A term introduced by Eve Sedgwick to describe the view of homosexuality as relevant only to homosexuals. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (/ s d w k /; May 2, 1950 - April 12, 2009) was an American academic scholar in the fields of gender studies, queer theory (queer studies), and critical theory.Sedgwick published several books considered groundbreaking in the field of queer theory, including Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990 . Queer Theory Musings: Let's Talk About Sex, Baby! The view that identity is a sociocultural construct that influences identity formation. The sense of a historical moment is strong in the essay, as its title underscores. Eve Sedgwicks Queer and Now, a synthesis of excerpts from several other pieces,was first published in 1993 and reprinted in the 2013 Queer Studies Reader. An institutionalized way of thinking and speaking, which creates a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic. By refusing to accept that there is a right way to be transgender and encouraging coalition building under the newly flexible term transgender, Feinberg hoped transgender persons could build a transformative activism-oriented community. Who are some important queer of color theorists we should know about? For instance, the social psychologist Suzanne Kessler was critical of Fausto-Sterlings attachment to reading genitals for the truth of sex, insisting that the performance of gender on the body rather than on genitalia was more often used to gender bodies. The view that identity is a sociocultural construct that influences identity formation. In the first years of the 2000s, groups like the Human Rights Campaign(HRC), which takes a formal rights approach to securing legal protections for LGBTQ+ persons, experienced many successes. Social constructionism also influenced understandings of gender. Furthermore, they argue that capitalism and militarism do harm and can only contingently benefit individual LGBTQ+ persons. In her introduction to the text, Sedgwick treats the topic of "homosexual panic" as a way of introducing the main themes of the book. In the second chapter, Sedgwick turns to the figure of Claggart, a gay policeman on a ship in Melvilles Billy Budd. She applies queer theory to her activism and advocacy, pursuing the notion that LGBTQ+ equality will be achieved once heteronormativity and homonormativity within the institutions of family, society, and government are interrupted, disrupted, and decentered to become more inclusive of racial, gender, and economic diversity (New York: Magnus Books, 2012). And if you disagree with this idea, explain why you do not see an important difference between the two. He writes, The future is queernesss domain. Following the Stonewall rebellion, lesbian and gay liberation groups started to fight for equal rights, and some scholars started to study the history and culture of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. Eve Kosofsky Sedwick's 'Queer and Now' essay in Tendencies. Sedgwick's optimism was far from nave; the same introduction disclosed her diagnosis of breast cancer, which. Charlene A. Carruthers. [26] Transgender studies emerged in activist and academic circles around the same time as queer activism and theory. Gender Trouble was critiqued for ignoring the materiality of the body and real sex differences. ContraPoints is an irreverent video essayist who explores gender identity and queer theory while using her extensive background in academic philosophy. Many queer theorists and activists are concerned that emphasizing single issues (marriage or the military) and centering LGBTQ+ politics on inclusion into existing institutions diminishes the radical potential of queer thought and action. Review of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990) [At Gay Book Reviews] One of the most influential books on queer theory. A Black queer feminist activist and organizer. What issues and whose interests does the HRC most seem to represent? In an article for Afropunk, Growing Up Queer: A Brief Lesson on Hetero- and Homonormativity, Justin Allen talks about the social consequences of heteronormativity (https://afropunk.com/2013/03/growing-up-queer-a-brief-lesson-on-hetero-and-homonormativity/). Wildes characters and the homosocial bonds that undergird much of Nietzsches writing both serve as testaments to the fact that the Romantic ideal of heterosexual masculinity allowed for a greater degree of traditionally feminine/homosexual behavior (sentimentality) while reestablishing the boundary between heterosexual and homosexual by virtue of the heterosexuals distance from desire itself within their public and private lives. [16] Like Rubin, Fausto-Sterlings early provocation about sex categories sees sex as biological, natural, and unchangeable; it is raw material that culture transforms into gender. However, perhaps her discussion of her struggle with breast cancer and how it affects her gender and sexual identity, a necessary and poignant tale in itself, may have been better developed and resonated in a separate memoir-centered piece in Tendencies. Print. The majority of