Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

10 Key excerpts on "Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick"

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  Gender, Embodiment and Fluidity in Organization and Management

  • Robert McMurray, Alison Pullen(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6  Witnessing Eve

  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

  Saara L. Taalas

  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009) is generally recognized as one of the most prominent writers in the development of queer theory. Sedgwick was a literary critic, poet, textile arts experimenter and social theorist. Her influence on literary criticism and social theory simply cannot be conveyed in its entirety, and let me be clear that this is not my intention. Rather I am inspired by Sedgwick who vividly states:

  I think many adults (and I am one of them) are trying, in our work, to keep faith with vividly remembered promises made to ourselves in childhood: promises to make invisible possibilities and desire visible; to make the tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer presentations in where it must be smuggled and, with the relative freedom of adulthood, to challenge queer-eradicating impulses frontally where they are to be so challenged.

  (Sedgwick, 1994, p. 3)

  Rather, I would like to turn to the lingering question of why researchers in organization theory have not engaged with her work more broadly, although this is starting to change. Organization theory in recent years has shown a burgeoning interest in queer subjectivities and performativities (Parker, 2001; 2002; Rumens, 2016; 2017; 2018; Rippin, 2017), academic activism (Parker, 2001; Contu, 2017; Rippin, 2017) and the corporealities of affect (Fotaki, Kenny, and Vachhani, 2017).

  In view of this recent interest in queer performativities and in affect and organization, Sedgwick’s conceptual innovations certainly merit a closer look. However, I will not be conducting a full review of Sedgwick’s works but rather focusing on Rumens’s (2017) proposal that critical organization enquiry strikes up a friendship with queer theory. In this spirit, I would like to pick up some themes addressed in recent discussions on organization and see how Sedgwick’s contribution might help ‘destabilize management’ (Parker, 2001). The purpose of this destabilization is to mobilize subject positions in regenerative ways. To this end, I will draw my main inspiration from Sedgwick’s later works on queer performativity, which return to Austin’s (1975/1997) speech-act theory, develop the concept of the periperformative and offer an alternative strategy for critical enquiry in reparative readings, a topic covered in her last book, Touching Feeling – Affect, Pedagogy, Performative

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  Critics at Work

  Interviews 1993-2003

  • Jeffrey J. Williams(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  13Sedgwick Unplugged An Interview with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

  By the 1980s, contemporary criticism was demarcated by the major “schools” of theory—structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and reader response. Since the mid-eighties, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has been a central figure in redrawing the map of theory, forging the fields of gay studies and queer theory. In one sense, Sedgwick’s work is an expansion of feminism, as she discusses here. But at the same time, it is a critique of feminism, which focused on the relations between men and women. Instead, in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire , Sedgwick foregrounded “homosociality” or same-sex relations, and its underside, homophobia.

  In Epistemology of the Closet , one of the most influential critical books of the nineties, Sedgwick deconstructed the concepts of “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality,” arguing that the regime of secrecy they represented—the closet—undergirded modern thought. Drawing on poststructural theory, Sedgwick represents its revisionary tenor through the nineties; working from the concept of gender, Sedgwick has been influential in placing sexuality at the forefront of literary study.

  Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1950, Sedgwick did her undergraduate work at Cornell (B.A., 1971) and graduate work at Yale (Ph.D., 1975) during the heyday of the “Yale School.” As she recounts here, she took seminars from Paul de Man, and one can discern the influence of deconstruction through her work. She taught at Boston University, Hamilton College, and Amherst College, but, after the publication of Between Men , she was one of those hired on at Duke, where she was Newman Ivey White Professor of English, during its heyday as a center of contemporary theory under the chairship of Stanley Fish (see also Fish’s interview in chapter 1

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  A Readers Guide to Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism

  • Maggie Humm(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Zimmerman’s paradigm, while useful for lesbian literary history, is one of a range of possible critical options. Zimmerman herself tends to measure her writers against an ideal of lesbian community and self-development belonging to the 1970s, and there are other, and theoretical, lesbian methodologies.

  Queer Theory and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

  Currently gender studies includes work on gay, or queer theory. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men (1989) and The Epistemology of the Closet (1990) offer some challenges to lesbian criticism’s generalisations about non-heterosexual experience. In these texts Sedgwick describes the literary histories of homophobia and misogyny but does not address lesbian experience directly. ‘Lesbian’ is a marked absence in both texts but Sedgwick claims that this is due to the fact that the term ‘homosocial’ used to describe women’s friendships, need not be dichotomised against homosexual (Sedgwick, 1990 , p. 3). Instead, homosexual textuality is opposed to heterosexual textuality. As Sedgwick argues ‘the tensions implicit in the male-male bond are spatially connected … while the tensions of the male-female bond are temporally connected’ (Sedgwick, 1990 , p. 45).

