Utilizing a variety of genres, modes, and methods, this panel will shine a light on those who cannot or will not conform to the strictures of what ‘Western’ society deems necessary for happiness and humanity: love, sex, and/or child-rearing. Whether they be between humans, aliens, monsters, or objects, our speakers will explore the implications of the non-normative relationships we find in the stories we read. With roots in posthumanism, queer and affect theories, the scholarship on this panel engages with an interdisciplinary set of ideas. Pulling from such scholars as Donna Haraway, José Esteban Muñoz, Robert McRuer, M. Remi Yergeau, and Sara Ahmed, this panel seeks to identify what we might learn about the Norm by looking at the Other, and how we should go about this learning process.

These questions will be tackled directly by the panel's co-organizer and speaker, Shanna Killeen of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Killeen's work will serve as a fitting framework for the rest of the panel, examining the aromantic archival and aesthetic practices presented in the Japanese film I Am What I Am to uncover "the relational possibilities opened up by aromanticism." As Killeen analyzes a human way of living often rendered invisible by homo- and heteronormativity, our second speaker, Elijah Mullens will look beyond our world to the realm of aliens and mutants. In their paper, "'An idea you'll have to give birth to': An Exploration of Astronomy and Queer Relationality in Planet-Size X-Men," Mullens, a doctoral student in Cornell's astronomy department, engages with real-world astronomy and queer theory to show how X-Men is "redefining what it means to exist together on a cosmic scale."

Bringing queer theory into conversation with affect and disability theories, our third speaker, Weston Leo Richey explores what relationships may exist between humans, cyborgs, and non-living things. In their paper, "Objects of Love: On the Quest for Intimacy Without Subjectivity in Kazuo Ishiguro and Ottessa Moshfegh," Richey proposes a new way of reading affect in speculative fiction, a process they term "speculative externalization." With a theoretical foundation in the work of Sara Ahmed, José Muñoz, and Jack Halberstam, Richey aims to show how Ishiguro and Moshfegh "present modes of intimacy, loving, and connection that are uniquely speculative, queer, and crip."

Finally, Flora Roussel will conclude the panel with a reading of Blutbuch by Kim de L'Horizon, and Photosynthèses by Camille Cornu. Both de L'Horizon, a non-binary writer of Swiss origin, and Cornu, a French novelist and poet, employ experimental literary forms to transcend binaries. Roussel broadens the scope of our panel beyond interpersonal relations to look at the spaces and temporalities those relationships may foster. In her paper, "Affect, Environment, and Precarity," Roussel proposes that "while virtuality is usually understood as a non-affective technology enabled through specific devices," queer novels, too, can be read as "virtual spaces" that remap time and space to disrupt simple binaries.

With these four 12-minute presentations, each woven together by our presider, Amelia Cruz from the University of Southern California, an expert in interdisciplinarity, Alternate Relationalities will, by its very presence, trouble the long-established 'way of things'. We hope to provide a new set of tools for interpreting the possibilities and limitations of human connection, to, in the words of autistic scholar and rhetorician, Remi Yergeau, "fuck up that which is already fucked up."