Queer Waiting

The act and experience of waiting – and refusing to wait – is a central feature in queer people’s lives: from waiting to come out, to waiting for political and social recognition, to refusing to wait while hard-won legal rights are taken away today. By tracing and exploring entanglements of queerness and waiting in fictional and autobiographical queer-themed narratives, this book proposes the new theoretical concept of “queer waiting”. Drawing on a diverse selection of narratives, genres, and cultural contexts, including early queer texts about gay men, texts about trans experiences and waiting for death during the AIDS epidemic, films such as Brokeback Mountain and the videogame The Last of Us Part II, Oscar von Seth argues that although waiting is a universal human activity and an unavoidable aspect of life, it can be understood as a distinct and specifically queer cultural phenomenon. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.