Tendencies

Front Cover
Duke University Press, Oct 28, 1993 - Literary Criticism - 281 pages
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.
 

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
BIBLIOGRAPHY
267
INDEX
275
Copyright

THE WAR ON EFFEMINATE BOYS
154

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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.

About the author (1993)

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).