LAUSR

ABSTRACT Following Lynne Huffer's work on queer feminism, this abridged essay centers the figure of the lesbian in order to develop a dyke ethics that engenders nuanced thinking about both monogamy and embodiment. The essay reads Alison Bechdel's comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, to elaborate a “dyke ethics of anti-monogamy.” Grounded in notions of friendship, community, and social justice, this ethics decenters the sexual dyad in a way that polyamory does not. It also insists upon a theoretical and ethical disposition of respect for the simultaneously political and embodied nature of desire. In so doing, it offers first a way of re-thinking the story of monogamy's nature as a naturecultural tale about mononormative desire and further places that desire in a field of relationality that renders its significance as a feature of humanness and an object of scientific inquiry strange.