Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

After Sex?: On Writing since Queer Theory

Since queer theory originated in the early 1990s, its insights and modes of analysis have been taken up by scholars across the humanities and social sciences. In After Sex? prominent contributors to the development of queer studies offer personal reflections on the field’s history, accomplishments, potential, and limitations. They consider the purpose of queer theory and the extent to which it is or is not defined by its engagement with sex and sexuality. For many of the contributors, a broad notion of sexuality is essential to queer thought. At the same time, some of them caution against creating an all-embracing idea of queerness, because it empties the term “queer” of meaning and assumes the universality of ideas developed in the North American academy. Some essays recall the political urgency of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when gay and lesbian activist and queer theory projects converged in response to the AIDS crisis. Other pieces exemplify more recent trends in queer critique, including the turn to affect and the debates surrounding the “antisocial thesis,” which associates queerness with the repudiation of heteronormative forms of belonging. Contributors discuss queer theory’s engagement with questions of transnationality and globalization, temporality and historical periodization. Meditating on the past and present of queer studies, After Sex? illuminates its future. Contributors . Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Michael Cobb, Ann Cvetkovich, Lee Edelman, Richard Thompson Ford, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Jonathan Goldberg, Janet Halley, Neville Hoad, Joseph Litvak, Heather Love, Michael Lucey, Michael Moon, Jose Esteban Munoz, Jeff Nunokawa, Andrew Parker, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Richard Rambuss, Erica Rand, Bethany Schneider, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kate Thomas

Anality: News From the Front

“Anality: News From the Front” is a critical commentary on Jeffrey Gusss (this issue) paper, “The Danger of Desire: Anal Sex and the Homo/Masculine Subject” and Stephen Botticellis “Clinical Example.” In her analysis of Gusss argument, Sedgwick situates the dangerous potential of transgressive anal desire as “a revolutionary flash-point to be sought out and exploited” and highlights what she views as Gusss underlying assumption: that “danger is now altogether a thing to be decried and avoided.” Her response to Botticelli is a lively imagined relationship to Botticelli as a therapist, based on his clinical observations documented in “Clinical Example.”

The 1001 Seances

This essay, written in 1976–77, is concerned primarily with James Merrill’s long poem “The Book of Ephraim,” which was published in 1976. The poem tells of many nights spent by Merrill and his partner, David Jackson, in communication with a spirit named Ephraim, whose messages they spell out on a Ouija board. The poem also includes fragments of a second story, a retelling of a lost novel of Merrill’s. In her essay Sedgwick talks about the poem’s structure, likening the spacing of fragments of Ephraim’s voice throughout the poem with the spacing of fragments of the lost novel, but she contrasts the pointedness of the novel’s plot with the looser repetitious structure of the poem’s nightly séances. To show that this pointedness is characteristic of Merrill’s novelistic writing, Sedgwick also looks at two actual novels that Merrill had published years earlier, The Seraglio (1957) and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965). In both novels, as well as in the lost novel embedded in the poem, the plot is dominated by a central, climactic, sadomasochistic scene of real or symbolic castration. Sedgwick distinguishes the fixity of this novelistic theme of castration from a different thematic range in the poem’s language, which has to do “with the behaviors of liquids, with currents, obstruction, diffusion, and circulation.” She explores this thematic range in the relation between Ephraim and his mediums, Merrill and Jackson, in which there is more play, variously shifting among flattery, voyeurism, gossip, pedagogy, love, fear, and neglect. The thematics of liquids, she suggests, includes the thematics of fixation but does not synthesize it. “It spaces, distributes, circulates it.” There is, she says, a formal impartiality to the distribution throughout this long poem of its many disparate elements, but there is also an awareness of wastage, of moments “intently and beautifully” improved, “then how quickly squandered.” Sedgwick suggests that Merrill’s long poem is formally exciting because it is “so knowing, so inventive, and so trusting about that wastage.” Sedgwick is describing the poem itself when she quotes it as saying that Merrill and Jackson, through their Ouija board séances with Ephraim, became “a set of / Quasi-grammatical constructions which / Could utter some things clearly, forcibly, / Others not.” (This abstract was written by HAS, with apologies to EKS.)