Adultery scandals involving politicians. Dating websites for married women and men. Raids of polygamous communities. Reality shows about polyamorists. It seems that non-monogamy is everywhere: in popular culture, in the news, and before the courts.

In Fraught Intimacies, Nathan Rambukkana examines how polygamy, adultery, and polyamory are represented in the public sphere and the effect this is having on intimate relationships and aspects of contemporary Western society.

As this book demonstrates, although monogamy is considered and presented as the norm in Western society, many kinds of sexual and romantic relationships exist within its borders. Rambukkana’s intricate analysis reveals how some forms of non-monogamy are tacitly accepted, even glamourized, while others are vilified and reviled. By questioning what this says about intimacy, power, and privilege, this book offers an innovative framework for understanding the status of non-monogamy in Western society.

Nathan Rambukkana's profile page

Nathan Rambukkana is an assistant professor in communication studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. His work centres on the study of discourse, politics, and identities, and his research addresses topics such as hashtag publics, mixed-race representation, digital intimacies, intimate privilege, and non/monogamy in the public sphere. He is also the editor of the collection Hashtag Publics: The Power and Politics of Discursive Networks (Peter Lang Press, forthcoming). He blogs at http://complexsingularities.net.

Rambukkana’s study covers wide ground and is unusual for its relational and inter-textual analysis. His discussion not only highlights differences, but much common discursive ground across which different styles of intimacy are constructed. Rambukkana explores communalities, even if they may be uncomfortable and brush against the grain of cherished taken-for-granted wisdoms. Truly impressive is Rambukkana’s consistency in working along intersectional lines of inquiry, thereby enriching polyamory scholarship with an approach that is attentive to race, class and gender perspectives.

Sexualities

Undoing Monogamy and Fraught Intimacies both attempt ambitious theoretical interventions into the study of intimacy, and are indispensable resources to those already engaged in the study of non/monogamies. Through the diversity of their archives and the breadth of their thoroughly intersectional critiques, Rambukkana and Willey demonstrate that the contemporary study of non/monogamy does not, and cannot, proceed in isolation. In their discussions of non/monogamy as it appears in colonialism, border control, life sciences, comic strips and the law, these two very different books demonstrate the diverse pleasures of intellectual promiscuity.

Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 31 No. 90, March 2017