Oscar von Seth
Postdoctoral position at Centre for Gender Research
- E-mail:
- oscar.von.seth@gender.uu.se
- Visiting address:
- Villavägen 6A
752 36 UPPSALA - Postal address:
- Box 527
751 20 Uppsala
Download contact information for Oscar von Seth at Centre for Gender Research
- ORCID:
- 0000-0002-6291-3257
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Short presentation
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Gender Research (between 2024–2026). My research interests are at the intersection of literature, cinema, and queer theories. I am also interested in masculinities, disability studies, human-animal studies, and the homosexual emancipation movement and sexology discourse in the German-speaking world before the Second World War.
Keywords
- comparative literature
- disability studies
- film
- gender and sexuality
- german literature
- history of sexuality
- human-animal studies
- masculinities
- queer kinship
- queer theory
Biography
I have a background as a contemporary dancer. I also used to work in theatre as a prompter and assistant director to Lars Norén. In 2014, I was awarded second place in Umeå novellpris, Sweden's biggest competition for short stories, and in 2017, I debuted as a novelist with Snö som föll i fjol (Yesterday's News, Calidris).
I got my PhD in Comparative Literature in 2022 with the dissertation Outsiders and Others: Queer Friendships in Novels by Hermann Hesse. Before commencing my current postdoc project (in January 2024), I taught in Gender Studies and at the Police Training Program at Södertörn University, and in Comparative Literature at Umeå University.
Research
My current postdoc project, “Queer Waiting in Literature and Film” (funded by the Swedish Research Council), poses the question if waiting, a universal human activity and an unavoidable aspect of life, can be understood as a queer cultural phenomenon. The project proposes “queer waiting,” a new theoretical concept in Queer Studies that is developed by tracing and exploring entanglements of queerness and waiting in a diverse selection of fictional and autobiographical queer-themed narratives (that is, texts in which queerness figures in one way or another). In broad terms, waiting is a universal human activity and an unavoidable aspect of life. Moreover, it is a phenomenon that can be said to connote queerness in the sense that experiences of waiting are often perceived as strange, drawn-out, awkward, and tedious sort of “temporal breaks” in which time is somehow suspended. Focusing exclusively on queer-themed narratives, this project expands such established notions of waiting and displays that the phenomenon has specific implications for queer characters (as well as for real-life queer people, as demonstrated in autobiographical queer texts). In its most broad definition, queer waiting is waiting experienced by queer people. More specifically, queer waiting is a form of waiting that is entwined with what makes people queer, like gender nonconformity, norm-challenging sexualities, and forms of kinship that challenge heteronormative relationality.
To provide a comprehensive account of queer waiting, the project’s corpus consists of approximately 30 queer-themed narratives from the 20th and 21st centuries, of which 15 are thoroughly interpreted. The others provide brief but significant references to queer characters’ experiences of waiting. The selection of material is extensive, 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 set during the AIDS epidemic—like Lou Sullivan’s diaries about coming of age as a HIV-positive gay trans man, We Both Laughed in Pleasure (2019), and Craig T. Harris’s I’m Going Out Like a Fucking Meteor, about waiting to die from AIDS-related complications at the height of the 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). To conceptualize queer waiting in and beyond these texts, the project draws on three main theoretical sources: José Esteban Muñoz’s theories about queerness and time (2009), Sara Ahmed’s notions of happiness and “happy endings” (2010), and Martin Heidegger’s concept “releasement” (1959). All in all, the project proposes that while waiting, to everyone, can make the present seem unbearable, queers experience it, and handle it, in unique ways.
In my dissertation Outsiders and Others (2022), I examine friendships between men in novels by Hermann Hesse. Male friendship is a key theme for Hesse, one of the most widely read German-language authors of the twentieth century and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Hesse’s protagonists are usually depicted as outsiders who come to know themselves in an intimate bond with another man. The friend is almost always portrayed as rebellious, beautiful, enigmatic, and inspiring, and comes to play a key role in the protagonist’s personal development and journey through life. Outsiders and Others draws on queer theories and queer concepts to explore how characters in Hesse’s fiction intersect with and connote queerness—such as homoeroticism and non-conformism—and argues that the friendships at the center of Hesse’s stories are “queer friendships” that challenge heteronormative conceptions of relationality, sexuality, and desire.
Media
Outsiders and Others: Queer Friendships in Novels by Hermann Hesse
This dissertation explores how characters who embody outsiderness and/or otherness intersect with and connote queerness—such as homoeroticism and nonconformism—in two novels by Hermann Hesse.
https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-48710
Uppsala Short Film Festival
Participation at a special viewing with Uppsala Short Film Festival, "Queer Utopia" (in Swedish).