  There are similarities between Adrienne Rich’s notion of a lesbian continuum and Sedgwick’s characterisation of a homosocial continuum. Sedgwick is also in debt to Nancy Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein and Luce Irigaray’s differing accounts of the relationship between social/cultural power and gender. Between Men wends its way from Shakespeare’s sonnets, Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, the Gothic to the Victorians, Tennyson and Dickens. Epistemology of the Closet follows chronologically to examine late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers including Melville, James and Proust. Both books describe the ‘hidden’ topic of literature which is male bonding. Sedgwick argues that cultural constructions of homophobia occur in organisational binaries such as innocence/initiation; sincerity/sentimentality, as well as in the more obvious binaries of growth/decadence. One result of Sedgwick’s claim is a shift in attention from individual writers to processes of knowing in Western culture. As Sedgwick traces these binaries she utilises diverse techniques from deconstruction to a focus on key words, much like Paulo Freire’s use of ‘generative themes’ in his pedagogy. For example, Sedgwick argues that the phrase ‘a man’s home is his castle’ is a condensed ideological construction, and as the title of her second book suggests, Sedgwick analyses ‘closet’ as a key metaphor of cultural control. Sedgwick, together with other queer theorists, aims to take gay criticism beyond essentialist and social constructionist explanations. For instance, queer theory studies literary ‘perversions’ in the Renaissance, not only as a cultural phenomenon, but as constituting a linguistic transgression of heterosexual norms. Yet it must be noted that Sedgwick’s inattention to the specificities of lesbian culture make her work of value more for its deconstruction of phallic and feminine imagery than for its construction

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  Feminists and Queer Theorists Debate the Future of Critical Management Studies

  • Alison Pullen, Nancy Harding, Mary Phillips, Alison Pullen, Nancy Harding, Mary Phillips, Sarah Gilmore(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Emerald Publishing Limited

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 9

  WRITING WITH EVE: QUEERING PAPER

  Ann Rippin

  ABSTRACT

  This chapter takes inspiration from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s artistic work and academic writing to attend to some of the under-utilised dimensions of her work to date, that of making. Using unconventional methodologies from Sedgewick, I present my own unconventional methodologies to queer CMS. In this way through theory and making, we can queer CMS anew.

  Keywords: Unconventional methodologies; queer; CMS; Sedgwick

  INTRODUCTION

  I love Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

  This is an odd way to start a chapter in a book on critical thinking, because, love, affection, partiality often clouds our judgement, constituting the very obfuscation of clear analytical thinking we are trained to pursue. Love, however, seems to me to be the right place to start this chapter. This chapter is a celebration of the contribution of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to queering scholarship, not her theoretical contribution, which is widely appreciated (see Parker, 2002 , e.g., with regard to management studies), but her methodological and pedagogical challenge which is less well known. She had a brilliant, challenging mind, she also insisted that we came out of our heads and into our bodies; out of our theory and into making. In this way she embodied a praxis which, this chapter suggests, could reinvigorate Critical Management Studies.

  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was a pioneering exponent of queer theory, and she was a poet, artist, literary critic and teacher. I choose to emphasise the making elements of her work because this is where I think she has something to teach us about pumping life back into CMS. I will look at two elements of her work which receive far less attention than critical analyses of The Epistemology of the Closet, and Tendencies which include her theoretical work on queer theory. These two elements are A Dialogue on Love, her autobiographical account of her analysis following her diagnosis of cancer, in which she discusses her love of textiles, and a course she taught at the very end of her teaching career on artists’ books at the City University of New York.

