This thesis theorizes alienated presence as a paradoxical form of queer relationality that persists amid crisis, grief, and structural abandonment. Through close readings of Adam Mars-Jones’s “An Executor,” Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys, and Thom Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats, it explores how caregiving under conditions of dispossession becomes both a mode of endurance and a site of estrangement. Chapter 1 analyzes bureaucratized intimacy during the AIDS crisis, framing care as an impersonal yet affectively saturated practice. Chapter 2 turns to 1970s Taiwan, where queer kinship emerges not through reparation but through compulsive, culturally embedded acts of caregiving. Chapter 3 reads Gunn’s elegies as poetic clearings in which relational loss is neither healed nor resolved but held open. Across these texts, alienated presence marks a refusal to restore intimacy to normative forms, insisting instead on the dignity of living with what cannot be repaired.