entries will be based on literature and works of literary criticism I am currently reading for ENG 480: History of Western Literary Criticism, an English class I am taking at Michigan State University this fall. intersectional. [4] In addition to sexuality, de Lauretis hoped queer theory would identify and trouble other constructed silencesfor instance, those of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. The influential transgender activist Riki Wilchins wrote this classic work to make queer theory and gender theory accessible to a nonacademic audience. This living list of queer scholarship includes many important intersectional texts (https://www.brown.edu/campus-life/support/lgbtq/graduate-student-resources/queer-theory-reading-list). The climax of this story comes after Billy accuses Claggart of nefarious activity, and Vere intervenes by arbitrating the situation from within the privacy of the captains quarters. Abstract Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's concept, the epistemology of the closet, is a foundational contribution to the field of queer theory. Sedgwick ends her introduction on the note that , It is possible, and quite likely, that this portion of this article hit home for me because I am currently reading Homers. He identifies major contributors to a canon of works that built up the theory. In Melvilles novella, the story is set against a backdrop of recent mutinies against several ships in the British navy. This site uses cookies. A police raid at the Stonewall Inn in New York City in 1969 ignited demonstrations. In the third chapter, Sedgwick underscores the way in which homophobic anxieties have come to be embedded at the heart of heterosexual identity during the end of the 1800s and through the work of Wilde and Nietzsche. Rubin uses the phrase sex-gender system to describe the process by which social relations produce women as oppressed beings. Free shipping for many products! The capacity of language and expressive actions to produce a type of being. Was there any way for the person to resist that challenge? L. Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come, in Stryker. In a follow-up publication, Butler argues that sex is a regulatory ideal that forces many bodies into a two-part system. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Class meets Monday-Thursday 3.30-5.40pm in McIlhenny 205. The struggle for queer liberation, not limited to marriage equality, is a fight that the majority population would not fight for us and with us. Chapter 6: Prejudice and Discrimination against LGBTQ+ People, Sean G. Massey; Sarah R. Young; and Ann Merriwether, Thomas Lawrence Long; Christine Rodriguez; Marianne Snyder; and Ryan J. Watson, Chapter 8: LGBTQ+ Relationships and Families, Jennifer Miller; Maddison Lauren Simmons; Robert Bittner; Mycroft M. Roske; Cathy Corder; and Olivia Wood, Chapter 12: A Practical Guide for LGBTQ+ Studies, Appendix A: Judith Butler Video Transcription, Appendix B: Lukas Avendao: Reflections from muxeidad, Appendix C: In Han Dynasty China, Bisexuality Was the Norm, Appendix D: What is a Fa'afafine Video Transcription, Appendix E: Queer Archaeology: Some Basics Video Transcription, Appendix G: Watch A Couple In Their 80s Get Married In Dallas County's First Same-Sex Ceremony Video Transcription, Appendix H: Care to the Trans- and Gender Non-Conforming Identified Patient Video Transcription. Tongson Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries Summary/Susan Petrole, The Combahee River Collective Statement Summary (Powers), TS Redmonds Summary of Audre Lordes Zami, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Susan Petrole), Lorde Summary- Uses of the Erotic (Hummel), Alexander Pedagogies of Crossing (Shoemaker), Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Culture (Warmington), Green, Pink, and Lavender Gaard (Shoemaker), Cape Queer? Product Information. If thats Sedgwicks underlyinggoal then we see how it evolves and bolsters her teaching, her projects, her understanding of her own health and the survival of others around her. In exchange, it prohibited the discrimination of closeted service persons. In a video in the InQueery series by them, Tyler Ford explains the history behind the word queer (https://youtu.be/UpE0u9Dx_24). A video from the School of Life series discusses Michel Foucault, a philosopher of history who explored different institutionsmedicine, crime and punishment, and homosexualitywith the goal of radically disrupting our understanding of them (https://youtu.be/BBJTeNTZtGU). In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in All of the above. Sedgwick: "Queer and Now" (Powers) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's article, "Queer and Now," collected in her book Tendencies (Routledge 1994), challenges the dominant cultural conception of what it means to be queer, i.e., not part of a binaried heteronormative coupling in early 1990s America. Want to create or adapt books like this? Sedgwicks deconstructivist approach shows us that any social binary that defines subjects in society (especially the binary of heterosexual/homosexual) is not a relation of symmetry between two terms. An institutionalized way of thinking and speaking, which creates a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic. From its earliest iterations, queer theory challenged norms that reproduced inequalities and, at its best, sought to understand how sexuality intersected with gender, race, class, and other social identities to maintain social hierarchies. Hames-Garca is the first to identify two schools of queer theory: the separatist, which keeps race, class, and gender outside descriptions of sexuality, and the integrationist, which blurs these categories and may abandon the concept of identity altogether. The largest U.S.