#Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

[certainwoman]

“Even at an individual level, there are remarkably few of even the most openly gay people who are not deliberately in the closet with someone personally or economically or institutionally important to them. Furthermore, the deadly elasticity of heterosexist presumption means that, like Wendy in Peter Pan, people find new walls springing up around them even as they drowse: every encounter with a new classful of students, to say nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure. Even an out gay person deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn't know whether they know or not; it is equally difficult to guess for any given interlocutor whether, if they did know, the knowledge would seem very important. Nor-at the most basic level-is it unaccountable that someone who wanted a job, custody or visiting rights, insurance, protection from violence, from "therapy," from distorting stereotype, from insulting scrutiny, from simple insult, from forcible interpretation of their bodily product, could deliberately choose to remain in or to reenter the closet in some or all segments of their life. The gay closet is not a feature only of the lives of gay people.But for many gay people it is still the fundamental feature of social life; and there can be few gay people, however courageous and forthright by habit, however fortunate in the support of their immediate communities, in whose lives the closet is not still a shaping presence.“

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

[oldwinesoul]

What I would be when I grew up, I never wondered that (maybe I knew that);

I wondered other things: if I'd be sane. Loved.

// Fat Art, Thin Art, 'Performative (San Francisco) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

[leehallfae]

riverdale (2017–2023) s02 e03 “the watcher in the woods” // “gender asymmetry & erotic triangles” - eve kosofsky sedgwick, between men: english literature & male homosocial desire

[miriam-heddy]

Just started watching Alert: Missing People. I had to wait till I’d seen all of H5O. I zoomed thru the first 4 eps.

Scott Caan is so very good! No surprise, but yeah. And, not standing next to a 6’1” Adonis (who, yeah, I miss!) must be a bit of a relief (if only for the director and wardrobe people).

There’s something very *gentle* about Scott, despite the explosive temper and hand gestures. Once again, he plays the father and friendly ex-husband well. His voice is different w/out the Jersey accent. Oh, and he’s still hot af.

Really enjoying the rest of the cast, too. Petey Gibson’s cute.

I’m hoping for some buddy action between Jay and Mike, btw. Maybe some slash? The setup is already seriously triangulation-based.

[dionysus-complex]

'There was something especially devastating about the wave of anti–“PC” journalism in the absolutely open contempt it displayed, and propagated, for every tool that has been so painstakingly assembled in the resistance against these devaluations. Through raucously orchestrated, electronically amplified campaigns of mock-incredulous scorn, intellectual and artistic as well as political possibilities, skills, ambitions, and knowledges have been laid waste with a relishing wantonness. No great difficulty in recognizing those aspects of the anti–“PC” craze that are functioning as covers for a rightist ideological putsch; but it has surprised me that so few people seem to view the recent developments as, among other things, part of an overarching history of anti-intellectualism: anti-intellectualism left as well as right. No twentieth-century political movement, after all, can afford not to play the card of populism, whether or not the popular welfare is what it has mainly at heart (indeed, perhaps especially where it is least so). And anti-intellectual pogroms, like anti-Semitic or queer-bashing ones, are quick, efficient, distracting, and almost universally understood signifiers for a populist solidarity that may boil down to nothing by the time it reaches the soup pot. It takes care and intellectual scrupulosity to forge an egalitarian politics not founded on such telegraphic slanders. Rightists today like to invoke the threatening specter of a propaganda ridden socialist realism, but both they and the anti-intellectuals of the left might meditate on why the Nazis’ campaign against “degenerate art” (Jewish, gay, modernist) was couched, as their own arguments are, in terms of assuring the instant, unmediated, and universal accessibility of all the sign systems of art (Goebbels even banning all art criticism in 1936, on the grounds that art is self-explanatory). It’s hard to tell which assumption is more insultingly wrong: that the People (always considered, of course, as a monolithic unit) have no need and no faculty for engaging with work that is untransparent; or that the work most genuinely expressive of the People would be so univocal and so limpidly vacant as quite to obviate the labors and pleasures of interpretation. Anti-intellectuals today, at any rate, are happy to dispense with the interpretive process and depend instead on appeals to the supposedly self-evident: legislating against “patently offensive” art (no second looks allowed); citing titles as if they were texts; appealing to potted summaries and garbled trots as if they were variorum editions in the original Aramaic. The most self evident things, as always, are taken—as if unanswerably—to be the shaming risibility of any form of oblique or obscure expression; and the flat inadmissability of openly queer articulation.

