Beyond Equality—Non-Monogamy and the Necropolitics of Marriage

Daniel Cardoso () and Christian Klesse
Additional contact information
Daniel Cardoso: Department of Communication Sciences, Lusófona University, Lisbon, 1749-024 Lisbon, Portugal
Christian Klesse: Department of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester M15 6BX, UK

Social Sciences, 2025, vol. 14, issue 4, 1-28

Abstract: ‘Marriage equality’ has been a widely used slogan and mobilizing concept for LGBTQ+ rights’ movements across the globe striving for formal recognition for ‘same-sex’ or ‘same-gender’ marriages. In this article, we critically interrogate the terminology and political rationality that have given shape to ‘marriage equality’ campaigns. We demonstrate the structural erasure of non-monogamous relations and populations from the changes hoped for and envisioned in these mobilizations. The lack of any genuine and substantial concern with consensual non-monogamies (CNMs) from most of the literature in the field highlights the close entanglement of marriage with monogamy. As a result, ideas are scarce about how meaningful and adequate legal recognition and social policy provisions for a wide range of intimate, sexual, familial, and/or caring bonds or constellations on the CNM continuum could look like. We argue that the critique of the mononormativity inherent to marriage is fundamental to understanding the role of this in the 21st century. We identify the roots of the mononormativity of marriage in its governmental role as a necropolitical and biopolitical technology, evidenced by its ‘civilizing’ function in white settler colonial projects. Because of this, an expansion of the call for equality to include non-monogamous populations does not resolve but rather aggravates the problem. We conclude that any truly queer politics of CNM consequently needs to be anti-marriage.

Keywords: marriage; marriage equality; consensual non-monogamy; LGBTQ+ politics; biopolitics; necropolitics; colonialism; Global South; sexual citizenship; intimate citizenship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/14/4/233/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/14/4/233/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:14:y:2025:i:4:p:233-:d:1632187

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().