Conservative fears about queerness and transness are intimately bound up with anxieties about the erosion of the traditional patriarchal family. These fears are not unfounded. In the United States, kinship is becoming increasingly queer. More and more people are departing from cis-heteronormative plots for monogamy, reproduction, and long-term commitment—including those who do not identify as LGBTQIA+. To trace this cultural shift, this talk examines "throuple plots" in contemporary LGBTQ+ literature and popular culture, which narrate relationships among three people working together to coordinate sex, intimacy, and care. Throuple plots challenge foundational cis- and heteronormative narrative structures, particularly the marriage plot, the love triangle and the cheating plot, and they innovate queerer forms for sustaining non-monogamous bonds across differences in race, sexuality, gender, class, and ability. Moving across three distinct genres (sitcom, memoir, and novel), I trace how throuple plots reckon with the ways that queer and trans kinships are both threatened and idealized by cis-heteronormative culture. And I conclude that queer kinship narratives can help us to confront the gaps between abstract political ideals, like “queer community,” and the messy, often-imperfect ways we actually live and practice queer kinship in the world.Teagan Bradway is a professor of English at SUNY Cortland and a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University for 2025-2026. She is a queer theorist and scholar of LGBTQ+ and experimental literatures. Her work examines how queer kinship takes shape and endures through aesthetic and affective labor. She is particularly fascinated by the ways LGBTQ+ people sustain social worlds through storytelling and other narrative practices. She is the author of Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading (Palgrave 2017) and co-editor of Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (Duke 2022) and After Queer Studies: Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century (Cambridge 2019). Bradway is also the guest editor of Unaccountably Queer (2024), a special issue of differences, and Lively Words: The Politics and Poetics of Experimental Writing (2019), a special issue of College Literature. Bradway’s articles have appeared in venues such as PMLA, GLQ, MLQ, Textual Practice, ASAP/J, The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature, the Routledge Companion to Literature and Politics, and The Nation. In 2024, Bradway was a Hunt-Simes Visiting Junior Chair of Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney. Currently, Bradway is completing a book on queer kinship narratives and co-writing “Endless Love” with the late Elizabeth Freeman.