In an October 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, J. D. Vance responded to critics who, in Carlson’s words, “went completely bananas” over his claim that to be childless is to have no “personal and direct stake” in the future of the country. The not-yet Senator from Ohio doubled down on this controversial opinion, stating: “What I was basically saying is that we’re effectively run in this country - via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs - by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and the choices that they made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Built upon a misogynistic stereotype and fettered by rank homophobia, it is clear why this comment came back to haunt Vance, the Vice Presidential candidate. Beneath the more obviously distasteful layers of this comment, however, lie a common set of assumptions ‘Western’ societies make about ‘good’ or ‘correct’ ways of relating to other people. The idea that being childless, unmarried, or - God forbid - interminably single always begets misery is, of course, a heteronormative one, but it also further stigmatizes those who fall entirely outside the bounds of mainstream relationality: Those who identify as aromantic, asexual, or polyamorous. Those who experience alternative forms or levels of empathy. Those who, for various reasons, cannot or choose not to engage in either the hetero- nor the homonormative prescriptions for “happy,” “healthy,” and “human” relationships. 

This panel hopes to 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 child-rearing in both hetero- and homo-normative contexts. We invite papers from a wide range of positionalities that utilize a variety of theoretical lenses, from critical neurodiversity to queer studies, from gender to race theory, and so on. Some potential subjects include: autism, schizophrenia, other cognitive and/or affective disabilities, aromanticism, asexuality, gender queerness, transhumanism, care, affect, etc.