7This book discusses how concepts of time, age and aging, and kinship produce and impact each other in a neoliberal, late-capitalist 21st century U.S. context. It is located at the intersection of American Studies, queer theory, critical age(ing) studies, and studies on belonging and kinship. Focusing on examples from across contemporary U.S. American culture - independent as well as mainstream - the study analyzes their potential to challenge and destabilize dominant concepts and narratives of what it means to live in time and to form affective bonds. The book thus contributes scholarship at/on the nexus between queer theory and critical age(ing) studies, imbued with an additional focus on (alternative) forms of relationality and collectivity. With its queer analyses of examples from transgressive sites of queer contestation as well as mainstream culture, the study also explores whether going mainstream and being anti-hegemonic is necessarily and always mutually exclusive.