Tendencies

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.

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