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.

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.

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. (Dec.)

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).