Building villages

Reflections and studies on the quality of relationships in legal recognition of non-monogamous families

Abstract

The following paper aims to contribute to the Italian literature on non-monogamy with a psychosocial interpretation towards the future of the political and legal recognition requests of non-monogamous and queer relationships, as well as of their families. Starting with a reflection on how normativities position those who are outside the binaries as noises to be ignored or cancelled, the paper then provides a critique of the concept of evaluation as a tool for acquiring rights (as it does not find a counterpart in the different-gender relationships). Psychosocial studies on the relationship quality of non-monogamous people should be used to strenghten the demands for the legal recognitions of non-monogamous relationships, families and multi-parenting. In fact, the available international literature has given voice and confirmed what the many polyfamilies experience in everyday life: that these families (non-monogamous, open, poly, extended, childless * or not) are a social reality with their positive charachteristics and criticalities. Starting from examples on the erasure of bisexualities and ame-gender families recognition – the paper discuss how including these types of psychosocial research can improve our struggle for the recognition and legal rights of non-monogamous agreements and relationships.