Nebula Reads: Dean Spade – For Lovers and Fighters

One of the things I miss about being in school is reading academic articles and chapters and turning in little 1-2 page papers that essentially summarized what the article was about and what you thought of it, and then discussing the article with your friends. So I decided to start a blog series where I do exactly that!

I’ll be starting with an article I came across in research for a paper I wrote recently, which was also cited in this excellent zine, so I went back and read it again. Full disclosure – I’m a big fan of Dean Spade. His book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, & The Limits of Law, was hugely influential on me.

Dean Spade is an organizer, writer and teacher, currently teaching at the Seattle University School of Law.  The article is called “For Lovers and Fighters,” and it was published in We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists, edited by Melody Berger (2006). You can read it here: https://www.deanspade.net/2006/11/19/for-lovers-and-fighters. There’s so much cool stuff in this article, like way too much for me to cover in one blog post, so I will just be covering a few points that really stood out to me.

In this article, Spade starts out by talking about how he’s seen more and more queer and trans people talking about and practicing polyamory, and how it makes sense to be resisting the “common sense” of monogamy just like we’ve resisted the “common sense” of race, class, gender, and sexuality in our culture.

He also writes about how capitalism is always pushing us toward perfection, which means the Right Way to be a Man or a Woman, and we have to buy things in order to fill this gap of insecurity that is created when we can’t attain the goal of perfection. Capitalism says you never have enough, that there isn’t enough to go around, and you need to hoard what you can and focus on getting as much as possible.

Similarly, Spade writes, “the romance myth is focused on scarcity.” You only have one soulmate, and you need to find them before it’s too late. Also, the myth says:

“Each person has only a certain amount of attention or attraction or love or interest, and if any of it goes to someone besides his or her partner, partner must lose out.”

I read this, and I was thinking yeah that’s basically the thinking behind relationship anarchy too, that it’s not true that you only have a certain amount of love available for relationships and loving one person takes away from how much you can love someone else. Love isn’t a finite resource.

But time is, isn’t it? And energy is a finite resource. Like, to be clear, I’m totally pro-polyamory, but I feel like we’re so busy reassuring people that love isn’t a finite resource that we might risk overlooking the fact that time and energy and overall ability to be around/interacting with other people is a finite resource. Spade continues:

“We don’t generally apply this rule to other relationships—we don’t assume that having two kids means loving the first on less or not at all, or having more than one friend means being a bad or fake or less-interested friend to our other friends.”

I think there’s an important distinction here that we’re talking about having “two kids” or having “more than one friend.” We’re not talking about having like, nine kids. I grew up knowing families that had 9+ kids and there certainly were questions/judgment from other families about whether they were really able to spend enough time with each kid, and how they could afford to have so many kids, and whether those kids would be able to go to college. ((And I think we also hear stories in media of the idea of the popular kid who has a ton of (fake) friends but no close (real) friends, vs. the “unpopular” kid with only one or two friends, but those friends are much closer.))

I’m just having some thoughts about the emphasis that love is not a finite resource vs. the possibilities that time and energy are finite resources.

Of course, in polyamory, it’s not really equivalent to a set of parents + 9 kids. It might be webs of people interwoven together, and ideally, from my understanding anyway, you aren’t 100% reliant on one person for everything in your life.

That’s another thing Spade talks about. He sees people feeling so much insecurity from the romance myth that they become “overly needy or dependent, or dominating, or possessive, or jealous, or mean, or disrespectful, or thoughtless,” and they prioritize “romantic relationships over all else—ditching their friends, putting all their emotional eggs in one basket.” This sentence really summed it up for me: “[The romantic relationship] becomes simultaneously the most important relationship and the one in which people give free rein to be their most insecure selves.”

I think this is one of the big things with amatonormativity: the idea that the romantic relationship is the Most Important Relationship, and that (singular) romantic partner should be completing you. They should be making you Whole(tm). My person and I have been talking lately about the societal norm that talking about your Deep Emotions and Big Family/Life Things is something you only do with your romantic partner, not your friends. (I have a suspicion this is also gendered, like “female” friends are more likely to talk about this than “male” friends, but I’d love to hear from commenters on this.) I think this is also why I feel so weird about the concept of “emotional cheating.”

