Tendencies

Series Q

by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer, Theory, Essays, Feminism, LGBT, Philosophy

304 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 1993

About the author

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an American academician specializing in literary criticism and feminist analysis; she is known as one of the architects of queer theory. Her works reflect an interest in queer performativity, experimental critical writing, non-Lacanian psychoanalysis, Buddhism and pedagogy, the affective theories of Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein, and material culture, especially textiles and texture. Drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of Michel Foucault, Sedgwick uncovered purportedly hidden homoerotic subplots in writers like Charles Dickens, Henry James and Marcel Proust. Sedgwick argued that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture would be incomplete or damaged if it failed to incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition, coining the terms "antihomophobic" and "homosocial."

Reviews

[sawah · Rating 4 out of 5]

JANE AUSTEN MASTURBATED SO I COULD EXPERIENCE MY SEXUAL AWAKENING TO PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

[Nadine · Rating 5 out of 5]

eve sedgwick LITERALLY owns my soul

[Francesco Iorianni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Von diesen gesammelten Essays habe ich folgenden gelesen: "How to bring your Kids up Gay." Mit der gegenwärtigen Debatte in den USA um das 'Don't Say Gay' Gesetz wird dieser Essay wieder aktueller denn je. Die Verdrängung und Verschleierung von nicht-heteronormartiven Verhaltensmuster an Schulen und anderen öffentlichen Institutionen führt zu einer Unterdrückung der freien geistigen Entfaltung, die Sedgwick als problematisch sieht und daher zu annihilieren ist.

[eve · Rating 4 out of 5]

too smart for me; will revisit in 5 years

[C. B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another intriguing collection of essays by one of the founding minds of queer theory. Many of these are fascinating, especially the essays on Oscar Wilde and Willa Carter—but the autobiographical pieces are rather sad, and sadly (for the reader) they’re painfully circumlocutory. If only Sedgwick lived a little longer. I wish they wouldn’t have always resorted to the intellectual to evaluate all problems, perhaps finding a way to live as a gay man beyond the confines of the bloated mental gymnastics of literary criticism (as nice as they are sometimes).

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm slowly building up rapport with Sedgwick, as I'm finally starting to wrap my brain around Epistemology of the Closet, and have been working my way through her oeuvre for a research project. This is a real melting pot of thought, with essays ranging from Diderot to Henry James to Jane Austen to 'addiction' discourses in the late 20th century. Sedgwick blends the personal with the theoretical, the literary with the pragmatic, the poetic and the dialogic with the political. I'm consistently impressed with her ability to entertain and provoke, her ridiculous ability to pull rabbits out of hats with seeming ease. She's a theorist who can bring me nearly to tears at moments, and it's clear that this is not merely a book of postmodernist critiques of identity and sexuality, but a book of survival, grief, and autobiography. Not quite sure that this can be pinned to a particular genre, though I imagine people often try.

I don't find this as consistent a text as Epistemology, but it's definitely the sort of book that can be excerpted from, picked up and browsed at will. I plowed through it, but will definitely be coming back to these essays for years to come.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

this book I love & I've the sense it's going to mature nicely too. Eve the dream. This is a nicer way in that Touching Feeling, which is incredible in its own right but much more difficult. At least it felt so at the time.

my highlights!
- no question the best essay I've ever read on wilde. I've read an unspeakable amount & they depress me very much. This one didn't
- the famous essay 'Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl' which caused a HUGE controversy at the time based on nothing but the title. V compelling work on pre-victorian lesbianism, masturbation, with a little foucauldian expansion. Also worthwhile for the discussion on the continuing taboo (even now!) on the discussion of masturbation/pornography in academia
-DELiGHTFUL dialogue on the cinema of the man himself Mr john waters O absoLUTely
-18thc porno nuns from Mr diderot

[Luke Widlund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long have I read Sedgwick precociously due to the fact that I do not comprehend every single sentence of her criticism.

And yet, here I am and TEARING up at the end of specific chapters where she sets aside the mask of scholarship and renders herself absolutely human and vulnerable.

Truly an achievement in literary studies and writing in general.

[Ivan Labayne · Rating 2 out of 5]

https://chopsueyngarod.wordpress.com/...

