Contracts, Polyamory, and Late Liberalism: The Relational Production of Unrelationality

Abstract

This article examines norms of labor and individuation inaugurated by late liberal directives to optimize intimate life as a site of personal fulfilment. Analyzing ethnographic material on US polyamory, I identify "the contract complex"—a set of techniques for managing multiple relationships—as a person-making regime that enables dramatic intimate transformations while extending classical liberalism's hierarchical privileging of autonomy over dependence. Persisting gendered binaries structure this phenomenon, with the late liberal home masculinized as it is re-imagined from a natural site of nurture to one of choice, and the person feminized as a site of therapeutic self-nurture through self-discovery.