Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Books

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.

When she begins therapy for depression after breast cancer treatment, the author brings with her an extraordinarily open and critical mind, but also shyness about revealing herself. Resisting easy responses to issues of dependence, desire, and mortality, she warily commits to a male therapist who shares little of her cultural and intellectual world.Although not without pain, their improvised relationship is as unexpectedly pleasurable as her writing is unconventional: Sedgwick combines dialogue, verse, and even her therapist's notes to explore her interior life--and delivers a delicate and tender account of how we arrive at love.

Brings together the author's explorations of emotion and expression. This work also offers tools and techniques for nondualistic thought, and in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian hermeneutics of suspicion.

Exploring the intersection of sexuality and identity, the book delves into how sexual orientation emerged as a crucial aspect of personhood, paralleling the historical significance of gender. Through analyses of influential literary figures such as Melville, James, and Wilde, it reflects on a transformative period in American culture. In her updated preface, Sedgwick contextualizes her work within the personal and collective trauma of the AIDS epidemic, highlighting its profound impact on queer studies and theory since the late 1980s.

Introducing a new generation to the book that changed humanities scholarship.

Queer Studies verdankt seinen Status als akademische Disziplin maßgeblich der Literaturkritik und den theoretischen Schriften von Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In „Ein Gespräch über die Liebe“ wendet sie ihre Fähigkeiten auf die Analyse eines viel persönlicheren Themas an. Diese beeindruckend intime Memoiren sind eine Erkundung von Sedgwicks Weg durch die Therapie bei Depressionen, die 18 Monate nach einer Brustkrebsdiagnose beginnt. Sie stellt die Notizen ihrer Therapeutin in einen Dialog mit ihren eigenen Worten, die die Form des Haibun annehmen, die traditionell für Reiseerzählungen reserviert ist; eine Beschreibung eines anderen Werks, das auf diese Weise strukturiert ist, trifft ebenso auf ihr eigenes zu. „Ein Gespräch über die Liebe“ ist ein fesselndes, brillant konstruiertes Porträt der einzigartigen Intimität zwischen Therapeutin und Patient, das die komplexen Beziehungen zwischen kindlicher Frühreife, Positionierung innerhalb der Familie, Fantasie, Sex, dem Körper, Depression und Einstellungen zum Tod erforscht. Durch diese Themen gelangt Sedgwick zu einer hochgradig persönlichen, aber dennoch umfassenden Definition von Sexualität, die Fantasie, Autoerotik und kulturelle Intimität einschließt.