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"No Drama" and its many issues
Jul. 17th, 2015 09:22 pmI am polyamorous, and some of the poly community spaces that haven't shaken out all the bugs yet have this terrible habit of declaring "NO DRAMA" ... like that's a thing that works. But it doesn't work because humans don't work like that. We're a species that thrives on emotions and complexity - and the poly community is supposed to be a place that encourages the expression of such.
What "No Drama" does:
it encourages emotional dishonesty in an environment where fostering honest communication is supposed to be the norm. It causes as much turbulence as it stops due to making people feel as though bringing their problems before the group will cause them to be shunned socially. That vulnerability takes a great deal of bravery, and instead of rewarding it "no drama" seeks to criminalize it;
it fosters a policing outlook based not on member safety but on a subjective metric which if it has to be appealed will cause the thing it's trying to prevent. How is drama defined? How do we argue about what it is without creating it? How will it be discouraged without creating more drama than we are stopping?;
it is unevenly enforced across genders. Because expressing emotion is constructed as a feminine behavior, masculine people are less likely to be accused of starting drama due to their practice at emotional regulation. It becomes a way to discriminate against people who express problems or feelings others find uncomfortable, or who are still learning emotional regulation. In a space that encourages the open expression of feelings, it becomes a way to tell femme and genderqueer people to be silent about emotions others don't want to deal with.
it is enforced unevenly across power divides, like any silencing tactic. If a secondary partner has a problem and seeks advice from the community, they can be accused of starting drama by a primary partner who does not have to be held accountable, since their share of causing the trouble happened in private. If someone in the community has previous abuse triggered during a community meeting, it puts the onus of the emotional work on the victim to calm themselves lest they be "starting drama". It adds an element of injustice to our community, and to all communities that use it as a cultural standard.
"No Drama" as a framing issue:
Ask yourself these questions: for whose benefit do we avoid engaging in complex emotional reasoning, i.e. "drama"? Is the group meeting for some other purpose than to discuss problems and provide support to its members? If the person who has brought their problem to a group because their partners were not sufficiently able to achieve understanding without help, are their emotional needs being left without redress if the group declares their problems too problematic? Is the job of fixing these problems being left on the weakest and most isolated members?
Our communities are fragile, and our members have no recourse for advice beyond our borders much of the time. Telling someone not to have drama is basically telling them to stop having problems which ... we can't do. Often our intentions for saying so are even more suspect: we feel that the groups time and concern are better taken up with discussing our problems, which are not drama because we can conveniently define drama any way we like. In this way "no drama" is a silencing tactic that warns people to play happy families for public consumption on pain of nebulous punishment. It has no place in the polyamory community, and the world would be better off it it were replaced with a more nuanced understanding of complexity and concern for vulnerability.
With special thanks to my friends Terri Hudson and Cassie Withey Rila, to whom some of these points belong.
What "No Drama" does:
"No Drama" as a framing issue:
Ask yourself these questions: for whose benefit do we avoid engaging in complex emotional reasoning, i.e. "drama"? Is the group meeting for some other purpose than to discuss problems and provide support to its members? If the person who has brought their problem to a group because their partners were not sufficiently able to achieve understanding without help, are their emotional needs being left without redress if the group declares their problems too problematic? Is the job of fixing these problems being left on the weakest and most isolated members?
Our communities are fragile, and our members have no recourse for advice beyond our borders much of the time. Telling someone not to have drama is basically telling them to stop having problems which ... we can't do. Often our intentions for saying so are even more suspect: we feel that the groups time and concern are better taken up with discussing our problems, which are not drama because we can conveniently define drama any way we like. In this way "no drama" is a silencing tactic that warns people to play happy families for public consumption on pain of nebulous punishment. It has no place in the polyamory community, and the world would be better off it it were replaced with a more nuanced understanding of complexity and concern for vulnerability.
With special thanks to my friends Terri Hudson and Cassie Withey Rila, to whom some of these points belong.
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