"Sedgwick in “Queer and Now,” the first essay in Tendencies:

“‘Why me?’ is the cri de coeur that is popularly supposed to represent Everywoman’s deepest response to a breast cancer diagnosis—so much so that not only does a popular book on the subject have that title, but the national breast cancer information and support hotline is called Y-ME! Yet ‘Why me’?’ was not something it could have occurred to me to ask in a world where so many companions of my own age were already dealing with fear, debilitation, and death. I wonder, too, whether it characterizes the responses of the urban women of color forced by violence, by drugs, by state indifference or hostility, by AIDS and other illnesses, into familiarity with the rhythms of early death.”

The rhythms of life—candles blown and cakes botched and singing of Happy Birthday off-tune, but heartily—but nothing about the rhythms of getting sick, and hurt, and abused, all unevenly experienced, some more vulnerable than others."

[em petlev · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love sedgwick but i think, as is usual with theory, certain pieces appealed to me more than others, which felt a bit boring or out of my field. i liked how she intermixed personal and academic works. i will be reading epistemologies

[Jessica]

DNF but will definitely revisit when i have more time

[غبار · Rating 3 out of 5]

nostalgic for a time when academic writing could admit such playfulness as sedgwick displays here, e.g. in an essay on anal poetics she says, 'The Golden Bowel, I mean The Golden Bowl ...'

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

gorgeous

[William Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A re-read. My favorite pieces this time: the essays on Henry James’s THE WINGS OF THE DOVE (“Is the Rectum Straight?”) and on SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (“Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”). The latter piece became infamous via right wing paranoid politics—we’re back there again, Deja vu, in the 2020s, but then did
we ever really leave, Sedgwick would ask). Typical of right wing sex panic, the attacks and pearl-clutching began BEFORE the price was even written; at that point it was a title only, submitted for an MLA Convention panel that hadn’t yet happened. Heteros be crazy…

Sedgwick’s work is challenging—famously, overtly—in style and, depending on one’s previous acquaintance with queer studies, in content/ideas. But if you’re picking up one of Sedgwick’s books or articles, it’s unlikely to be your first time at the rodeo, that is, you know who she is in some way, and haven’t stumbled on it by chance. Even to the queer theory and academic prose initiated, though, it’s fair to say her work requires the fullest of one’s attention. But the rewards! The joy of the style, embraced. The lightning strike of her ideas!

As an academic in queer studies (among other areas) and as a gay man—not the least, as an adoring, envious fan of the magic Sedgwick worked, in ideas and in syntax and vocabulary—I embrace the value and fuel of Sedgwick’s work for me over the past 30+ years. I’m one of so many queer folks and folks in GLBTQ studies, I know. But I’m sure we all (or do we?) feel the special gaze of Eve in our directions. I read her work in college, in the still early days of queer studies coming into itself (hell, Sedgwick nearly founded and certainly galvanized the field of queer studies; she invented the now-everyday term “homosocial”; the list goes on). In college I also heard her talk when she returned to Amherst (where she’d taught till recently) and totally fan-queened-out, presenting my copies of her books for her autograph. This talk was shortly after her first brush with the breast cancer that would return twice, years later, ultimately taking her from us only in her 50s. At the time (1990-1991?) she’d published BETWEEN MEN and EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOSET, the two works that—besides Judith Butler’s GENDER TROUBLE and David Halperin’s 100 YEARS OF HOMOSEXUALITY might be said to have created queer studies as a field (distinct from gay and lesbian studies before it). This trifecta of founding figures—there were many others at the time doing central work in queer studies or other fields with queer concerns (D. A. Miller, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon—the latter two of which I had the benefit of working with in grad school)… and of course the predecessor figures feminist and queer studies looked back to and sprang from in some sense (from Gayle Rubin to Michel Foucault—now there’s one of the widest culture-theory influencers since Freud, I’d argue).

Apologies for the academic digressions—professional hazard. But all of this is to say how stunning, powerful, and still electric the work in TENDENCIES was and is.

[anique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Queer/Feminist literary criticism at its best. Enjoy Sedgwick much more than her counterpart Judith Butler.

[Tom Coates · Rating 5 out of 5]

The analysis of the various axes upon which 'sexual orientation' *could* have been cut is enough to make this a classic of queer theory and a fascinating piece of work. Very highly recommended.

[Cassady Clover · Rating 5 out of 5]

This buried me in confusion, but let me know that all my perversities are in fact ok, even loving E.K. Sedgwick…