In a recent lecture on law’s exclusivity, I experimented with something new. I wanted my students to feel—not just analyze—how law shapes, permits, or restricts our intimate lives. Using the case study of polyamorous relationships and their legal challenges, I hoped to open a wider conversation: not only about polyamory, but about how each of us inhabits different positions of marginalization and privilege.
I used movement to help the students have embodied experience of intersectionality, by using the room as a map of privilege. I asked them to stand in a line across the room. They stood in a line, with no laptops, no notes—only their bodies in space. Then I read a series of prompts and invited them to step forward or backward in response. For instance,
- Step forward if you can legally marry the person you love in your home country.
- Step forward if your immigration status does not affect your intimate or family relationships.
- Step forward if your gender identity has never been questioned, criminalized, or mocked.
- Step forward if you have never had to hide part of your identity in a professional space.
They moved—mostly forward, sometimes with reflective pause, sometimes with a sudden step back. No one spoke, but their glances toward one another carried a kind of silent dialogue. When we finished, I asked them to reflect on how it felt to move.
One student remarked, “I don’t know why… but it felt sad to move,” looking little unsettled, surprised by her own reaction.
I responded, “Yes … I guess that is the awareness.”
And I saw her expression shift into something like recognition—of herself, of others, of the structures quietly shaping all our lives. Her sadness was not guilt. It was empathy beginning to move.
Why Movement Matters
I use this exercise because intersectionality cannot be understood only with the mind—it must be understood with the body. Intersectionality comes from embodied realities: race, gender, migration status, sexuality, class, language, belonging. When students move, something becomes visible.
Privilege is uneven, not cumulative.
Most people carry a mix of advantages and vulnerabilities.
We are all minorities in some aspects of our identity.
And only by gaining a deeply personal, embodied experience of marginalization or privilege—most often a mix of the two—can we extend our awareness to others. You do not need to be polyamorous to understand the constraints polyamorists face. You do not need to be Black to grasp the fear or exhaustion of racialized surveillance. You do not need to be queer to imagine the pain of hiding affection in public.
Law as a Mirror—and a Multiplier
With this awareness grounded in their bodies, we returned to the lecture’s central theme: how law constructs belonging and exclusion. Law does not create hierarchies on its own. It mirrors social inequalities—and often multiplies them.
The challenges faced by polyamorous people illustrate this: inheritance and housing rules structured around dyadic couples; immigration policies premised on monogamy; taxation and parental rights systems that erase non-normative families; everyday administrative inconveniences such as booking a hotel room or accessing family benefits; and the social stigma that compels many to hide their status at work for fear of being disadvantaged. These challenges intensify when layered onto other marginalized identities—being a woman, being poor, being a migrant, being racialized.
These examples help students see how law and social structures can become limits to personal freedom and belonging. They show how law and norms are built around the mainstream—around a presumed majority that appears “neutral” only to those who fit within it. Polyamory is just one case that reveals how deeply law privileges certain family forms and embeds assumptions about whose relationships count.
Law, by design, builds upon majority norms. And those norms feel invisible only to those already aligned with them. The movement exercise gave students a way to feel this: that law is not merely a set of rules but a spatial politics—of who moves freely, who moves cautiously, and who feels constrained before they even begin.
Hoko Horii 