At the risk of seeming otiose (one of my favorite Sedgwick words), I’ll open this post with my own anecdote of appreciation for Eve Sedgwick’s work. During my first semester of college, my beloved mentor-professor initiated me into the world of academic queerdom by lending me a copy of Between Men. Next thing you know I was writing a paper on the erotic triangle in Frankenstein—nothing extraordinary, but it provided the occasion for discovering Sedgwick’s brilliance, and I was hooked on queer studies from that point forward.
This pivotal “exchange” between mentor and student seems related to the tradition of “intertextuality” that Sedgwick refers to in her chapter on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (28). There, she describes how the Sonnets, along with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, figured prominently in the construction of a bourgeois Victorian homosexual subculture. “Visiting Whitman, liking Whitman, giving gifts of ‘Whitman,’” Sedgwick suggests, offered ways to identify oneself as homosexual and to express desire for and/or affiliation with other fellow travelers (28).
In my first few months of college, I “came out” to my professor as a certain kind of reader—one who took pleasure in finding the secret that was hidden in plain sight. Her gift of Sedgwick’s book revealed that there were others in on the secret. While my relationship to the “clique” of queer studies has grown more complicated since then, re-reading Between Men for this seminar has felt like an intellectual homecoming of sorts.
This time around I appreciated the opportunity (er, requirement) to actually read the “boring parts”—i.e., the literary analysis chapters—which I confess I’ve previously skipped in both Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet.
One thing I notice is that Sedgwick distances her analysis from the intertextual practices of reading mentioned above. Intertextuality is a key theme both in queer subcultures and queer theory, but Sedgwick argues that it can lead to a sort of misreading of texts, “plucked from history and, indeed, from factual grounding” (29). While I am not ready to abandon intertextual misreading altogether, Sedgwick does persuasively show that it can distract us from noticing the connection between earlier forms of homosocial and homoerotic desire and gender, class, and racial hierarchies. She offers a different model of analysis, somewhat more historicized, that treats literary texts as sources of theoretical insights (or “tentative generalizations” as she calls them [47]) about the underlying structures of homosociality and homoeroticism in dominant Western culture. These structures presumably persist into our own period.
I find this method of analysis—deriving theory in part from cultural texts rather than applying theory to them—inspiring but also challenging, since it raises questions about the selection of one’s archive, among other concerns.
~Jennifer B.
