Anxious Intimacies: Polyamory, Jealousy, and Lifestyle Politics in America

ABSTRACT Polyamory is a lifestyle politics that makes visible key features of the affective milieu of late modernity in the United States. In particular, the practice of polyamory highlights the importance of anxiety as a mediator of physiological, psychological, social, and political phenomena, and the kinds of strategies people can employ to alter these associations. The provocation and subsequent management of anxiety in polyamory creates everyday microlaboratories for configuring affect, sociality, politics, and intimacy in dialogue with broader structures of value. Anxiety emerges as a sort of ethical barometer in polyamory, through which people make sense of their own internal worlds and identify areas for self‐work. Experiencing, recognizing, talking about, and working through anxiety in polyamory enables people to (re)fashion ethical selves in their intimate everyday lives, bringing anxieties about capitalism, consumerism, and individualism into conversation with the intimacies of attachment and desire. Understanding how anxiety works across these various domains within polyamory can provide insights into cultural and affective logics that structure social relationships in the contemporary United States, what intimate practices meant to undo these logics suggest about emergent forms of sociality, and how anthropologists can constructively engage anxiety as a multidimensional phenomenon.