ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the notion of the delayed performative of becoming a queer family through the lenses of waiting and queer temporalities. To wait for something queer—something different and outside—is a dance with time practiced in failure and virtuosic in its desire. To wait for the not-yet queer family is to imagine a world and a love just on or over the horizon. The chapter provides a series of fragments that take their inspiration from Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse—a meditation on the "movements, pleasures and poetics of the languages of and on love". Like adoption and like mothering, the delayed performative of the not-yet queer family is an anticipatory enactment of intimate relationships that braids together hope and affect. Queer family time and queer futurity rely on waiting as the "relational and collective modality of endurance and support".