-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group. Your email address will not be published. Jos Esteban Muoz. A strategy or one who enacts such strategy to gain access to, or assimilate into, existing social structures, like monogamous marriage or serving in the U.S. military. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where Black Meets Queer, by Kathryn Bond Stockton. The scientific study of human sexuality, including human sexual interests, behaviors, and functions. Designating theoretical perspectives which contradict their own beliefs under this terminology is brilliant to say the least. Duggan and Puar are critical of activist initiatives that are based on inclusion into existing social institutions, because they see these institutions themselves as damaging. 1993. Allen Synthesis Three: Where and What is Home? What evidence does each perspective use to support its argument? In exploring the definition of the designation queer and the various interpretations of political concerns of this classification, she gives readers a glimpse into the lives of those who struggle daily with the issues we have spoken about in class. The reception of Ancient Greek art during the Romantic period, says Sedgwick, was significant insofar as it served as the occasion for a general societal acceptance of unphobic enjoyment of the male figure. The key insight from this chapter is that the way in which Prousts narrator describes Charlus and Albertine as different in every relevant way except one: regardless of the suspicion surrounding Charluss true sex and Albertines sexuality, both figures are cast as inhabiting a feminine position relative to the world of the text as a whole. The largest U.S.-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group. It accepts greater economic inequality and disfavors unionization. For queers invested in transformative justice-oriented politics, the assimilationiststrategies employed by liberal LGBTQ+ organizations typified by the HRC stand in the way of meaningful social change. Describe that difference in your own words. Foucault Home Page [At CSUN] As a result, meanings and values change across space and time. This view sees homosexuals as a specific group of people, a minority, within a largely heterosexual world. It explains why she so adamantly defends close readings, queer interpretations, formalist inquiry, and a deep plumbingof difficult texts. T. de Lauretis, Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, in special issue, L. Duggan, Making It Perfectly Queer, in, J. DEmilio, Capitalism and Gay Identity, in, J. Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality,, G. Rubin, The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, in, A. Fausto-Sterling, The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,, A. Fausto-Sterling, The Five Sexes, Revisited,, S. Stryker, (De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies, in. A term introduced by Eve Sedgwick to describe viewing sexuality and sexual definition as important to everyone, rather than focusing on homosexuals as a distinct group. However, queer activism and scholarship reject mainstream liberal ideals of privacy, the goal of formal equality under the law, and the desirability of assimilation into existing social institutions. It does, however, have at its founding, and through the twists and turns of its development, an investment in radical social change tethered to a belief that, because gender, sexual, and other forms of social hierarchy are reproduced and regulated through discourse and social institutions, those institutions can and must be changed for the better. This view sees homosexuals as a specific group of people, a minority, within a largely heterosexual world. Queer theory, which Ms. Sedgwick developed along with Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkley, is a prism through which scholars examine literary texts. Many express criticism that groups like the HRC have become representative voices of the LGBTQ+ community and are failing to represent its most vulnerable members. 2006). We cannot be and will not be denied that. The conference proceedings were later collected in a 1991 special issue ofDifferences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. On page 8 of Queer and Now, I appreciate when Sedgwick opens the definition of queer to virtually endless permutations that not only incorporate but also contradict, overlap, and redefine any reductive homo/heterosexual binaries that have been filtered through a heteronormative societal lens. performativity. Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. I also am intrigued by her challenging us to articulate our position toward the word queer in relationship to how we apply the term in the first (9) or second or third-person (11). [22] This is likely reminiscent of Fausto-Sterlings provocation that there are five discernible sexes. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose critical writings on the ambiguities of sexual identity in fiction helped create the discipline known as queer studies, died on Sunday in Manhattan. With stunning foresight and conceptual power, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work opened not only literature but also politics, society, and culture to broader investigations of power, sex . What connections between the two do you find? Those identified as homosexual in medical discourse appropriated the discourse to revise what the category might mean, identify one another, build a community, and make political demands. Queer critics of the HRC maintain that the organization has a limited vision of human rights, is procapitalist, and supports bills that fail to include transgender personsfor example, the proposed 2007 Employment Non-discrimination Act. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, by Riki Wilchins. Lisa Duggan coined the term homonormativity to describe the activist work of groups like the HRC.[36]. It works for legal protections for LGBTQ+ persons, such as promoting legislation to prevent discrimination and hate crimes. Office: Leonard 209B. What are the differences between essentialist and constructionist theories of identity? Kirk Synthesis 3: The Power of Queer Imaginings, Synthesis 2 Queer Identities, Temporalities, and Geographies, Synthesis #1: Queer Hearts Resurrected: The Socially Corrupted Undead Bodies of In the Flesh, Synthesis #2: Reflections on The Polymath or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, Synthesis #3: Suppressing and Igniting Lesbian Desire in But Im a Cheerleader, Synthesis One: Shifting Paradigms in Foucaults History of Sexuality Volumes One and Two, Synthesis Three: Queer Imaginings in Melvilles Moby Dick, Synthesis Two: Queer Studies in a Transnational Context, Re-centering Race in My Beautiful Launderette, Synthesis 3: Meditation: Prodesse quam conspici, The Booty Dont Lie: Radical Coalitions between Queer Women of Color and the Straight Women Who Love Them, Cinema Diaspora: Discussant Mira Nair with Gayatri Gopinath Chairing. Jack Halberstam. It is also a very autobiographical and personal essay. As the essays in what is now Reading Sedgwick have gone through their final revisions, they honor the occasion of Eve's life and work by moving the . A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation, by Tan Hoang Nguyen. The policy required gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons to remain closeted while in the military. The view of sexuality that assumes individuals possess a fixed and innate sexual identity that is both universal and transhistorical. Please try again. The word politics and its many variations have come to signify dishonesty and ruthless self-interest within our culture, immediately evoking a sense of distrust in many Americans. According to Rubin, One begins to have a sense of a systematic social apparatus which takes up females as raw material and fashions domesticated women as products.[14] Rubin writes, As a preliminary definition, a sex-gender system is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.[15]. Susan Strykerprovides an even more specific periodization, finding that the term transgender emerged in the 1980s but didnt take on its current meaning until 1992 when Leslie Feinberg publishedTransgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come. 2) How does each of us vocalize the word queer in conversations with others? Sexuality, Race and Space: Queer Literary and Cultural Theory, Week 3: Theorizing Queer through Transnational Women of Color Feminisms, Berlant and Warner Sex in Public (Shoemaker), Judith Butlers Critically Queer (Jacoby), Summary of The Introduction to Whats Queer About Queer Studies Now? The work discussed in this chapter dissipates some of the power that coheres around the idea of natural gender and sexuality, an idea that has often been used to mark queer genders and sexualities as unnatural and by extension inferior to heterosexuality. Is it the homo/heterosexual binary that Sedgwick engages in such depth in Axiomatic? This anthology of essays explores the concept and act of passing, critiquing the visible and invisible systems of power involved in this performance (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press. in context of AIDS) and the need for strong attachment to cultural objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or obliquesites where the meanings didnt line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love (5);the challenges and rawness of opening conversations and classes that focus on gay and lesbian studies in academia; critiquing the