Polyamorous: Living and Loving More

In the newly released Polyamorous: Living and Loving More, Jenny Yuen reports on the story behind "One, Two, Three More Love" and the importance of family diversity in children's books. Available now. Get your copy today.

Polyamory in Popular Culture and Children's Literature

For the last few months, I've been working on a book chapter about Polyamory in Children's Literature. This book chapter is part of a larger collection of academic work that asks the following questions: What is Canadian pop culture? How can we identify examples of it? When we study popular culture in this country, where should/could we begin? Which cultural representations in Canada are significant and what should we know about them? What do these representations teach us – about ourselves and others? 

This collection aims to explore how the role of identity, such as nationality, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and so on, significantly affect the popular culture that emerges from a variety of Canadian geographies. It is scheduled to be published in 2019.

Here is a link to the file:
https://1drv.ms/w/s!AgljCs968ALBl0qSg7ab4mPXf5En

An Interview with Toronto author, Jenny Yeun

A few weeks ago, I chatted with Toronto author, Jenny Yeun about the children's picture book, "One, Two, Three, More Love". Our conversation will be featured in her upcoming publication, Polyamorous: Living and Loving More, scheduled to be released later this year. 

Be sure to pick up a copy at your local bookstore and online.

Non/Monogamies in Canadian Children's Picture Books - Forthcoming Publication

My abstract for the forthcoming publication The Spaces and Places of Canadian Popular Culture has been accepted and the first round of edits on my chapter is completed and returned to the editor for review. This has been such a rewarding process with an aim of completing the book by the summer of 2019 and making it available as a course text for the fall of that year.

My chapter, entitled "Non/Monogamies in Canadian Children's Picture Books" was written with the belief that all children should be able to see their families represented in the stories around them and with the intent to contribute to the huge task of representing family diversity in Canada.

Be sure to check it out when it becomes available.

Where It's At!

Wow! This project has really taken off in a few short months and we are generating a lot of interest among poly circles here in Canada and abroad. 

 

The manuscript is almost completed and the illustrations are currently underway. A query letter has been sent to a Canadian publisher to gauge interest and the feedback we've gotten so far has been phenomenal. 

 

For those who have been following this project since its humble beginnings, again thanks for all your continued support. It’s been great to see you’ve all been spreading the word. Our Facebook page now has almost 100 likes! For those of you who haven’t already joined our Facebook page head on over to

 

https://www.facebook.com/OneTwoThreeMoreLove

 

and hit "like".

 

Thanks,

 

Liz and Rachel

 

 

 

 

Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors

The traditional model of the nuclear family – married, monogamous, heterosexual parents and their offspring – has undergone enormous changes.  In Canada, family is now thoroughly unmoored from marriage, gender, sexual orientation, reproduction, and childrearing.  The presumption that domestic relationships are limited to two persons at one time is likely to be the next focal point of change.  As the meaning of family continues to evolve in Canada, and those who create kinship ties in non-traditional ways become more visible, we need to incorporate positive representations of these families into books for children and their parents. As Rudine Sims Bishop states:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange.  These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author.  When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror.  Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection, we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books. [1]

With a deep appreciation for reading as a means and act of self-affirmation, and as parents of children who have grown up in LGBTQ, non-traditional and multi-partnered, Polyamorous families, my partner and I embark on this project with the aim of of contributing to the huge task of representing diversity in children's books.

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[1] Bishop, Rudine Sims. (1990). Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom. The Ohio State University. Vo. 6, no. 3. Summer.

One, Two, Three, More Love

What are the perspectives, experiences, and insights of children who have grown up in non-traditional families?  Do they think they are just like everyone else?  Are they comfortable with their families?  Do they long to see their lives reflected in the world around them?  These questions are of concern to many Canadians who find themselves thinking about the meaning of family.

