ABSTRACT
Norms, it appears, do not travel well between galaxies. This chapter explores how Regueiro’s and Barceló’s stories humorously upset the standardisation of sexuality through unexpected and mistake-laden sexual encounters with extraterrestrial species. During these human/extraterrestrial encounters in interstellar space, the heterosexual bind unravels as spatially segregated species cease to exist at a remove from one another. In Barceló’s Consecuencias Naturales, a macho engineer in Spain’s space programme is confronted with the fact that alien bodies are, despite his best efforts, un-mappable within human formations of racial hierarchy and binary gender identity. In Regueiro’s “Planetoide de Oportunidades”, an unknown bacterium impregnates a lesbian couple, subsequently creating a hybrid species that undermines the humans’ colonising efforts to eradicate them from the planetoid. This confronts and resists humanity’s violent history as “custodians” of planet Earth, while also suggesting that, somewhat paradoxically, humanity’s only means of survival is extinction in the form of merging and metamorphosing with another species.