construction of monolithic categories where everything means the same thing i.e., family, sexuality, queer; a description of her own projects in process; her personal situation that includes both illness and existentialism brought on by breast cancer in her forties and real outrage from the outside directed ather work as an academic studying literature and sexuality; the politics and perversity of feminist and leftist intellectualism vs. an increasingly anti-intellectual right; the resentment directed at academics who work outside of thepurely bureacratic time =money = productivity oriented workforce and the privileges of academics to take pleasure in their work; and finally, confronting the fears that PC culture will result in some kind of doctrine or propaganda, instead of an awakening and acknowledgment of what has always been. Introduction It is a challenge to create an origin story about a field of study, in this instance queer theory, because ideas are not birthed in a moment, a day, or even a year. According to Sedgwick, both Wilde and Nietzsche undertake a revaluation of the status of heterosexual masculinity in light of the German and English attitudes toward Ancient Greek art. Activist demands that have been most palatable to cisgender heterosexuals are those that foreground the right to privacy, individual autonomy, and equal access to social institutions like marriage and the military. It works for legal protections for LGBTQ+ persons, such as promoting legislation to prevent discrimination and hate crimes. Additionally, both queer theory and activism introduced ways of thinking and acting through politics that went beyond normalizing demands for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in existing social institutions. neoliberalism. Emerging in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the movement was a concerted effort to demand equal rights for homosexuals. I will begin my summary with the editors' conclusion, where they offer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a final example of . According to Sedgwick, homosexual and heterosexual definition is central to the construction of the modern nation-state, because it informs modern modes of population management. 1993. She notes that although it became standard to refer to lesbiansandgays in the 1980s, the and obscured differences instead of revealing them. Why or why not? Change). A term introduced by Eve Sedgwick to describe viewing sexuality and sexual definition as important to everyone, rather than focusing on homosexuals as a distinct group. In Chapter 4, Sedgwick begins with a meditation on the ways Victorian and Gothic literature negotiated the values around heterosexual masculinity and integrated those social norms into narrative. In fact, Judith Butler, who is often identified as an early and formative player in the creation of queer theory, cites both theorists as influential to her work on performativity. Like Muoz, Carruthers emphasizes the importance of the Black imagination, specifically the ability to imagine alternative economics, alternative family structures, or something else entirely.[42] This work cannot be accomplished if groups like the HRC, which has a clear procapitalist agenda, shape public discourse about LGBTQ+ issues. The short introduction in theQueer Studies Readerstates that Sedgwicks purpose in the piece is toargue against the monolithic understandings of sexuality that presume sexual identity as a static identity category (3). Allen Synthesis Two: Thoughts on Place, Space, and Change, Birth in the Closet-Synthesis #3 (Hummel), Hummel Synthesis #2:Re-vising the Suburbs: A Tale of Whoa, Synthesis #1: Freakin at the Freakers Ball: Halloween in the Castro, a Love Story, #3 Henry David Hwangs Queer Diaspora in M. Butterfly. Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center / Study of Human Rights Outstanding Book Award, this book provides the first scholarly study of trans people. And ultimately, it is a way to shout out loud that those things we have always just accepted all the moving parts that come to define family, sexuality, or queer those are things we havent had a full conversation about yet, and part of what we havent acknowledged is the expansiveness of categories, of all the parts that determine sexuality, but also race, also gender, also nationality, also age, and religion and class. Sedgwick opens this chapter by recounting the legal case of an eighth grade science teacher named Acanfora who was removed from his teaching position once the school board found out that he had been part of a pro-homosexual student group during his college years. 12 Queer Patience: Sedgwick's Identity Narratives KARIN SELLBERG 189 13 Weaver's Handshake: The Aesthetics of Chronic Objects (Sedgwick, Emerson, James) MICHAEL D. SNEDIKER 203 . For the final part of her article energetically titled A Crazy Little Thing Called Ressentiment, she argues against how the intellectual right, via the hackneyed populist semiotic of ressentiment (18), have attempted to trash and disavow the powerful energies of queerness (20).

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