I am Polyamorous. For the last two decades, I have been involved in various forms of queer, consensual, multi-partner relationships. Polyamory is also described as consensual, ethical, and responsible non-monogamy. So when an opportunity presented itself to write about Polyamory and multi-partnered relationships for a Queer Theory assignment in grad studies, I did not hesitate to pursue it. However, my attempts to locate English language children’s literature that explicitly portray (both visually and textually) polyamorous and multi-partnered family structures revealed not only an absence of relevant materials but even an absence of tools to locate, situate, and categorize such materials within the Halifax Public Library Network (HPLN); neither the staff nor the computer system had the tools or even the language to assist me, and the gap was openly acknowledged. Instead, I found a plethora of children’s literature representing a dominant narrative of family and kinship based on a normative ideology of monogamous coupling. It would seem that my experience and frustration is neither unique nor surprising as it is echoed within many online polyamorous discussion groups and blogs. For many polyfamilies seeking children's literature that speaks directly to their lives and realities, they often come up empty handed.

For scholars who are doing queer theoretical work on family and kinship structures that exist outside dominant narratives – including polyamorous and multi-partnered family structures – this absence can pose a challenge. For those seeking to further contemporary scholarship, including feminist, queer, and critical race theories and media studies discourse, this absence reveals a false narrative of inclusivity.

In my queries, four illustrated children’s books were recommended by HPLN staff and online poly discussion groups to introduce and discuss general themes of polyamory and polyfamilies to children; Six-Dinner Sid (Moore 1991), The Little House that Ran Away from Home (Claude Ponti 2001), Else-Marie and Her Seven Little Daddies (Lindenbaum 1991; adapted from Swedish to English by Gabrielle Charbonnet); and Raf and the Robots (Cornor 2014). Of these recommendations, none of these texts are marketed as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) books and/or explicitly portray polyamorous and multi-partnered family structures. In Else-Marie and Her Seven Little Daddies, a little girl is worried the other kids in her playgroup might not be accepting of her seven little (toy doll sized) daddies. In the end, she finds she had nothing to worry about. Six-dinner Sid is about a cat with a big appetite that, by the end of the story, belongs to six different families who does not mind sharing him. The Little House That Ran Away from Home is about a house that looking for a more compatible owner. It leaves its nasty occupants, befriends Huff, a collector of noises and the two of them find a perfect spot to settle down, as well as a wife for Huff: Puff, who collects smoke plumes. They live happily ever after and have many children together. Raf and the Robots is deliberately set in an ambiguous unconventional family, where young Raf learns about getting his timing right. The family in the book could represent a number of real family situations - a poly family, a couple with a donor or surrogate, a blended family with an involved ex, sisters living together, or many other configurations – but it is not stated explicitly. Needless to say, the absence of polyamory and polyfamilies in children’s literature is striking and noteworthy.

Unapologetic in my refusal to accept established metanarratives of our times, I gleefully approach the socializing world of children’s literature by asking the following questions; Why does the absence of polyamorous and multi-partnered family structures in media and popular culture matter? What might kinship look like through a queer lens if diversions from the dominant status quo were depicted? What happens when we push polyamory and multi-partnered family structures in intersectional directions so that notions of kinship and power come into resolution in multiple and contradictory ways?

In “The Perversions of Children’s Literature”, Natasha Hurley asserts that “to read child characters queerly may not, in fact, be the same thing as reading children’s literature queerly” (2011:123). While I agree that there is much to be gleaned from reading children’s literature queerly, to stretch the bounds of how we imagine young people and their lives, I feel this may not go far enough. Instead, I offer One, Two, Three, More Love; a queer Polyfamily children’s text – a universalizing rather than a minoritizing move, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick would call it – with the aim of not just thinking impossible things but saying them, and refusing the demands of normativity on young people and their texts, by writing polyfamilies into existence for as Nikos Kazantzakis so eloquently states, “by believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired” (1965:434).

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References:

Cornor, Sarah (2014). Raf and the Robots. Stories for Unique families.

Hurley, N. (2011). The Perversions of Children's Literature. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 3(2), 118-132.

Kazantzakis, Nikos (1965). Report to Greco. Bruno Cassirer, Oxford.

Lindenbaum, P. (1991). Else-Marie and her seven little daddies. Douglas & McIntyre.

Moore, I., & Sallis, P. (1991). Six Dinner Sid. Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers.

Ponti, Claude (2001). The Little House that Ran away from Home. In Little Lit 2: Strange stories for strange kids. Spiegelman, A., & Mouly, F. (Eds). New York: HarperCollins. 21-24.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press.