—

Emily: Who's non-monogamous.

Kim: And who doesn't have this form of family. Probably not a single person either. Or somebody whose relationship is out of the scope of the media. The house, the 2.3 children, the monogamy, this kind of state-sanctioned marriage commitment. This is why gay people wanted marriage equality, because they know that we have so many rights tied to settler marriage. It became a very important way for them to not have suffered all kinds of material discrimination.

Jase: Something that we had a guest on years ago was talking about how when the fight for marriage equality was going on, he saw this big shift within his community of gay pride attending, political demonstration people, from it being very queer and trans and non-monogamous and all this stuff, to suddenly, we're getting closer to trying to fight for marriage. All that was gone, and it became that white picket fence. It became much more, we're just like you, and that was a point of tension within the community of, oh wait, suddenly we're changing how we look to try to get this thing. I get both sides of that because at the same time, if they didn't, no one would accept it. Kind of like you're saying, if you want to be president, you've got to look and act a certain way, even if you want to change that.

Kim: Whereas I'd love to see a queer—oh, and also Angela Willey, who wrote a book on non-monogamy, I read it and assigned it. Angie Willey's a feminist science studies scholar. She said her definition of—she is queer, and she says, but to be queer is to be against the state.

Jase: I've heard that definition before too.

Kim: A lot of radical queers were not happy with where things were going.

Jase: I think it's also a tricky thing where if you're queer and that's your definition of it, if you try to fight for change to make the way that you and your peers do relationships more acceptable, you then have to keep moving to stay queer. If that became legal and sanctioned to do what you're doing, now you're not queer anymore, if that's your definition of it. I have seen some of that, even just socially, of as something I'm doing becomes more accepted, people who really feel like being queer is important because mine is not what the state says I should do, or what even my micro society says is okay, that then you can't be queer if you do fit a definition that is acceptable. There's a lot of identity politics that show up in that.

Emily: A lot of what you just talked about there feels a little bit more inherently heteronormative, or if it's not a heterosexual relationship, it's still a monogamous relationship. My question is, what are the ways in which people should recognize that they still may have a settler mentality and be settler in their assumptions about love even if they are practicing non-monogamy?

Kim: I think one of the things that I've been saying in the last few years is I wasn't doing polyamory too long before I realized it was another form of settler sexuality. I think maybe it's akin to the marriage equality type thing, assuming that non-monogamy is really about resisting some sort of vague notion of Christianity quite often. I started this in Texas, so there was a lot of resistance and people breaking away from Christian upbringings. That was a very particular place.

Emily: Sure.

Kim: A lot of the people I dated in my age group had grown up in the church. The church is really heavy in Texas. Even in a place like Austin, everybody has this background in their childhood. Sure, that's a form of resistance. But taking for granted the relationship escalator that's about finances and commitment, I think there was still that kind of thing happening as well. This is one of the reasons that I ended up gravitating towards solo polyamory, which was really being very critical of state-sanctioned marriage and the hierarchies that could happen in opening a marriage. That primary and secondary language, solo polyamorists really reject that. I found that very distasteful. The kind of unicorn hunting that happens, that's got some patriarchy woven into it and marriage privilege woven into it, often ageism and classism, if anybody knows what a typical unicorn is and a typical unicorn hunting couple. There's all those kinds of typical gender, race, class hierarchies that still infuse what I would call normative polyamory practice. But again, this is in my age group. I'm not sure what the younger people were doing. Maybe they are just inherently more critical because they're that way in their monogamous relationships. I don't really know.

Jase: I feel like just from my experience of my age group, which is somewhere in the middle of what I call young and what you're talking about for your community, that it just varies so much. We can get stuck in a bubble of who we interact with online or what the community is like in our particular city. I feel like that's honestly something that's quite refreshing anytime I go to a new city or a new country and connect with more of the non-monogamy community there to just see, oh, there are different ways people do this. There are different things that are normative. Maybe a person in this group is considered more radical within their group, but then back in a group in Seattle, that would be the normal standard that you feel like you need to live up to in terms of how radical you show up. It's really interesting. I actually find it quite helpful to get that perspective.

