Tendencies
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In Tendencies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick "attempts to find new ways to think about lesbian, gay, and other sexually dissident loves and identities in a complex social ecology where the presence of different genders, different identities and identifications, will be taken as a given"(xiii). Queer is a key term in Tendencies, and while Sedgwick does use the term to refer to "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically," she also points out that "a lot of the most exciting recent work around 'queer' spins the term outward along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses"(8-9). The book itself is a queer collection of essays, with topics ranging from Henry James and lesbianism to John Waters and Divine, from opiate dens and contemporary arguments around addiction to sexualities and nationalism, from the war on effeminate boys to the activism around AIDS and breast cancer. Throughout, Sedgwick experiments with and transforms many different received forms of writing-- the autobiographical narrative, the performance piece, the atrocity story, the polemic, the prose essay that quotes poetry, the obituary - in an on-going project she refers to as Queer Performativity. As Sedgwick states, "these essays are about passionate queer things that happen across the lines that divide genders, discourses, ‘perversions’"(Tendencies xiii).
