FEATURED PUBLICATIONS
Forbidden Intimacies
Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance
Melanie Heath
Publisher: Stanford University Press (2023)
A poignant account of everyday polygamy and what its regulation reveals about who is viewed as an "Other"
In the past thirty years, polygamy has become a flashpoint of conflict as Western governments attempt to regulate certain cultural and religious practices that challenge seemingly central principles of family and justice. In Forbidden Intimacies, Melanie Heath comparatively investigates the regulation of polygamy in the United States, Canada, France, and Mayotte. Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic and archival sources, Heath uncovers the ways in which intimacies framed as "other" and "offensive" serve to define the very limits of Western tolerance.
These regulation efforts, counterintuitively, allow the flourishing of polygamies on the ground. The case studies illustrate a continuum of justice, in which some groups, like white fundamentalist Mormons in the U.S., organize to fight against the prohibition of their families' existence, whereas African migrants in France face racialized discrimination in addition to rigid migration policies. The matrix of legal and social contexts, informed by gender, race, sexuality, and class, shapes the everyday experiences of these relationships. Heath uses the term "labyrinthine love" to conceptualize the complex ways individuals negotiate different kinds of relationships, ranging from romantic to coercive.
What unites these families is the secrecy in which they must operate. As government intervention erodes their abilities to secure housing, welfare, work, and even protection from abuse, Heath exposes the huge variety of intimacies, and the power they hold to challenge heteronormative, Western ideals of love.
Espousing Patriarchy:
Conciliatory Masculinity and Homosocial Femininity in Religiously Conservative Families
Melanie Heath
Research article published in Gender & Society (2019)
Abstract: Drawing on in-depth interviews with individuals in current and former plural Mormon fundamentalist families, Heath demonstrates how gender is structured relationally in plural marriage, dependent on noncoercive power relations. Men perform a “conciliatory masculinity” based on their position as head of the family that requires constant consensus-building skills and emotional labor to maintain family harmony. This masculinity is shaped in relation to women’s performance of “homosocial femininity” that curbs men’s power by building strong bonds among wives to deflect jealousies and negotiate household duties. Heath argues for the importance of studying masculinities and femininities together as a relational structure to better understand specific religious and family contexts.
Keywords: conservative religions; masculinity; femininity; polygyny; fundamentalist Mormonism; gender relations
Judging Women’s Sexual Agency:
Contemporary Sex Wars in the Legal Terrain of Prostitution and Polygamy
Melanie Heath, Julie Gouweloos, and Jessica Braimoh
Research article published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2016)
The legal arena has been a major site for battles over questions of sexuality. Feminists have often looked to the law to decide contests over women’s sexual agency, pitting feminists against each other over issues such as prostitution. This article compares two legal cases in Canada, one on prostitution and one on polygamy, to shed light on the relationship between state legal apparatuses and the feminist actors who engage them. The discursive strategies of the actors in the prostitution case coalesce along the familiar lines of the feminist sex wars. The “danger stance” views prostitution as an injustice forced upon women who have no other alternatives; the “choice stance” contends that prostitution is not inherently grounded in the exploitation of women. Likewise, the discursive strategies of actors in the polygamy case—a very different context for thinking about women’s agency—reflect a similar divide. Through an analysis of legal documents, this article considers the strange bedfellows in the prostitution and polygamy cases to provide insight into the current political terrain of the sex wars. Our analysis sheds light on the mechanisms within legal structures that regulate conceptions of women’s sexual agency.
Testing the Limits of Religious Freedom:
The Case of Polygamy’s Criminalization in Canada
Melanie Heath
Book Chapter Contribution in The Polygamy Question (2016)
(Book Authors: Janet Bennion, Lisa Fishbayn Joffe)
“Testing the Limits of Religious Freedom: The Case of Polygamy’s Criminalization in Canada” analyses the discourses used by the judge in the 2010 British Columbia Polygamy Reference. The province of British Columbia had been faced for many years with the question of whether to prosecute members of a small community of Fundamentalist Mormons living in an area called “Bountiful” in Canada for the crime of polygamy. While there was a criminal law on the books, the province had been reluctant to prosecute members of this group for fear that the law would be struck down as unconstitutional. The government sent a reference to the British Columbia Supreme Court, asking them for an opinion on how the law should be interpreted and whether it was permissible to enforce it under the Canadian Constitution.. Heath examines how the opinion places disproportionate emphasis on the nature of harms associated with polygamy and insufficient emphasis on claims, lodged by men and women, that polygamy allowed them to pursue their own religiously based conception of a good life. Her main argument is that the court’s discussion of the harm of polygyny obscures its ability to consider religious freedom and the right to familial and sexual intimacy.
Keywords: polygamy, religious freedom, sexual intimacy, criminal law