Kim: I think the geographic differences—I moved from Austin to Edmonton, Alberta, which they call the Texas of Canada.

Emily: Oh wow.

Kim: Both oil culture places, very politically conservative outside of Austin and Edmonton, which were the capital cities.

Emily: Um,

Kim: I am interested, with younger people, say Millennials and Gen Zers, I'm a Gen Xer. It's a scarier economic world.

Emily: Sure.

Kim: Maybe they simply can't aspire to the things my generation aspired to, which was the American dream.

Jase: That's at least the narrative, is that that's not a thing people can aspire to. What happens to the American dream if it feels unattainable to most people?

Emily: And what's going to continue happening with whatever is occurring in the political landscape and then also with the rise of AI, what is that going to bring to the ways in which we relate to one another into our relationships.

Jase: Do you feel like the positive side of it, to go to what you were talking about with the settler sexuality and these more normative ways of doing things, is I do feel like I see this especially within Gen Z, this idea of because this ideal that our grandparents did is just not an option, it does inspire a little more, 'Well, what else is there? How else could we do things?'

Kim: Yeah.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: We'll see where that goes, and maybe there's new norms that show up, but I do at least think it's interesting to see that it forces creativity. Like that saying, 'Necessity is the mother of invention.' You have to come up with something new.

Kim: This is why when I offer social commentary, I try to be humble about it because I teach undergraduates. I just taught an undergraduate class today in their first years, 18, 19. I have no idea what their world is like.

Emily: Wow.

Kim: I can't give them career advice. I can't give them advice about anything. They're not living in the same world. I don't want to be one of those people that acts like I know what is possible for them because I don't.

Emily: Has that changed in terms of the undergraduates and the graduate students that you've seen over the time that you've been teaching, just where their heads are at in terms of everything that's happened within the last 10, 15, 20 years and how a lot of young people have had a rough time of it?

Kim: Yeah. I've got a 24-year-old daughter, she's a Gen Zer, although she's got old Gen X boomer parents.

Jase: Right,

Emily: There you go.

Kim: What I see in my students is, well, first of all, I assign about a third of the homework that I assigned 12, 13 years ago. They simply cannot read long stuff. You know how much they're turning their learning process over to AI. You can't learn to think if you're not writing, if you're not struggling with the words yourself and trying to distill a thought and put it on paper. That is how you learn to think. I don't know what they're going through. I'm not demonizing them or saying they're bad or they're lazy. This is the world that they're in.

Emily: In.

Kim: I assume they're coping as best they can, but I definitely feel I'm farther and farther away where I feel I can talk to them and reach them because they can't even read a 10-page article half the time. It's not that they're not smart enough. There's some kind of disconnect there between the page and their ability to focus on it. I'm sure that's got to do with screens and social media.

Emily: For sure.

Jase: I feel like I could go on a whole tangent about that.

Kim: But what are the implications for relationships?

Emily: Exactly. I did want to give us an opportunity to look at another listener question.

Kim: Okay.

Emily: We had a listener who wanted to know: I am always curious to learn about how much of my own experience is due to my conditioning. I come from a settler, Christian purity movement background, and these attitudes that I grew up with have actually affected my heart and body in a way that I would consider abusive. Not being able to listen to myself, feeling intense shame, believing that sexuality is all harmful all the time, basically. I am healing, my paradigm is shifting, and I am really eager and encouraged to hear more about how decolonization can help us heal out of unhealthy worldviews and understand and connect in more loving, authentic, and radically healthy ways.

Kim: I can talk about the concepts, alternative concepts, how those alternative ideas get translated into healing and new practices. That's probably the work of a therapist or people that work in that area. But one of the things that I focus on in my teaching is to stop fetishizing sex as a particularly special form of touch. All humans need touch and intimacy. Not all humans need or want sex as a form of touch or intimacy. We talk about this as polyamorous. I have learned so much from asexual polyamorists.

Emily: Yeah.

