Time, Space, and Queer Grief in Postsocialist Hungary

Abstract

Queer and Affect Theories, and their intersections, have focused attention on the nature and impacts of loss and grief for queer subjectivities and politics, finding them foundational to both individual and collective affiliations and agencies, and dispossessions and disassociations. These explorations have often remained within the limited spatialities and temporalities of an unmarked Western cultural studies. But what happens when queer loss and grief emerge in the fraught dis/identificatory fields of geotemporal sexual politics? What else might we see if we track such material/emotional transformations across the historical arc of event and meaning “elsewhere”? Drawing not on Affect Theory but on anthropological approaches to emotions and their politics, on postcolonial work on belonging’s geotemporality, and queer thinking on the politics of disidentification, this paper traces the emotional politics of queer (non)belonging and (non)futurity in postsocialist Hungary, from dreams of imminent geotemporal “normality” in the early 1990s, through growing disillusionment and shame at both national and queer “backwardness” in the early 2000s, to the current despair at the Orbán regime’s relentlessly heteronational politics, in an effort to expand the boundaries of spatiality and temporality, and thus the epistemological and political potential of current understandings of queer grief.