Drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews with bisexual-identified practitioners of polyamory in the UK, this article shows that love, intimacy and friendship are salient themes in polyamory discourses. An exploration of the question of how respondents define polyamory with regard to different ‘styles of non-monogamy’ reveals that the boundaries of polyamory are contested within the movement that has formed around this concept. The prevalent definition of polyamory as ‘responsible non-monogamy’ usually goes hand in hand with a rejection of more sex- or pleasure-centred forms of non-monogamy, such as ‘casual sex’, ‘swinging’, or ‘promiscuity’. The author argues that the salience of the relational ideologies of love and intimacy hampers the potential of polyamory to ground a truly pluralistic sexual ethics.

Popular discourses on bisexuality assume a peculiar interrelation between bisexuality and non-monogamy. Drawing upon qualitative research in gay male and bisexual non-monogamies in the UK, this article explores bisexual women’s accounts on the effects of promiscuity allegations on non-monogamous sexual and relationship practice. Due to the prominence of gender as a differentializing factor in the discourses on promiscuity, to be publicly known as bisexual and non-monogamous tends to have particularly stigmatizing effects on women. The issue is further complicated by the intersection of promiscuity discourses with discourses on race/ethnicity and class. The regimes of violence that go hand in hand with the stigmatization through promiscuity allegations police women’s sexual behaviour making it more risky for women of certain positioning to come out or move and socialize in certain cultural contexts.

Polyamory describes a form of relationship where it is possible, valid and worthwhile to maintain (usually long-term) intimate and sexual relationships with multiple partners simultaneously. Nevertheless, debates around polyamory have often suffered from an evasion of power in the ultimate and community contexts within which the concept arose. In this introduction, we trace the political contexts in which polyamory arose, investigate their implicit assumptions from an intersectional, multi-issue perspective, and position ourselves socially and politically as editors of this special issue. We hope to provide a critical introduction to polyamory. Where we stand: Positionality and intersectionality This volume was born out of our joint participation in the Gender and Ethnicity Research Discussion Group. The group was formed in summer 1996, by several postgraduate students and activists. Our monthly meeting place was Cema, the now defunct North London bar of our friend Rabiye Cinar, which hosted gay and migrant nights, and attracted a very diverse crowd. Most of our group's participants, too, were minoritized, often negotiating multiple subordinations in their lives. We shared the belief that multiple axes of oppressions interacted simultaneously, and that dominant gender and sexuality debates often resisted this insight. The group nurtured us intellectually as well as emotionally, and helped us survive the stresses of British society in and outside the university. It

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Polyamory means different things to different people. While some consider polyamory to be nothing more than a convenient label for their current relationship constellations or a handy tool for communicating their willingness to enter more than one relationship at a time, others claim it as one of their core identities. Essentialist identity narratives have sustained recent arguments that polyamory is best understood as a sexual orientation and is as such comparable with homosexuality, heterosexuality or bisexuality. Such a move would render polyamory intelligible within dominant political and legal frameworks of sexual diversity. The article surveys academic and activist discussions on sexual orientation and traces contradictory voices in current debates on polyamory. The author draws on poststructuralist ideas to show the shortcomings of sexual orientation discourses and highlights the losses which are likely to follow from pragmatic definitions of polyamory as sexual orientation.