There’s no limit to your love – scripting the polyamorous self.

Abstract

This article explores how the polyamorous self gets storied on NSFW (not safe for work) blogs of tumblr., and the ways the scripting involved in this practice reconfigures the meanings attached to one’s self, body and sexuality. The article relies on case-based narrative analysis, where I work the interface of ethnographic material (two year field study), textual blog content, images and individual and group interviews with polyamorous bloggers. I contextualize it via concepts of sexual scripting (Gagnon & Simon, 1973), elements of Foucault’s (1988) technologies of the self - particularly critical self-awareness and self-care - and Koskela’s (2004) concept of ›empowering exhibitionism‹. Sexual and romantic behaviors are often cloackd in silence and executed in privacy because of feelings of guilt and anxiety, especially so in the case of practices that fall outside of the mono-normative grand narrative still cultivated in our society. Online one can challenge the scripted norms that regulate sexual behavior and our identities as sexual beings.