Rick W. A. Smith<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I<\/span>n Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology<\/em>, Dr. Angela Willey powerfully critiques and reconfigures monogamy\u2019s nature. Moving beyond the now well-worn critiques of monogamy\u2019s reification as \u201cnatural\u201d within mainstream Scientific discourses, Willey engages with and significantly expands upon recent developments in material feminism, offering productive new ways to rethink the entanglements nature, culture, and belonging. Significantly, Willey takes on the science of Biology as a space of care for feminist and particularly lesbian imaginings, knowledge productions, and possibilities for living beyond the sexual, relational, and intellectual confines of compulsory monogamy. Engaging with a wide array of topics, including sexological history, laboratory ethnography, poly discourse, as well as lesbian culture, writings, and archives, Willey offers a compelling and affective feminist manifesto that leads us through the limits of monogamy to what might lay beyond. Skillfully engaging both scientific and feminist discourses about the body and its embedded capacities for knowing and relating, Willey offers new theoretical insights into the possibilities of both human and non-human relations where \u201cthe politics of science and the possibilities of biology are not [\u2026] separate sets of concerns\u201d (3).<\/p>\n

In the opening pages of Undoing Monogamy<\/em>, Willey situates her project within a genealogy of feminist and queer materialisms, imagining new concepts of materiality that might emerge from efforts to simultaneously reckon with feminist, scientific, and other modes of knowing the body. Willey\u2019s goal is not only to move past feminist critiques of social constructionism in science to enable new engagements with materiality, but to evade the imposition of knowledge hierarchies over multiple capacities for producing bodily knowledge. Perhaps most significantly in her introduction, Willey offers an important theoretical intervention on contemporary material feminist scholarship, identifying an ongoing intellectual slippage between \u201cbiology\u201d and \u201cthe body itself\u201d, and \u201cScience\u201d and \u201cnature itself\u201d, which has led to the impression that the science of \u201cbiology\u201d is an unmediated process of knowledge production. To take both feminist and scientific insights about the body more seriously, Willey argues, involves starting from a position that does not take the mediated processes of bodily knowledge production, nor the sole ownership of those knowledges by Science and its practitioners, for granted.<\/p>\n

In the five chapters that follow, theorizing compulsory monogamy is at the heart of Willey\u2019s project, but the author also questions basic assumptions about human biology that underlay discourses of both monogamy and<\/em> its possible non-monogamous alternatives, assumptions that Willey links with the racial logics of transnational colonialism and how they are constantly redeployed in theorizing human nature and belonging. Willey begins by tracing the emergence of monogamy as an outcome of nature in 19^{th<\/sup>-century sexology, where monogamy\u2019s nature played a central role in reifying European nationalism and imperialism. She then traces the science of monogamy to contemporary research on the behavioral genetics of prairie voles, the central animal models upon which public and scientific discourses on monogamy have coalesced in recent years. Offering a powerful and deeply moving feminist ethnography of one of the US\u2019s leading behavioral genetics laboratories, Willey evaluates the genetic and hormonal mechanisms that have been linked with both monogamous behavior in voles and the ability to form social bonds in humans, and problematizes the experimental frameworks through which sexual monogamy and coupled relations are measured and made natural. Turning to scholarly discourse on polyamory, Willey evaluates a variety of queer and feminist counternarratives of monogamy\u2019s nature which have instead argued for the fundamental nature of polyamory. Willey calls for new kinds of poly discourse, ones that do not recapitulate monogamy\u2019s appeals to Science or envision polyamory as monogamy\u2019s logical opposite in destabilizing the centrality of coupled relations, but imagines new naturecultural ways of seeing both monogamy and its possible non-monogamous alternatives. Moving towards these new poly discourses, Willey focuses on excerpts from Alison Bechdel\u2019s comic strip, \u201cDykes to Watch Out For\u201d, working from the subject positions and embodied knowledge of lesbians towards the invention of new, anti-monogamous relations. Here, Willey advances a \u201cDyke ethics of anti-monogamy\u201d, where a centering of \u201cfriendship, community, and social justice decenters the sexual dyad in ways that polyamory does not\u201d (97). Returning to the question of monogamy\u2019s nature, Willey engages Audre Lorde\u2019s \u201cUses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power\u201d, to theorize what she calls \u201cbiopossibility\u201d, which challenges Science as the central site of producing authoritative knowledge about the body, and works from the embodied knowledges of queer women of color to understand matter and its possible relations. Here, Willey brilliantly refuses a simple denial that there are molecular substrates for human attachment, but insists that matter is inextricably embedded within webs of social relation and that bodies are always already bodies in context.<\/p>\n}

In Undoing Monogamy<\/em>, Willey takes up the troubled but crucial work of not simply critiquing monogamy\u2019s nature, but claiming Biology as a space of feminist and queer re-imaginings of human and non-human relations. In her epilogue, \u201cDreams of a Dyke Science\u201d, Willey\u2019s unfolds a vision for remaking Science that will flow from occupying it with feminist and queer subjectivities, where \u201cthe feminist scientist will not only \u2018be aware\u2019 of the interconnectedness of the personal and the political; that awareness will lead to a fundamental transformation of science\u2019s very definition\u201d (143). Willey\u2019s dream, therefore, \u201cis not for a better science, but for a different one\u201d (143).<\/p>\n

Dr. Angela Willey is a Five Colleges Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies whose teaching and research activities span the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and Hampshire College. Willey received training in contemporary feminist theory and science studies at Emory University and the London School of Economics. Her research centers on postcolonial feminist and queer critiques of coupled belonging, with a focus on the productive powers of monogamous discourses and the advancement of more livable alternatives. Her work will be of particular value for readers of new, feminist, and queer materialisms, as well as those interested in feminist science studies, history and philosophy of science, critical behavioral genomics, women\u2019s and gender studies, and decolonial studies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Table of Contents | http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.17742\/IMAGE.CR.10.1.14 | PDF Rick W. A. Smith In Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology, Dr. Angela Willey powerfully critiques and reconfigures monogamy\u2019s nature. Moving beyond the now well-worn critiques of monogamy\u2019s reification as \u201cnatural\u201d within mainstream Scientific discourses, Willey engages with and significantly expands upon recent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7987,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[138,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-10-1-critical-relationality","category-elicitations","wpautop"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p707hj-38K","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7987"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12074"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12795,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12074\/revisions\/12795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}