Kim: Just so much about being in good relation, being attentive to one's partner, the way that they'll talk about intimacy and connection. We do push back against monogamists thinking that polyamory is all about sex. I think saying, hey, sex is one great way of relating for many of us. For some of us, it's not been so great because it's been a weapon of violence or non-consensual. But if we can disaggregate sex back into one form of touch and intimacy and recognizing sometimes it's great, sometimes it's not necessary, maybe it loses its shine, but it also loses the negative fetishes that grow up around it.

Emily: And sex in relationships where things change and people move into other areas of their lives and don't necessarily want it as much, I feel like it can also be very weaponized against people in relationships as well, and that there can be a lot of conflict around sex. So I appreciate you saying that, just because I think that many of us go through periods of time in our lives where sex is more or less interesting to us, and some of us just simply don't want it in our relationships. That doesn't mean that the relationship still can't be meaningful.

Jase: Could we take just a moment to talk about the word fetish? Because I feel like it's used in a lot of different contexts. So could you give us—when you're talking about fetishizing sex in this way—

Kim: I was using it in a way that's informed by Marxist theory.

Jase: Okay.

Kim: I didn't mean a BDSM fetish. I'm very vanilla, so I don't have all the lingo for that. Meaning when Marx talked about commodity fetishism, the commodity fetishized relations. I think what Marx said was to really look at all the relations that go into making a commodity. So I think that about fetishizing sex. To me, if you pull sex apart, it's a set of really interesting relations. Sometimes those relations are good and consensual and intimate and loving, and sometimes they're violent, sometimes they're non-consensual. I think we really need to look at the relations, and then the relations can manifest themselves through something we call sexual intercourse. They can manifest themselves through a hug or a cuddle or a, hey honey, how was your day? And a pat on the back, a gift or a card or a poem we write somebody. So I want to put it on a level playing field with a lot of other good ways of being in relation. If we choose to connect through sex consensually, that's great.

Jase: It's interesting because where I thought you were going to say was more of the religious angle, thinking back to the 17th century usage of the word fetish to mean a talisman or an amulet or something that was believed to have supernatural powers. That the thing itself is more than the physical thing. That's kind of what comes to my mind with that, to make a fetish of something.

Kim: I don't know if that's a metaphor, an analogy? That is kind of what I was saying, but yours is just a better story. I think that's better.

Jase: Yeah, I guess I just think of it placing more meaning

Emily: on it.

Jase: From reading stuff that's a little more magical fantasy, you'll talk about I have a fetish, and it's like a physical thing you have. But to me, when we talk about fetishizing something like sex, you're taking this thing and you're giving it a power and a meaning that it doesn't have on its own. You're giving it something else just by believing it. I don't know how we got to using fetish to be more of an obsession or a thing you're into.

Kim: I don't know if I answered the question for that listener, but I really do feel for them. I probably grew up a little bit like that. We have a lot of sexual shame in tribal communities because historically settlers, one of the ways they justified the civilizational project and colonization was by painting tribal people, Indigenous people, as heathens, as backwards. Part of their narrative is sexual deviance. You have in the deep historical archive observations of tribal peoples throughout the Americas engaging in same-sex practices, having multiple genders, not just binary gender. Maybe not ubiquitously, but there's enough there to where we can see they were living, loving, and lusting in really different ways. That was used against Indigenous people. A lot of Black feminists have said that Black women have been hypersexualized. So have Indigenous women. That's about painting those groups as less civilized in order to justify exploitation of them. There would be many people at home who would not be comfortable with me talking about non-monogamy, even though we had plural marriage among Dakota people. Not polyamory, that's a contemporary manifestation of non-monogamy. There are multiple kinds of non-monogamy. So I understand what it is to come from a background where you are not supposed to speak openly about sex. It's something to be kept for one person, and it's shameful. I get it.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: We're going to take another quick break to talk about some sponsors for this show. Thank you so much to them for supporting us and helping us get this message out here and have amazing guests like Kim TallBear on the show. Please do take a moment, check them out, use our promo codes and links. That does really help support our show. And then of course, go to multiamory.com/join if you would like to support us directly and join our really cool community of amazing, supportive people, many of whom submitted the questions for this episode.

