In contemporary Turkey, polygamy is often understood as a backwards, uncivilized and patriarchal practice, both a vestige of the Ottoman past, as well as stemming from the insufficient secularization of pious Muslim subjects who practice it. In return, monogamy is imagined as the progressive, civilized, and equal form of marriage. Yet these days, other, emergent forms of nonmonogamy complicate the historical opposition between polygamy and monogamy as backward/traditional and progressive/modern. These are various forms of what is referred to as “consensual nonmonogamy” as practiced by queer, non-binary and trans identified subjects in Turkey, echoing a growing interest in (and discursive explosion of) polyamory and other forms of “progressive” nonmonogamy in the US and other “Western” countries. This results in the “traditional” polygamy to be cast as doubly uncivilized/backward.

Evren Savci argues that by centering not liberal notions of freedom and consent, but feminist and queer Marxist notions of enclosure, privatization, reproductive labor, value, alienation and (queer) commons, we can glean similarities in these two forms of organizing intimacy that at first sight seem to fall on opposite ends of the binaries of modern/traditional, feminist/patriarchal, free/unfree, civilized/backward, secular/religious. Such reorganization of the analytical tools used to understand sexuality also makes room for thinking about normativity, extraction and exploitation together, despite the historical divergences between Marxist and Foucaultian traditions.