I’d be very very wary of any suggestion that polyamory could be a basis for ‘communities of care’. Because in practice, what that means is that those with the most sexual and romantic partners receive the most care. Which is, ya know, a hierarchy of the fuckable.
That’s a terrible idea. If that isn’t immediately obvious, lemme explain:
For a start it reproduces all the worst things about existing systematic oppression: it makes care more accessible to skinny white abled twenty-somethings and less accessible to those who inhabit marginalized identities, especially those who are regularily fetishized and/or desexualized.
It also makes care inaccessible to those for whom romantic and sexual relationships are undesirable or difficult and it pushed people to stay in bad relationships or jump from bad relationship to bad relationship to avoid not having access to care.
And you can see this in practice. There are people in polyamory communities whose entire social network is composed of partners and metamores (partners of partners). Which means their whole social network falls apart if they lose the ability to be desirable or the willingness to have sexual and romantic relationships.
At it’s core, polyamory as a basis for ‘communities of care’ takes the strangehold of the nuclear family and makes it worse. The shitty deal of the nuclear family is “If you want stability, long term care, shared resources, someone to help you raise a child, you need to find someone willing to care for you AND fuck you for the rest of your life”. With polyamory as a basis for care the new shitty deal is “If you want all these things you need to find several people willing to care for you AND fuck you and you need to maintain that standard of desirability for the rest of your life.” Which is, ya know, not better.
We need communities of care, we need solidarity beyond the family, and we need the freedom to shape relationships on our own terms. Dismantling the relationship between sex, love and access to care is a key part of that.
See also: relationship anarchy is not about sex or polyamory
QueerAnarchism 