Emily: I wanted to get your thoughts on the legal recognitions that polyamorous and non-traditional relationships are receiving in various cities across the country. Do you feel like this is great for the movement? Do you have any thoughts on it?

Kim: It's been a while since I've read about any new developments. I thought I read about something in Massachusetts. There was a great book called Fraught Intimacies that came out back in 2017. Have you covered that one?

Jase: We haven't actually, no.

Emily: No, yeah.

Kim: Nathan Rambukkana, a Canadian academic, wrote Fraught Intimacies. That author takes up what the policy and legal alternatives might be. It's been a while since I've—

Jase: There's been a wave of more local governments, like city governments or county governments, passing more specifically nondiscrimination protections.

Kim: Uh-huh.

Jase: This is something that we did an episode a while back where we had some people from OPEN, the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy, on to talk about advocating for protections in your workplace.

Kim: Right?

Jase: Because a lot of people don't realize that being non-monogamous is not a protected class in the same way that your religion or your sexual identity or your sexual preference is.

Kim: Right.

Jase: When I talked to the HR at my company, the woman I talked to was like, I didn't even—I would have assumed that was protected too. When I explained it wasn't, she said, here's the wording that would help to protect that more officially in our documents. She worked with legal and got that in there. It took a while, but it did end up in our handbook. That's the one that we're seeing more and more cities passing on the city level or the county level. Having those protections, that someone can't be denied housing or fired from a job for having multiple relationships or living in a house with people they're not married to.

Kim: This is not an area I research, but I have a lot of thoughts about this. I had a relationship with somebody in Canada who had to be pretty quiet, non-public about the fact that they were doing non-monogamy because apparently there are some corporations that have morality clauses that people have to sign.

Jase: Yeah, exactly.

Kim: I was shocked because as an academic, I had a blog and I was open. I couldn't believe it. I've also heard of people worried about getting their children, their ex trying to draw them into custody battles over this.

Jase: So yeah, it's still an issue for sure.

Kim: People are afraid.

Jase: When we signed our publishing contract for our book, there was a morality clause in there. That's just a generic one they do where they can pull out if you do something that's considered morally reprehensible. We said, hang on a minute, because depending who you ask, our whole thing could be morally reprehensible. Let's clarify this language. That's where it shows up is this fear of, well, all it takes is someone to say that that thing is bad, that it's immoral, and then suddenly that morality clause can spring up and get you.

Kim: I do wonder, during the pandemic, for example, it was really interesting to listen to when you couldn't go across the US-Canadian border, very few people could. You had to have status in both countries. Then they finally opened it up to where if you were in at least a one-year committed relationship, you know, they meant monogamy.

Jase: Committed, what does that mean? Yeah.

Kim: Exactly. Those kinds of rules that people just take for granted, and they take monogamy for granted. I thought a lot about that. I also wonder about, there's some parallels to marriage equality. I think people want the rights that come with these recognized legitimate relationship forms. Well, we should have healthcare, period. We shouldn't have to be married or have a job. So this is what's driving some of this. I do worry about those kinds of things. I would love to give healthcare both to my co-parent if he didn't have it, and my partner.

Emily: Yeah.

Kim: And I can't.

Jase: Yeah, absolutely.

Emily: To build on all that, what would a more politically engaged non-monogamy look like? Maybe it's organizing or it's alliances or it's priorities. If we had a pie-in-the-sky idea of what that would look like, what would that be to you?

Kim: I don't want to tell people what to do, but—

Emily: Well, yeah, that's all right. Your opinion on it.

Kim: I think for me, what was important is because I was capable of being open about it, and I know not everybody is as safe as me. I'm a tenured professor and it's a field in which one can be more queer out there in terms of taking non-normative life stances. It was important for me to do that because there are so many others who can't. I myself have not been super active in rights organizing around non-monogamy, but I feel like by being so public and writing about it and really questioning the norm, I'm helping open up more space for others.

Emily: Absolutely.

