Tendencies

by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Overview

Tendencies 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822314219
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	10/28/1993
Series:	Series Q
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	913,224
Product dimensions:	6.03(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.89(d)
Lexile:	1580L (what's this?)

About the Author

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center. Her many publications include A Dialogue On Love (Beacon, 1999); Fat Art/Thin Art (Duke, 1994); Tendencies (Duke, 1993); and Epistemology of the Closet (California, 1990).

Table of Contents

Foreword: T Times xi

Queer and Now 1

Queer Tutelage

Privilege of Unknowing: Diderot's The Nun 23

Tales of the Avunculate: 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

Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl 109

Epidemics of the Will 130

Nationalisms and Sexualities 143

How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys 154

Across Genders, Across Sexualities

Willa Cather and Others 167

A Poem Is Being Written 177

Divinity: A Dossier, A Performance Piece, A Little-Understood Emotion (written with Michael Moon) 215

White Glasses 252

Bibliography 267

Index 275

Editorial Reviews

"Because of the polymorphousness of its disciplinary perversity, Tendencies, taken together with Sedgwick's two previous books, virtually defines the new field of queer studies. The opulent availability of an embodied self who also happens to be a brilliant reader marks Sedgwick's effort throughout this volume. It is also what allows one the tutelary space for taking, not only pleasure from her work, but courage from her example."--James Creech, author of Closet Writing/Gay Reading

"Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is deservedly recognised as the primum mobile of lesbian & gay studies. Yet her real achievement lies not so much in the creation of a new academic discipline, as in the profound implications her work carries for the rest of the academy, and the wider world beyond. For she assigns an absolutely fundamental, constitutive role to homophobia in the construction of Modernity, and its myriad institutions, discourses, pleasures, and pains. Tendencies provides a marvelously exhilarating excursion across the range of her interests and involvements. . . . She is the most consistently intelligent, courageous, perceptive, daring and sensible critic currently writing in the United States. I strongly recommend panic-buying."--Simon Watney, author of Policing Desire

From the Publisher

A leading practitioner of gay studies, Sedgwick ( The Epistemology of the Closet ) offers an illuminating and provocative collection of essays, many reprinted from academic journals, on subjects as varied as the politics of health care, the popularization of ``queer theory'' as an academic discipline (and its harassment by PC-bashing journalists) and Sedgwick's own diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer. Sedgwick turns an unflinching eye on the dynamics of gender and identity that fail to fall into neat, heterosexual categories. She contends that the literature of James, Wilde and Cather call for a reading that is sensitive to the dissonances and ironies of a love that dare not speak its name; she interrogates the ``naturalness'' of heterosexual identity in literature and popular culture. The opening essay, for instance, invokes ``the utopian bedroom scene of Chuck Berry's immortal aubade : `Roll over, Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news.' '' Though steeped in the jargon of academic cultural studies, Sedgwick's essays offer forthright cultural analysis and an autobiographical intimacy that will prove accessible and germane for a general audience. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This collection of essays is a meditation on sexuality in literature and life and on the artificial categories imposed on people because of their sexual orientation. The idea that the ``two available categories (heterosexual and homosexual) are not symmetrically but hierarchically constituted in relation to each other'' is just one of the brilliant thoughts Sedgwick has to offer in examining the works of Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Diderot, and Willa Cather. What she has to say deserves attention, but the ideas presented here will remain inaccessible to all but a handful of Sedgwick's own colleagues. Her writing is witty yet turgid, and the essays overall are slow and difficult reading. This first volume in a new series focusing on the theoretical aspects of gay and lesbian studies is not recommended except for special collections. Sedgwick ( Between Men , Columbia Univ. Pr., 1986) is Newman Ivey White Professor of English at Duke.-- Patricia Sarles, Brooklyn P.L.

Library Journal

Sedgwick (English, Duke U.) offers 12 essays, most previously published, on queerness, the unabashed expression of homosexuality in men and women. Among them are "Tales of the Avunculate: The Importance of Being Ernest, Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," and "How to Bring your Kids up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys." Paper edition (unseen), $15.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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