Queering the narratives: LGB and the politics of infidelity

Heteronormativity commonly permeates academic discourses on and media representations of infidelity in intimate relationships. Situated in the British context, this presentation seeks to examine the politics of infidelity through an exploration of the entanglement between LGB and infidelity. Drawing on critical, feminist, and queer theory, this talk first provides a critique of dominant academic research on infidelity. I argue that the research’s explicit and implicit heteronormative angle goes along with a continuing exclusion of queer folks and their experiences of infidelity in existing studies. This blind spot opens up important questions in terms of knowledge and power (Foucault 1980): Whose intimate relationships and experiences are deemed worthy of academic consideration and listened to? And what stories of infidelity are being told and accounted for in the ivory tower? Second, pursuing a phenomenological approach, I present exploratory findings of semi-structured interviews with people based in England who experienced, according to their understanding, infidelity. My sample includes both interviews with LGB and heterosexual folks in monogamous and consensually non-monogamous relationships. Through this approach, I foreground the sexual stories (Plummer 1995/2003) of queer infidelity. While these stories bear witness to the ongoing hegemony of heteronormativity, they also shed light on how LGB folks push back in these power struggles and renegotiate the meanings of infidelity. The insights illustrate how experiences of infidelity can open up space for forming and claiming one’s queer identity, and how it can serve in building and pursuing intimate relationships. Thus, these stories explore the potential for resistance and creativity, but also its related struggles, in queer narratives of infidelity. Based on its critical engagement with research on infidelity and the foregrounding of lived experiences and meanings of infidelity, this presentation emphasises the importance of listening to LGB stories of infidelity. As such, the findings illustrate the need for a critical engagement with the politics of infidelity. In contemporary discourses, infidelity is oftentimes portrayed as an individualised, private, and apolitical undertaking. In contrast, this talk showcases infidelity and its representations as an inherent site of power struggles, in which fundamental questions of sexual legitimacy and citizenship are negotiated.