Waiting for Queer

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’’ (Mun˜oz,
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’’ (Mun˜oz, 2009, p. 112).