Waiting for Queer

Abstract

This essay takes up the notion of the delayed performative of queer mothering and queer families through the lens of adoption. With a particular focus on the enactment of queer futurity in/through performances of waiting—the anxious waiting for “the call” bearing news of a child that adoptive mothers do, and the insistent waiting for the possibility of another world that mothering promises—this chapter performs queer mothering/queer families as a “doing for and toward the future” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 1). I use Judith Halberstam's idea of “queer family time”—an opening or horizon that imagines a future self and family “not quite here but always in process, always becoming, emerging in difference” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 112).