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