U.S. Family Law Along the Slippery Slope: the limits of a sexual rights strategy for polyamorous parents

Families in the United States are rapidly changing, and the normative familial model of two married, monogamous, heterosexual parents with children no longer reflects the majority of U.S. families. Nonetheless, state incentive-based policies and discriminatory family laws continue to enforce heteronormative monogamy. Recent changes to the U.S. legal landscape have produced limited formal recognition and protections for same-sex couples and LGBTQ parents, and even these narrow rights are withheld from other diverse familial configurations including families with polyamorous parents. This article uses the concept of sexual citizenship to frame the analysis of U.S. family courts’ normative construction of family, identifying striking parallels between family courts’ historical and contemporary prejudicial treatment of LGBTQ parents and the institution’s similar delegitimization and denigration of polyamorous parents today. This paper reviews polyamorous parents’ efforts towards achieving legal and societal legitimatization, finding significant parallels with legal strategies LGBTQ parents utilized to seek legal recognition and protection prior to federal recognition of same-sex marriage. This paper highlights the inadequacies of such a formal sexual citizenship approach, finding that a limited strategy of accumulating specific sexual rights fails to address non-monogamy’s more radical cultural presence as well as the (non-legal) informal aspects of belonging needed to improve the livability of polyamorous parents’ and their children’s lives. This paper concludes with recommendations for improving the treatment of non-traditional families including LGBTQ, polyamorous, and other blended families, both within and outside the legal institution.

“You have the right to love and be loved”: participatory theatre for disability justice with self-advocates

Individuals with intellectual disability are often left out of and overlooked in discussions on sexual health and sexuality. Given this, we undertook a participatory theatre research project to better respond to the needs of the individuals with intellectual and developmental disability regarding their sexual agency and sexual citizenship. The project, entitled Romance, Relationships, and Rights arose when the executive director of a community living agency approached researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship to learn about how they, as an agency, could better support their community. To disrupt sexual ableism and traditional theatre hierarchies, we collaboratively turned to participatory and disability theatre with the aim to advance and promote the sexual citizenship of individuals with intellectual and developmental disability, who refer to themselves as self-advocates - those who speak and act with agency. The challenges of equitable co-creation arose throughout the theatre process; the themes of deconstruction/co-construction and uncertainty and liminality reveal the iterative process of centering self-advocate voices.

The queer aesthetics of la PrEP: iconography, the pharmacopornographic regime, and (safe) sex in the French neoliberal marketplace

This article offers an analysis of an array of French pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) campaigns through the pharmacopornographic framework established in the works of transfeminist philosopher Paul Preciado. Throughout, I argue that the material and discursive presentation of PrEP in these campaigns, part of a more expansive injection of biomedical protocols into the global marketplace, invites us to (re)consider binary conceptualizations of queer and non-queer subjectivities, normal and pathological sexual subjectivities, and good and bad sexual citizenship often through biomedical and neoliberal perspectives. Additionally, I propose the critical concept, biotechsex, to describe the biotech circuit that simultaneously subjectifies users and non-users of biotechnologies, like the PrEP option, and circumscribes them within a dynamic network of socio-political discourses concerning morality, ethics, pathology, and desire, a circuit formed and informed by the more specific French ideologies of universalism and communitarianism.