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  Reading Sedgwick

  • Lauren Berlant(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  I can conjure few thinkers whom we have more need of invoking, grappling with, and making use of than Eve Sedgwick at the present time. In the field of queer studies, we have become just as extraordinarily skilled at producing the most elegant ideological readings of our culture as we have at producing a reparative reconstruction of that same culture, often in the same breath. As Tyler Bradway has compelling argued, we have been less successful at tak-ing up Sedgwick’s actual call to proliferate numerous analytical positions and perspectives that far exceed even the binary calculus of the paranoid and the reparative. 35 We have been less successful in being generous to one another’s intellectual lineages, objects of interest, and theoretical insights. As a conse-quence, we become members of embattled encampments (commonly known as “subfields”) that can be safely neutralized or easily encapsulated in some-thing as innocuous as a graduate seminar title: queer affect studies, queer-of- color critique, queer disability studies, queer Marxism, queer ecologies, queer posthumanism. These labels are by no means pernicious or wrong, but they are too easy to list off as transparently obvious units of knowledge, as though each was not totally and utterly dependent on and interconnected with the others. 30 | Ramzi Fawaz Where our field’s range of concern has expanded—now taking as its pur-view the geographical span of the globe, the institutional range of neoliberal capital, even the entire gamut of nonhuman life—I would venture to say that the affective range of our arguments and internal conflicts has remained surprisingly narrow: to be social or antisocial, to be normative or antinor-mative, to think queer or trans, to think sexuality or race, to be Marxist or Foucauldian, to be a decolonizer or an agent of homonationalism, to believe in surface or depth, to study rarefied Literature or neoliberal capital etc.

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  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

  • Jason Edwards(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In Search of Lost Time (E: 212).

  SEDGWICK’S QUEER THEORETICAL CONTEXT

  If you want to find out more about queer theory in general and Sedgwick’s position within it, take a look at Iain Morland and Annabelle Wilcox’s Queer Theory (2004), Nikki Sullivan’s A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003), Riki Anne Wilchin’s Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer (2004) and Donald E. Hall’s Queer Theories (Transitions) (2002). You might also profitably work your way through Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin’s The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993) and Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle’s The Transgender Studies Reader (2006). In addition, the journal GLQ considers queer matters in a diverse array of theoretical and cultural contexts, and the recent ‘After Sex’ summer 2007 issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly is worth perusing to ascertain what happened to, or is currently happening in queer theory.

  Perhaps the most intelligent, concise guide to the history of queer theory and its precedents, particularly within art history, remains Whitney Davis’s ‘“Homosexualism”, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and Queer Theory in Art History’ (1998). In relation to questions of homo- and heteronormativity, Michael Warner’s Fear of a Queer Planet; Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993) is also required reading.

  THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY

  Sedgwick has repeatedly insisted that her work cannot be read in isolation from the texts that preceded, accompanied and inspired hers. Amongst the key sources in the history of sexuality you might look at are Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1988), Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1988), John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century

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  Homo Psyche

  On Queer Theory and Erotophobia

  • Gila Ashtor(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Fordham University Press

    (Publisher)

  But it has vastly more to say for the inveterate, gorgeous generativity, the specula-tive generosity, the daring, the permeability, and the activism that have long been lodged in the multiple histories of queer reading ” (xx). There-fore, rather than attempting to resolve the abstract debate about whether queerness requires a better psyche or no psyche at all, a return to the centrality of hermeneutics draws attention to how reading practices oper-ate as privileged sites for negotiating the relationship of knowledge to sex-uality . It is in the work of attempting to explain what people do, and maybe even why they do it, that Sedgwick encountered the limits of exist-ing literary paradigms, which prompted her to search for more nuanced what “theory” knew / 39 explanatory models of desire and affiliation. In their collection of essays, Regarding Sedgwick , Stephen Barber and David Clark write, “Sedgwick says that Oscar Wilde was ‘hyper-indicative’ of his age. Could this not justifiably be said of her with regard to our own time, as heterogeneous as that moment surely is?” 11 Among her contemporaries, Sedgwick’s influence on the field is by far the most extensively documented and reflected upon, 12 a feature of her critical persona that may have much to do with the culture of autobiographical life-writing she actively engen-dered. As Stephen Barber and David Clark write in their introduction to Regarding Sedgwick , a unique possibility is “mobilized around the signi-fier ‘Sedgwick.’ ” 13 In order to gain purchase on the question of the psyche’s role in con-ceptualizing queerness, this chapter explores the construction of queer hermeneutics—and of queerness as hermeneutics—as one place where the dependence of interpretation on psychology is enacted in particularly urgent, sophisticated, and practical ways.

