Queer waiting in literature and film

Oscar von Seth presents parts of his postdoctoral project “Queer Waiting in Literature and Film”. The project poses the question if waiting, a universal human activity and an unavoidable aspect of life, can be understood as a queer cultural phenomenon. With references to a diverse selection of fictional and autobiographical queer-themed narratives—from early queer texts about gay men, like Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) and E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1913–14), through a variety of autobiographical narratives about waiting to die during the AIDS epidemic, to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), the film Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), Abdellah Taïa’s autobiography An Arab Melancholia (2008), and the videogame The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020)— the project proposes that while waiting, to everyone, can make the present seem unbearable, queers experience it, and handle it, in unique ways.