Tendencies (Series Q) [Paperback]

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0822314215 | ISBN-13: 978-0822314219 | Publication Date: October 28, 1993 | Edition: 1st ed

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

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.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books; 1st ed edition (October 28, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822314215
• ISBN-13: 978-0822314219
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,023,140 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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