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  Modern Criticism and Theory

  A Reader

  • Nigel Wood, David Lodge(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  31 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315835488-31

  Introductory note

  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Newman Ivey White Professor of English at Duke University. Her Between Men: English literature and male homosocial desire (1985) is widely regarded as a radical text in identifying the constraints of purely heterosexual definitions of sexuality. For Sedgwick, there are a whole host of effective relations between men that are not always genetic; homosociality is not only homosexuality. She rather attempts to trace a continuum between varieties of male bonding (including more formal brotherhoods) and homosexual behaviour, not so as to base the former on the latter, but ‘rather as a strategy for making generalizations about, and marking historical differences in, the structure of men’s relations with other men’ (Between Men, p. 2). Her main focus is on English literature of the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. (In Between Men there is just one chapter on earlier cultural formations.) The point of this choice is that there was at that time a growing emphasis on the demarcation of clear gender identities, a heterogeneity that has given rise to modern gender distinctions.

  This is at its strongest in realist fiction, where the power of untheorized assumptions underpins an accepted set of (usually tacit) propositions as to just what ‘reality’ may be. This silence about the inevitability of same-sex relationships (which could stop short of sexual activity) runs like a transverse section through the male-authored texts Sedgwick analyses. Representations of the physicality of women provoke unstable responses that incorporate the extremes of intense attraction/repulsion. Sedgwick is at her most feminist when isolating the function of references to women within the closed system of homosocial relations: either they are a necessary product that eventually promotes male bonding or they help shore up certain patterns of gender difference that in effect promote homophobia, or they exist as a combination of the two. The removal of female agency from these paradigms helps also to reify certain passive female characteristics. There is a vested interest in policing such distinctions – to the point where what she terms ‘homosexual panic’ emerges: a flight from full individuality (because it might at certain points embrace the reprobated patterns of homosexuality) for the safety of traditional roles that do not threaten the enabling fictions of gender distinction.

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  Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects

  Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer

  • Lana Lin(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Fordham University Press

    (Publisher)

  70 For Sedgwick to discover writers, such as Tompkins and Proust, who captured so well her own sensibilities, was to feel loved by them. Her identification with their subjectivities, which mirrored her own, was a demonstration of her capacity to love and be loved. The give and take of the therapeutic exchange, not unlike the giving and taking of advice staged in “Off My Chest,” affirmed her ability to love and worthiness of love.

  Object-Use, Object-Love

  Sedgwick’s public discourse of love, which she deployed to mediate her relationship to illness and mortality, can be further understood by examining the transference dynamics involved. No doubt transference, which Britzman identifies as “built from the analysand’s inchoate demand for love,” permeated Sedgwick’s therapy.71 When she reveals that “the space of Shannon is both myself and not,” Sedgwick’s blurring of self and other takes place in the transference where one cannot clearly discern one’s own voice from one’s parental figures, one’s lovers, and one’s therapists.72 The dual voices Sedgwick hears, talking to someone who is not quite herself and not quite other, signal the transference of her ingrained and inherited feelings onto Shannon. Freud came to see transference as itself a neurosis and called the transference neurosis an “artificial illness.”73 This transference neurosis induced by psychoanalysis has in common with slow moving or indolent cancers the characteristics of an incurable but not necessarily debilitating illness. Sedgwick suffers from both types of affliction, and Dialogue

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  Body My House

  May Swenson's Work and Life

  • Paul Crumbley, Patricia M Gantt, Paul Crumbley, Patricia M Gantt(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Utah State University Press

    (Publisher)

  According to Eve Sedgwick queer refers to “the open mesh of 182 S u z a n n e J u h a s z possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and ex-cesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality are made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (8). Diana Fuss writes that queer imaginatively enacts “sexual redefini-tions, reborderizations, and rearticulations” (7). In many of her poems May Swenson queers conventional gender definitions and in the process views desire as a force that erupts and is sustained by the interchange rather than the distinctiveness of gender po-larities. Focusing on the active/passive dialectic so commonly tied to tra-ditional definitions of masculine and feminine, Swenson shows not only that one need not be a man to be active, a woman to be passive, but that these qualities in tandem, as they fluctuate between persons, can spark flu-idity, agitations, shape-shifting, and transfers. In this space desire can play. This queer desire is not the thrill of dominating or submitting: “I want to take you!” or “Take me!” Rather, it is inspired by both sameness and dif-ference, by the contingency or complementarity of the selves who engage in it. Queer desire presents an alternative to traditional heterosexuality, whether it is specifically homosexual or not. To explore queer desire this paper moves from Swenson’s “nature po-ems” to her “love poems” (these categories blur on many occasions) to show how her basic interest in the process of identity formation, which she generally understands by way of the body and the senses, is height-ened when she confronts the pressures of conformity that are systemati-cally engaged when gender and sexuality come into the picture. Swenson, an inveterate observer of nature, could not help but notice and represent the changes in natural forms effected by the process of time, or what is called mutability.

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