TendenciesTendencies brings together for the first time the essays that have made Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick "the soft-spoken queen of gay studies" (Rolling Stone). Combining poetry, wit, polemic, and dazzling scholarship with memorial and autobiography, these essays have set new standards of passion and truthfulness for current theoretical writing. The essays range from Diderot, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James to queer kids and twelve-step programs; from "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" to a performance piece on Divine written with Michael Moon; from political correctness and the poetics of spanking to the experience of breast cancer in a world ravaged and reshaped by AIDS. What unites Tendencies is a vision of a new queer politics and thought that, however demanding and dangerous, can also be intent, inclusive, writerly, physical, and sometimes giddily fun. |
Contents
DIDEROTS THE NUN | 23 |
QUEER TUTELAGE IN THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST | 52 |
IS THE RECTUM STRAIGHT? IDENTIFICATION AND IDENTITY IN THE WINGS OF THE DOVE | 73 |
MEMORIAL FOR CRAIG OWENS | 104 |
CROSSING OF DISCOURSES | 107 |
JANE AUSTEN AND THE MASTURBATING GIRL | 109 |
EPIDEMICS OF THE WILL | 130 |
AS OPPOSED TO WHAT? | 143 |
ACROSS GENDERS ACROSS SEXUALITIES | 165 |
WILLA GATHER AND OTHERS | 167 |
A POEM IS BEING WRITTEN | 177 |
A DOSSIER A PERFORMANCE PIECE A LITTLEUNDERSTOOD EMOTION | 215 |
WHITE GLASSES | 252 |
| 267 | |
| 275 | |
THE WAR ON EFFEMINATE BOYS | 154 |
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abject addiction adult anal eroticism aunt autoeroticism avunculate body century child Closet cross-dressing culture Densher desire discourse Divine Divine's Edith Massey effect Elinor Epistemology erotic essay Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick fact father feel female feminist figure film friends gender girl hetero heterosexist heterosexual homo homophobic homosexual homosocial identification ignorance instance Jack Jane Austen John Waters Kate Kate's La Religieuse lesbian less Lionel look male homosexuality Marianne masculine masturbation means Michael Milly Milly's modern mother narrative novel one's Oscar Wilde perhaps person Pink Flamingos play pleasure poem political possible Proust psychoanalysis queer question reader reading relation representational resistance same-sex scene seems sense Sense and Sensibility sexual identity Silverman social structure supposed Suzanne Suzanne's tableau things tion turn uncle Waters's white glasses Wilde Wilde's Willa Cather woman women writing York
Popular passages
Page 8 - At the same time, a lot of the most exciting recent work around "queer" spins the term outward along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identityfracturing discourses, for example.