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

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).

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

"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

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.