I gave a talk about my on-going research at the symposium with queer activists, lawyers and scholars. Below is the summary of the talk:
My Questions
As a legal scholar, I have long been interested in how law constructs and regulates agency—especially in the domain of intimacy. My doctoral research examined child marriage and the paradox of liberal legalism: While international human rights law claims to uphold individual autonomy, in practice, the recognition of agency is often conditional. Individuals are deemed capable of agency only when their choices align with prevailing moral or legal standards. Choices deemed ‘wrong’—such as engaging in sex work, child marriage, or undergoing female genital mutilation—are frequently dismissed as forms of false consciousness or coercion.
My postdoctoral work, which focused on sexual violence law, further developed this critique. In liberal societies, intimate relationships are ideally private and free from state intrusion. Yet, in efforts to protect individuals from harm—such as domestic violence or sexual coercion—the state often intervenes in this private sphere. Recent rape law reforms have expanded state surveillance and introduced strict carceral approaches. While intended to safeguard autonomy, they can paradoxically expose intimate life to new forms of control.
This tension becomes especially vivid when the state confronts relationships deemed morally suspect or socially deviant. Homosexuality, for example, has historically been regulated through sodomy laws, unequal age of consent provisions, or the denial of marriage rights. Similarly, age of consent laws—though designed to protect minors—are often enforced in ways that police teenage sexuality, particularly when it defies heteronormative or gendered expectations. These examples show how law often acts as a mechanism of repressive normalization. It reinforces dominant moral frameworks under the guise of neutrality or protection.
A question arises as to how law impacts individual freedom in intimate relationships. To address this question, this project focuses on people who exercise their agency to engage in so-called ‘deviant’ intimacy, that is, sexual and romantic relationships that are not allowed in law. Why does law prohibit these relationships (reasons), and what are the justifications given? How does law impact individual freedom in intimate relationships? More broadly: How do we navigate being different? How do we, as an individual, a citizen, and a member of communities, experience and navigate through different normative structures? How do we maintain our freedom within a larger system that may go against our preferences, while being in a normative society that propels us to conform? How do we deal with the influence of norms and opinions that could dictate our preferences and behaviors?
The Present Research
The present research serves as a case study that contributes to answer these broader questions, by focusing on polyamorists. The following research questions will be explored:
How do those in polyamorous relationships exercise their agency within and outside the legal realm? How do they experience, perceive, consider, engage with the state law and other normative orders that privilege monogamy?
I adopt a socio-legal approach grounded in qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews and participant observation. The project is inspired by legal consciousness scholarship, which examines how people experience, internalize, and contest legal norms in their daily lives. But I go further: legal consciousness, for me, is not just about what people say about the law. It is also how they feel it, perform it, play with it. For that reason, I also use audio-visual methods to capture the embodied and affective dimensions of legal experience.
So far, I’ve interviewed and observed 26 people:
- Age: 4 in their 20s, 10 in their 30s, 11 in their 40s
- Gender: 13 women, 9 men, 2 non-binary, 1 transgender
- Sexuality: Most participants identify as queer, though their orientations and relational identities are fluid and often resist fixed categories.
- Location: 11 in the Netherlands, 11 in France, 2 in Luxembourg
- Occupations: Ranging from IT, education, and research to gastronomy and those on social benefits
- Education: Most have completed higher education
Preliminary Findings
While I’m still analyzing the data, several themes have begun to emerge.
[Relationship to Norms]
Many participants are embedded in alternative communities—queer circles, anarchist networks, dance collectives like balfolk, self-development, tantra, ecological or communal living environments, sex-positive community but also asexuality. These contexts often offer a kind of cultural buffer, where polyamory is not only tolerated but normalized. Being poly in these spaces allows for support, shared vocabulary, and collective practices of care.
Outside of these bubbles, however, many choose to pass as monogamous or keep their polyamorous status private. Some speak of one partner, while in fact referring to several. Disclosure is often avoided in workplaces or with family, out of concern for misunderstanding or stigma. Intersectional factors—such as gender, nationality, financial status—can heighten the stakes of non-conformity. Intersectional factors—such as gender, sexual orientation, nationality, or financial vulnerability—can heighten the risks. As many participants put it, in remarkably similar words: “I don’t want to take risks.” “They do not need to know.”
[Relationship to the Law]
Participants raised a wide range of legal and bureaucratic challenges such as marriage, taxation, housing, inheritance, hospital visitation, parental rights, insurance. Also Booking hotel rooms, sharing bank accounts, or applying for family discounts—small but significant reminders of institutional mononormativity.
