One Marriage Under God: The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America (2012) and co-author of The How To of Qualitative Research, second edition (2022).
Heath applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Forbidden Intimacies opens to the first page of chapter 4 on gender, power, and agency, capturing one of the key questions that animates this book: Is polygyny (one man married to more than one wife) intrinsically harmful to women? We hear from Samantha, a plural wife, who tells us that women in plural marriages (another term for polygyny) are not victims, brainwashed, or incapable of making intelligent choices. Samantha married into a plural family at age 18 and never regretted it. She exclaimed during our interview: “I had no way to comprehend all that [polygyny] could be when I was making that choice.” In contrast, Amelia told me that, after leaving her plural marriage and the religion that required it later in life, she realized that she had been brainwashed to believe that polygyny was the only choice she could make and remain in her religion and community. “That’s all you know,” she emphasized. These two contradictory perspectives speak directly to how regulating a forbidden intimacy such as polygyny is complicated by questions of women’s agency.Follow Melanie Heath on Twitter and visit her website.
Forbidden Intimacies examines the ways that governments regulate “bad” types of intimacy like polygyny, resulting in negative consequences for the populations that practice them and for society more generally. The contradictory discourses and logics that animate the debate over polygyny—such as whether it is harmful to women, children, and society—are key to this regulation. Comparing legal prohibitions in the United States, Canada, France, and Mayotte (an island in the Indian Ocean whose inhabitants are French citizens), the book draws on ethnographic research, including 145 interviews with 165 participants, to examine how states shape and are shaped by intimacies that are seen as antithetical to “progressive” Western values. This often takes the form of racial projects in which Western states govern forbidden intimacies to define themselves against a repudiated, racialized other. For example, governments focus on patriarchal control and gender inegalitarianism as inherent to polygyny, making women’s agency in these relationships suspect and justifying banning it as a “barbaric” practice.
Rather than one singular and harmful polygyny, the book explores the flourishing of polygamies or multiple ways that nonmonogamies are lived—even in the case of polygyny which receives the most disapprobation. I examine the ways that polygamies are experienced in the context of what I call labyrinthine love, a structure of emotions that blends varying types of love, jealousy, and commitment. Labyrinthine love challenges the assumption of a simple continuum of polygamies, such as bad polygyny and good polyamory (a philosophy where all partners consent to the intimate relationship). There is a complex range of emotions in non-monogamies from honesty and communication, such as when husbands and wives make decisions together, to those characterized by more coercive forms of intimacy, such as when a wife learns of her husband’s marriage to another woman after the fact. My analysis of these complex polygamies shines light on the negative impact of governments regulating polygyny as inherently harmful.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
