Queer Waiting in Literature and Film

This project aims to explore entanglements of waiting and queerness in literature and film and develop a new concept in queer theory called "queer waiting." Queer waiting will be defined as waiting that is awkward, unusual, and interwoven with non-normative sexuality and gender.Because of stigma, queer people often wait for a better future.

The hypothesis in this project is therefore that queer characters experience waiting in ways that are directly linked with their queerness.

To provide a broad account of the project’s key concept, its corpus will be comprised of openly queer texts (from the 20th and 21st centuries). It asks questions like: How can waiting, a universal human activity, be conceptualized as queer? How does queer waiting expand our knowledge of queer subjectivity in historical and cultural contexts?

The methods necessary to answer the questions are close textual analysis and comparisons.The project runs for three years and will result in a monograph that emphasizes waiting as an unresearched but central aspect of queerness.

The importance of the project lies in the introduction of a new queer vocabulary that can be employed in queer studies and other academic fields.

By combining José Esteban Muñoz’s ideas on "queer time" and Martin Heidegger’s Gelassenheit (releasement) with literary and cultural studies, the project proposes that while waiting, to all, can make the present seem unbearable, queers experience it, and handle it, in unique ways.