ABSTRACT
This chapter reads Isabel Waidner’s contemporary queer experimental fiction and its engagement with questions of social inequality, precarity, and intersectionality against the backdrop of more traditional narrative patterns of social mobility, notably Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, a seminal text that addresses the interdependencies of class, homosexuality, and social rise. This juxtaposition will help highlight the impact of a decidedly queer perspective on subjectivity, life-storying, and social critique, and demonstrate the close connection between aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Waidner’s literary and epistemological interventions will be analyzed in three steps. The first concentrates on the use of queer temporalities to interrupt the narrative pattern of linear progression and create an extended present in which forms of precarious existence in times of neoliberalism and nationalism are interrogated. The second focuses on Waidner’s notion of the queer subject, which no longer responds to binary structures and clear categorizations. Instead, it embodies intricate forms of intersectionality, agency, and disenfranchisement and enters into various forms of relations that can be more adequately described as assemblages, a term emanating from new materialist studies. This particular lens will be used in the third section to discuss some features of Waidner’s experimental aesthetics.