Kim: So for me, that's my activism. We each need to find the way in which we can have effect in the world. I'm really against universalism and universal prescriptions. We all have different temperaments. We all have different risk tolerance. We all have different abilities to withstand social criticism. I take a lot of online hate for some of the work that I do, and I, for some reason, can take it. I know not everybody can take it. My livelihood is not at stake. I feel like there's a bigger burden on people like me. You just have to plug in where you feel you can reasonably do something. I'm not saying never take a risk either. It's good to push ourselves into those discomfort zones. But different people bring different talents to the project. We don't all have to do it the same way. If you're a great organizer, and some people are, it would be really good if you could put your efforts into that area.

Emily: Yeah,

Jase: Yeah,

Emily: That's great.

Jase: As we're transitioning to the end of the episode here, we have a few questions for you, and one is, is there anything right now that you're reading or watching or in conversation with that's shaping your thinking and your teaching that you'd want to share?

Kim: I read so much for my classes, all these Indigenous Studies books. You know what I've been watching a lot of though? Podcasts on YouTube.

Emily: Ah, great.

Kim: On women's health and menopause and all the new research coming out because things just have really changed. That's really where I'm dealing with that both physically and how that affects the kinds of relationships that I'm choosing to be in now.

Emily: Menopause is a political movement as well.

Kim: I'm also really into talking openly about it. It's amazing to me how many people are afraid to talk about it. My filter's so different now because I do this work and I founded the Sexy Storytelling Show in Edmonton. My grad students took it over and we'll just be walking around talking about masturbation and everything. I'm just like, oh, most people don't talk about this stuff openly. I do think it's important.

Emily: If a listener were to take away one thing from this conversation or from your work, from your blogs that you've done throughout the last 10 or more years, what would that be?

Kim: My whole project, no matter what topic I'm taking on, whether it's geneticists and scientists and colonialism or sexuality and colonialism, everything to me is about disrupting this idea that there are these hard categories around the objects of nature and sexuality. I want us to think more about how we relate in the here and the now. I think maybe this goes to an activism question as well. If we're more attuned to, to use a bit of a cliché, the webs of relations that we're in, if we're attuned to that, and saying, 'What I do here affects this part of the web over here.' I think we need to stop hoping for some transcendent future utopia. My students read a lot of decolonization literature, and I always try to remind us in class, decolonization is a process. This is a lifelong journey and project. The mountaintop Heaven, these utopias, this is not the project. What we do in the here and now, that's what I think is really important. Harm reduction, alleviating suffering in the here and the now, sustaining each other, whether that's sustenance through food or intimacy and intellectual work, sustaining each other I think is really important. We all get sustenance in different ways. So that's my final word.

Jase: I like that, to bring the perspective to the here and now and not just hold out for some magical utopia or bloody revolution that somehow works out good this time. I feel like I hear that narrative come up a lot too.

Emily: Amazing. So Kim, this has been wonderful. Again, thank you so much for coming back on the show all these years later and for answering this question that's been on the minds of many of our listeners. I'm really glad that we actually got to speak about it today.

Kim: Thank you. It's great to see you again.

Emily: Thank you. And for all of our listeners out there, where can they find more about you and your work?

Kim: My Unsettle Substack. I'm also on Blue Sky. I have a lot of talks online too, YouTube talks. If you Google me, there's a lot out there. Not all of it is on the topic of non-monogamy, but I'm pretty easy to find online.

Emily: Excellent. Awesome. Well, we have a question of the week, which is going to be on our Instagram stories. For all of you out there, and that is why is it important to critically examine the community you are a part of? So very interested to see what you all have to say about that. And in addition, the best place to share your thoughts with other listeners is in the episode discussion channel in our Discord server, or you can post in our private Facebook group. You can get access to these groups and join our exclusive community by going to Multiamory.com/join. In addition, you can share with us publicly on Instagram @multiamory_podcast. Multiamory is created and produced by Jase Lindgren, Dedeker Winston, and me, Emily Matlack. Our production assistant is Carson Collins. Our theme song is "Forms I Know I Did" by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on multiamory.com.