These histories of anti-intellectualism cut across the “political correctness” debate in complicated ways. The term “politically correct” originated, after all, in the mockery by which experimentally and theoretically minded feminists, queers, and leftists (of every color, class, and sexuality) fought back against the stultifications of feminist and left anti-intellectualism. The hectoring, would-be populist derision that difficult, ambitious, or sexually charged writing today encounters from the right is not always very different from the reception it has already met with from the left. It seems as if many academic feminists and leftists must be grinding their teeth at the way the right has willy-nilly conjoined their discursive fate with that of theorists and “deconstructionists”—just as, to be fair, many theorists who have betrayed no previous interest in the politics of class, race, gender, or sexuality may be more than bemused at turning up under the headings of “Marxism” or “multiculturalism.” The right’s success in grouping so many, so contestative, movements under the rubric “politically correct” is a coup of cynical slovenliness unmatched since the artistic and academic purges of Germany and Russia in the thirties.'

(Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer and Now," in Tendencies, 16-17 - published 1994)

[vital-information]

“The moralistic hygiene by which any reader of today is unchallengeably entitled to condescend to the thought of any moment in the past (maybe especially the recent past) is globally available to anyone who masters the application of two or three discrediting questions. How provisional, by contrast, how difficult to reconstruct and how exorbitantly specialized of use, are the tools that in any given case would allow one to ask: What was it possible to think or do at a certain moment of the past that it no longer is? And how are those possibilities to be found, unfolded, allowed to move and draw air and seek new voices and uses, in the very different disciplinary ecology of even a few decades distance?”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Field”

[ynwei]

The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson

[this-world-of-beautiful-monsters]

- From "Queer and Now" by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from page 3 of her essay collection Tendencies

[IMAGE ID: Screenshots of a text saying:

I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to use, became a prime resource for survival. 

We need for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love. This can’t help coloring the adult relation to cultural texts and objects; in fact, it’s almost hard for me to imagine another way of coming to care enough about literature to give a lifetime to it.

The demands on both text and the reader from so intent an attachment can be multiple, even paradoxical. For me, a kind of formalism, a visceral near-identification with the writing I cared for, at level of sentence structure, metrical pattern, rhyme, was one of trying to appropriate what seemed the numinous and resistant power of the chosen objects. 

Education made it easy to accumulate tools for this particular formalist project, because the texts that magnetized me happened to be novels and poems; it’s impressed me deeply the way others of my generation and since seem to have invented for themselves, in the spontaneity of great need, the tools for a formalist apprehension of other less prestigious, more ubiquitous kinds of text: genre movies, advertising, comic strips. END ID]

____

Something something queerness in fandom, something something neurodivergency in fandom, something something BIPOC consumers in fandom and disability in fandom and everything from everyone in fandom, something something the way a piece of media just speaks to you when you need it most--like the way an academic text written by a stranger years before your birth feels like it was written with you in mind, or a show about cartoon turtles, or anything else in the world.

Something something and it just hits.

[some-sick-deja-vu]

“MacKinnon concludes, ‘what defines a woman as such is what turns men on.’ But what defines defines?”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire

[liminalweirdo]

does anyone happen to have a copy of The Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick that they could direct me to?

[oldwinesoul]

𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝐼 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑏𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝐼 𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑤 𝑢𝑝, 𝐼 𝑛𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑤𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 (𝑚𝑎𝑦𝑏𝑒 𝐼 𝑘𝑛𝑒𝑤 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡); 𝐼 𝑤𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠: 𝑖𝑓 𝐼'𝑑 𝑏𝑒 𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑒. 𝐿𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑑.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Fat Art, Thin Art, 'Performative (San Francisco)

[thereisnoneedtopanic]

「Besideは興味深い前置詞でもある。なぜなら、そこには二元論的なものは何もないからだ。無数ではないが、多くの要素が隣り合っているかもしれないからだからだ。 Besideは、二元論的思考を強制するいくつかの線形的な論理学の、ゆったりと広がる不可知論を可能にさせる。例えば、無矛盾律、排中律、原因と結果、主体と客体など。 しかし、その関心は、兄弟姉妹とベッドを共有したことのある子どもなら誰でも知っているように、密接で平等主義的な幻想や、平和的な関係に依存しない。 Besideには、欲望、同一化、表象、反発、並列化、識別化、対抗、もたれかけ、ねじれ、模倣、撤退、引き寄せ、攻撃、包み込みなど、その他の関係が幅広く含まれているのだ」（Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 𝙏𝙤𝙘𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙁𝙚𝙚𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙜 8）。

[shrimpchipsss]

professor shen qingqiu, the most confusing man in academia

(redraw of that indiana jones scene)

[princesskuragina]

That post-all-nighter breakfast that tastes like. Actually my brain is so fried that I've tried to write this post like 10 times and I can't figure out how to formulate what I'm feeling

[vital-information]