So what is their legal consciousness? It is still to be developed but some preliminary ideas: ‘performing in front of the law / distance with the law / downplaying the law’?
One illustrative example comes from the civil wedding of two polyamorous women in their 20s, living in Luxembourg. At city hall, the mayor read aloud standard civil code articles, including the promise of fidelity. The couple said “yes”—complying with the formalities. But at their private celebration, they exchanged their own vows—open, polyamorous, and deeply personal. In our interview, one of them reflected:
“It’s a way to navigate the gray zone. We comply with the vows in the law, but we do them in our own way. Fidelity—we do it in our own way. Because we could cheat on each other, but we don’t. That complexity makes our relationship transparent—and strong.”
Another added:
“Like Butler says we perform gender, I think we also perform legal status. We marry under a monogamous law, but we don’t have to blurb everything to them. They don’t care. So we just adapt to the setting. […] It doesn’t feel like a limitation so far. I mean, as I said, worst case scenario we would have to buy a house, we would create a legal entity or we would perform this. We are roommates. And then what we do in between us in the house, the bank doesn’t really matter. Sometimes you don’t have to tell everything.”
They treat the law as a code they’re fluent in—but not defined by. They engage with legal forms pragmatically, aware of their symbolic and material consequences (property, inheritance, taxes), but also of their limits—what the law doesn’t see or regulate. Law becomes a surface to play on, not a foundation to build identity upon. Their legal consciousness oscillates between performance and autonomy. Not quite against the law, but never fully of it either.
Their legal consciousness thus oscillates between performance and autonomy. It is not quite “against the law” (which implies antagonism), but they use legal forms strategically, knowingly, and with distance. This resonates with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Just as gender is not a fixed identity but a repeated, stylized performance, here the legal status of “married” is enacted, repeated, and stylized without full identification. The civil code is treated like a script to be performed in public, then overwritten in private.
At the edges of the law and legal edgework
Another informant from Ede. A Jewish lesbian woman who lives with her two spouses. Under the state law she makes meticulous legal arrangements to make sure that they can support each other in marriage-like way. She told me:
“When I teach non-Jewish women who want to become Jewish about Jewish law, I try to show them that it’s at the edges of law where its essence becomes visible. When you learn where a law ends, or touches another law, then you begin to understand what’s really inside of it.”
“If someone holds a gun to my head and says, ‘Eat this non-kosher meat,’ I will eat it. But if they say, ‘Kill that person, or I’ll kill you,’ I won’t. Even though someone is going to die either way. Probably both of us. But that’s not the point. That tells us something sacred about the law—it’s encoded in the commandment: you shall live by them. That’s not just about survival—it’s about a kind of sanctity, the prioritization of life. Shabbat, too—it’s full of rules, of things we can and can’t do, and that structure is meaningful because it also bumps up against this commandment: you shall live by them. At those points of tension, we learn. When two commandments meet and seem to contradict, that’s where you really see them.”
me: And you say that you’re dealing a lot with the edges of laws.
“I homeschool, I’m polyamorous. I’m lesbian. These are definitely edge cases. Where people never quite know what to do.”
me: And when you touch the edge of the cases how do you do that? How do you go about it?”
“We do a lot of research. We study where the edges are. We made sure we didn’t break the bigamy laws, but we still found a way to get married. We asked ourselves: what are our parameters? And within those, what can we do? Because when you live in the edge cases, you also end up shaping the edge itself. You change the edges.
So many people came to our wedding and many of them were her friends—also polyamorous—who thought they’d never get married. And all of a sudden people were having an emotional spiritual experience with a marriage which was polyamorous, and all of a sudden they could see a reflection of something of them in a marriage.”
For her, legality is not about clear-cut rules or compliance; it’s about proximity to sacred thresholds. Her consciousness of the law is constructive: she uses state law and Jewish law together to invent new legal arrangements. Where most people see “gates”—boundaries that close access—she sees empty space: potential, ambiguity, interpretive freedom.
This is not legal subversion, nor full submission—they see law as a living architecture. It operates in the legal gray zones not by accident but by design. Here, legal edge work becomes a tool for expanding the space of freedom, for themselves and for others. Their experiment expands symbolic and emotional space for others, as it was clear in the example of their wedding. They do so by exploring what is possible at the margins.
Hoko Horii 