Writing PolyQueer Worlds: Controlling Images, Material Practices, and the Politics of Legitimacy

This study critically examines how family law regimes in Canada and the United States shape the everyday lived experiences of queer non/monogamous families (sometimes referred to as multipartner families), with particular attention to their parenting practices and experiences of intimate partner violence and abuse. While both legal and sociocultural discourses in these national contexts have begun to acknowledge certain forms of queer kinship, non/monogamous relationships remain structurally marginalised. This marginalisation is rooted in a sociolegal history that frames non/monogamy, particularly in its associations with polygamy, as inherently harmful to women, children, and society. These normative assumptions continue to inform contemporary family law regimes and cultural imaginaries, which construe non/monogamous family forms as deviant, immoral, or even criminal. Within this context, the families in this study reside in a condition of technical il/legality, a term I use to describe the ambiguous legal terrain wherein non/monogamous families are not explicitly criminalised but remain outside full legal recognition and protection. Their desire to share life through cohabitation, mutual support, caregiving, kin work, and co-parenting is shaped by the persistent threat of legal invisibility, institutional discrimination, and potential criminal sanctions. Situated within intersectional sociolegal and critical phenomenological approaches, this research explores how queer non/monogamous families navigate these regimes of power. Drawing on multi-pronged, phenomenologically grounded qualitative methods, this study centres the voices and embodied knowledge of queer non/monogamous individuals and families living in both Canada and the United States. The methodological design of this project integrates in-depth life history interviews, participant observation, and an innovative life document data gathering practice, which invites participants to create self-curated textual, visual, and multimedia narratives of their family lives over time. This novel method allows participants to reflect on their experiences with a greater degree of agency, depth, and complexity than traditional interview formats typically allow. Through these diverse data sources, the study uncovers how family law regimes—as structural frameworks—actively shape kinning processes, parenting arrangements, and responses to experiences of IPVA. Through the analysis of 73 interviews, the study reveals how the technical il/legality produced by family law regimes gives rise to an embodied disposition characterised by a persistent sense of legal precarity. This disposition influences how queer non/monogamous families organise their relationships, structure parenting and caregiving practices, and navigate interactions with institutions. It emerges not only from the threat of legal sanction but also from the broader sociocultural context in which their family forms are marked as illegible, deviant, or unworthy of recognition. An in-depth analysis of 53 interviews, supported by life documents and follow-up interviews, further reveals how this legal and social marginality informs their experiences of intimate partner violence and abuse. In foregrounding the complex interplay between legal structures, cultural narratives, intersectional experiences of violence, and the lived experiences of queer non/monogamous families, this study offers a critical contribution to sociological understandings of kinship, legal consciousness, intimate partner violence and the sociolegal production of marginality.

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