OR TEN DAYS I WATCHED my mother die. And when she died, I was stunned. I had been waiting for her... more OR TEN DAYS I WATCHED my mother die. And when she died, I was stunned. I had been waiting for her to die, and her death, foretold by a series of unmistakable signs, somehow came as a complete shock, a bizarre, unthinkable. .. thing that hit me completely unprepared. So what had I been doing for ten days? I don't know exactly, but not what I thought I was doing. In this article, I sketch the broad contours of what I believe are the ways in which caring and waiting may overlap and open up in the act of waiting the possibilities for ethical modes of connectedness that define care. The films through which I chose to address this issue belong to a corpus I call transnational queer cinema: unapologetic art films that favor poetic rather than narrative forms, bodies over subjectivity, and touch on a series of recurring themes such as precariousness, vulnerability, connectedness, and unknowability. These works also embrace radical slowness, an often-unsettling formal choice that, in what follows, I tie to the dual question of waiting and caring for the sick in the context of displacement and migration. Many forms of medical care involve waiting-waiting for people's condition to improve or worsen, maybe for them to die, waiting in any case for the care to end. At a basic level, care, like waiting, involves duration (of the caring relationship, which unfolds not just in space but also in time) and a degree of uncertainty (regarding the outcome or progression of the condition involved-what Hervé Guibert, dying of AIDS, once referred to as "this margin of uncertainty, which is common to all ailing people in the world." 1 Things become more complex after that. Can waiting, defined by temporality and the absence of the awaited object, share ethically and perhaps politically useful characteristics with caring, usually premised on presence and spatial contiguity? The first indication that it might comes from etymology. The same Germanic root gave us the English "wait," "watch," "wake" and their derivatives, while Latin origins connect the French attendre (to wait), the Spanish atender (to attend, to heed, but also to care, to nurse) and the English "attend," "attention," "attentive," and the like. This original link between waiting and caring
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Books by David Caron