By Tammy Ng
The interviews I had conducted and laid out in previous blog posts had an overarching theme. The theme being how a person’s cultural background has shaped how a person views different concepts. Many of my interviewees would mention where they had grown up, their religion, or their ethnic background being a huge factor in how they had view polyamorous relationships. Much of our morals and values don’t just come from nowhere; It is in fact shaped by society and the people surrounding us. When you are a child and you listen to nursery rhymes and bedtime stories, these seemingly trivial things are already shaping how we view the world, as the stories are trying to instill certain morals and values into children (West 2007).
Many of my interviewees spoke about the repressive cultural background they had come from. I was able to interview a number of white students and a number of students of people of color. I noticed that the students that are also people of color were slightly more apprehensive about polyamory. They were not against the idea fully but saw a struggle with being stereotyped in a certain way if they were to voice their opinions on supporting polyamory relationships, whether it was in support of others or for themselves. For so long, people of color have been othered and racially oppressed, that no matter where you go and even within a poly community (which can be considered an oppressed community) still has racism within it (Sheff 2013). The intersectionality of a person of color and being a part of the poly community creating a different experience from those who are white and a part of the poly community. White people don’t have the same history and/or struggle of being racially oppressed as people of color, so they are allowed freedoms that people of color don’t have.
One interviewee had spoke about a very interesting, but probably not a rare experience. They spoke about growing up around relationships that never really worked out. Whether it had been divorces in family, teen pregnancy, cheating, etc. They saw the struggle and failure of monogamous relationships constantly around them and sought out alternative relationship models. Often when people don’t have great examples of relationships surrounding them, they either repeat the same mistakes they saw growing up or do their best to not fall into those footsteps (TallBear 2014).
In U.S. society we have been socialized into seeing monogamy as the norm. Because monogamy is the norm within mainstream culture and is typically the only type of relationship we see in movies, read about in books, etc., it has shaped our minds into seeing anything other than monogamy as weird or wrong. Whether it be because of our religion, family, schooling, etc., we are constantly being exposed to things that sway us to think about things a certain way. It is up to the individual to question it. Whether something is done a certain way because it is truly right or if it is just a social construction.
Breaking Relationship Norms 