What happens to ‘strangeness’ and the ‘stranger’ in a society calling itself perfect? What changes when we marry Sara Ahmed’s concept of the stranger with the ideas that shape New Materialism? This joint keynote talk examines these questions with reference to historical and speculative literary production. The first half will discuss the example of the Oneida Community (1848-1880), a Christian, communist, free-love group in upstate New York. We will examine literary characterizations of the group from within and without, looking for what constitutes the ‘strangeness’ of this paradoxical and unique social experiment as well as questioning whether the idea of the ‘stranger’ is always an invidious ethical concept. The second half will shift into the future and beyond the confines to Earth to take on Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton (1976) as a case study for challenging the notion that strangeness and the Other are actively put onto other bodies. Delany shifts the functionality of these concepts to enable a reading of a strangeness within the self through subject-environment intra-action, a strangeness that destabilizes and shifts identity rather than a process that shapes it by means of difference. The novel guides the reader along a path where identity is shaped by growing strangeness within and the resulting unstable identity becomes productive in cultural and social change. Both of these contributions will be particularly interested in how these ideas affect our understanding of personhood, the relationship between real and imaginary utopias, and the ambiguities of the strange as such.