One very cool idea from Spade (which was also quoted in the zine I linked above) is to treat the people you date more like you treat your friends and to treat your friends more like your dates. This means “to be respectful and thoughtful and have boundaries and reasonable expectations” with dates, and for friends, “give them special attention, honor [your] commitments to them, be consistent, and invest deeply in [your] futures together.” I love this and I think it’s an excellent tool for fighting amatonormativity and the devaluation of friendships.

Continuing with the article, Spade writes about the connections between polyamory and thinking about gender more fluidly and what that does to sexual orientation categories. As much as certain segments of the LGBTQ+ community (especially online) are still adhering to Strict Categories, if you think about it, basing sexual orientation on the-gender-you-are-attracted-to (whatever “attraction” even means) makes less and less sense when gender becomes more fluid.

Like, ignoring my asexuality and arospec-ness, I’ve identified as gay the longest. I identified as gay before I identified as nonbinary, and I’ve continued to identify as gay even though I’m not like, nonbinary-person-only-attracted-to-nonbinary-people (as if “nonbinary” is a third gender, which it isn’t). And then I’ve had experiences of having crushes on people who transed their genders. (this phrase comes from my philosophy of “you should be able to trans your gender for fun and still not be discriminated against.”)

Anyway, as someone who has thought about whether they can still use “gay” if it doesn’t really make sense, technically, (and is it misgendering?? also are you misgendering yourself??) it was So Validating !!! to read this part where Spade writes about how people experiencing gender fluidity have been experimenting with different identities or attractions to different genders, and “[f]or couples with one person beginning to identify as trans, it can mean recognizing that the two members of the couple can have sexual-orientation identifications that don’t necessarily depend on the gender of the other partner.”

Finally, another big thing I took from this article was Spade’s writing on polyamory culture and jealousy. Spade writes about concerns about pressure to be poly – like it’s the only “radical” way to live, and jealousy is Really Bad. He writes that the poly norm is “causing people to judge themselves harshly when feelings of jealousy come up,” and that both having the feelings and admitting them is discouraged. But this alienates us from ourselves and others (and leads to “retail therapy” to cure ourselves of the bad feelings). Spade writes:

“I’ve been disturbed to see dynamics emerge in which people create the new poly norm and then hate themselves if they cannot live up to it. If they are not perfect at being nonjealous, nonthreatened, and totally delighted by their partners’ exploits immediately, then they have somehow failed.”

Spade doesn’t have a solution to this (at least, not in this article from 2006) but I thought this was super enlightening, even to think about how feelings of anxiety might make me pull away from relationships where maybe it would be better to talk things through. (tbh I’m very much a Talking About My Feelings type of person.) But of course, there’s a balance between talking about your feelings and making your feelings someone else’s problem in a harmful/guilt tripping/exhausting way. I just think the never ever speaking of them might be too much of an extreme.

Here’s a quick synopsis on the main points I ended up writing about:

• The idea of love as an infinite resource vs. how I think time and energy are still limited (also, do you think love is an infinite resource?)
• Amatonormativity and problems with making one romantic relationship The Relationship – most important, maybe the only acceptable place to talk about emotional stuff, the relationship you must dedicate most of your energy to
• Also the idea to “treat the people you date more like you treat your friends and treat your friends more like your dates” (setting aside my feelings about the friends/dating binary)
• Polyamory & gender fluidity -> people maybe identifying with labels that may not correspond with the people they are dating
• The issue of jealousy being a Bad Feeling that Must Never Be Spoken and the resulting alienation of keeping it a secret

Anyway, this article gave me lots of thoughts and I ended up reading it three times! I’d love to hear your thoughts. (and any recommendations for more things I should read! although I do have kind of a lengthy to read list atm)