Some of the infants, children, and adults in whom shame remains the most available mediator of identity are the ones called (a related word) shy. ('Remember the fifties?' Lily Tomlin used to ask. 'No one was gay in the fifties; they were just shy.') Queer, I'd suggest, might usefully be thought of as referring in the first place to this group or an overlapping group of infants and children, those whose sense of identity is for some reason tuned most durably to the note of shame... I'd venture that queerness in this sense has, at this historical moment, some definitionally very significant overlap, though a vibrantly elastic and temporally convoluted one, with the complex of attributes today condensed as adult or adolescent 'gayness.' Everyone knows that there are some lesbians and gay men who could never count as queer and other people who vibrate to the chord of queer without having much same-sex eroticism, or without routing their same-sex eroticism through the identity labels lesbian or gay. Yet many of the performative identity vernaculars that seem most recognizably 'flushed' (to use [Henry] James's word) with shame consciousness and shame consciousness and shame creativity do cluster intimately around lesbian and gay worldly spaces. ... It has been all too easy for the psychologists and the few psychoanalysts working on shame to write it back into the moralisms of the repressive hypothesis: 'healthy' or 'unhealthy,' shame can be seen as good because it preserves privacy and decency, bad because it colludes with self-repression or social repression. Clearly, neither of these valuations is what I'm getting at. I want to say that at least for certain ('queer') people, shame is simply the first, and remains a permanent, structuring fact of identity: one that...has its own, powerfully productive and powerfully social metamorphic possibilities.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel” from Touching Feeling

[compacflt]

Okay, so I was re-reading your Slider one-shot for like the twentieth time, and what really struck me (beyond the brilliance of your writing, and the way you’ve presented the disillusionment of growing up, expecting the world to be a certain way, only to realize that life doesn’t quite work out the way you think it will, when you’re seventeen), is the casual sexism just tossed ‘round by our main characters!! :o We have canonical evidence of both Ice and Mav being pretty sexist (what with “the plaque for the alternates is in the ladies’ room” and the downright stalker-ish behavior exhibited by Mav at the O-club…), but it still surprised me a lil’ when twenty-y/o Ice was just like: “The Soviet Union did the impossible and taught women to drive” —and I realized that ah, he truly was born in 1959, or something. There’s little scenes throughout your story where I find myself wondering, which one of them is better, in this sense: When Ice tells Mav that Sarah isn’t talking to him ‘cause of his combat kills, justifies it by saying: “You know how women are”, and Mav tells him all women aren’t the same… I thought that maybe, it was Mav; but then later, Ice shows a distinctive amount of empathy for Juno, sees and respects her for the skilled pilot that she is… and I thought that maybe, it’s Ice after all—he does seem to be more progressive and accepting than Mav, in general? It also made me wonder, that if either of them had been a woman, would they even have respected the other person enough to consider them to be a rival??—or would it have a been a mildly-amusing circus side show for them, to have a female pilot at TOPGUN?

Ty for the ask anon!! ice is more socially progressive than mav yes.

But—maybe this is my experience growing up in one of the bluest counties in Commiefornia and then going to one of the most leftist-coded colleges in one of the most leftist-coded cities in The World; uhh, even if a white man votes D all the time & has professional respect for women/minorities to their faces etc, get him in a room with a bunch of other white men, especially in a masculine and competitive environment like the gym or the navy, and uh. progressive or not, what you get is a lot of “The Soviet Union did the impossible & taught women to drive.”

And it was the 1980s. (As a reminder, in top gun’s 1986, less than 45% of Americans even approved of interracial marriage.) It sucks to say it, but if Ice was making fun of Cougar for quitting the navy cause of his psych issues such as they may be, and openly calling bullshit on Maverick’s MiG story in front of everyone, I am quite confident in saying he Would Not respect a female pilot to her face—if they were the same rank. At the same rank, it’s a competition. All weaknesses, even perceived biological ones, are to be exploited and called to attention. —But, once he’s advanced in rank, proven his own superiority, he’s more inclined to favor a meritocratic “sex doesn’t matter just fly good” attitude, ergo his relationship w/ “Juno” (she’s just a literary symbol to show that Ice may have respect for other minorities in the Navy “your career speaks for itself” but NOT FOR HIMSELF as a closeted man). This “who cares about gender/race just fly good” attitude is probably where 50s+ Maverick lands too, which is why no issues with Phoenix.

but jesus GOD maverick is a sexist in the original Top Gun. That’s why I wrote the prologue to WWGATTAI—a part of me definitely believes both he and Ice are definitively queer, but a part of me also wonders, are they just also conditioned to dismiss women as intellectual/societal equals because of their time in the 1980s male-dominated Navy? CAN they really only have a truly equal relationship with another man? I have no idea what my Ice’s sexual orientation is for exactly this reason. Yes, he’s functionally gay by the end of it, and that’s what I keep calling him—but sexuality is fluid & complicated. It’s definitely more-than possible he’s mostly straight and it’s just the circumstances of his wildly intense trauma-bond relationship with Maverick that led to their relationship as I wrote it. If you don’t LIKE/understand/respect women, and only feel at home/excited by committing acts of male-typified violence with the few men you respect, how does that bend your definition of the word straight? ...its still straight, but only straight-ish!

not to take it a step further, but WHY ELSE is canon maverick single in TGM? he canonically can’t make it work with women until he retires from the navy!!! he doesnt know how!!! His military environment is not conducive to normal long-term relationships with civilian women!!!