Undoing Monogamy

Angela Willey is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Acknowledgments xi Introduction. Politics and Possibility: A Queer Feminist Introduction to Monogamy 1 1. Monogamy's Nature: Colonial Sexual Science and Its Naturecultural Fruits 25 2. Making the Monogamous Human: Mating, Measurement, and the New Science of Bonding 45 3. Making Our Poly Nature: Monogamy's Inversion and the Reproduction of Difference 73 4. Rethinking Monogamy's Nature: From the Truth of Non/Monogamy to a Dyke Ethics of "Antimonogamy" 95 5. Biopossibility: Molecular Monogamy and Audre Lorde's Erotic 121 Epilogue. Dreams of a Dyke Science 141 Notes 147 Bibliography 169 Index 191

"Undoing Monogamy is an important contribution to feminist and queer studies of science, to feminist materialisms, and to academic studies of non/monogamy.... Undoing Monogamy provides us with an example of how to approach science differently in ways that are grounded more in the lives and needs of a wider variety of diverse humans and nonhumans." - Kim TallBear (Hypatia) "The value of Undoing Monogamy to scholars of non/monogamy is unquestionable. The careful, historical attention to the way that non/monogamy has been implicated in colonial logics and ongoing projects of racism is a vital contribution to the field." - Jessica Kean (Australian Feminist Studies) "[Undoing Monogamy] has something to teach everyone: every reader will find something new and unfamiliar in its pages." - Clare Chambers (International Feminist Journal of Politics) "The thoroughly interdisciplinary methodology, alongside ethical and joyful visions of a 'dyke science,' give us all a new way forward, where we do not make easy scapegoats of disciplines, but interrogate and integrate our various disciplines through our deeply naturecultural worlds." - Banu Subramaniam (Science, Technology and Society) "A richly interdisciplinary book . . . that demonstrates a facility and ease with multiple approaches in feminist science studies. . . . Willey's really substantive contribution to queer theory and sexuality studies, which is that the idea of monogamy and nonmonogamy as sexual practices-as sex itself-has been obscuring something of value: the expansive social worlds that might emerge if both monogamy and its others were critiqued." - Kyla Tompkins (American Quarterly) "Undoing Monogamy makes a key theoretical intervention: clarifying ow new materialist approaches can build on, rather than depart from (or at worst, ignore), the insights of feminist science studies. Angela Willey makes a necessary and pointed contribution. . . . This is a scholar to watch for self-reflexive, multidisciplinary, and intersectional feminist research that challenges us all to conceive of critique and world-building as compatible projects." - Kyla Schuller (Catalyst)