gender

homosociality

queer idiom

shame

space of permission

nationality

American

occupation / innovator as

critic

essayist

feminist

literary critic

innovator in the field of

critical theory

feminism

feminist theory

gender and sexuality studies

homoeroticism

performativity

queer studies

queer theory

sexuality

scientific organization

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

poet

journalist

cause of death

natural causes

poetry

religion

Buddhism

gender studies

is the dichotomized social production and reproduction of male and female identities and behaviors.

the ''dichotomized social production and reproduction of male and female identities and behaviors . . . in a culture for which 'male/female' functions as a primary and perhaps model binarism affecting the structure and meaning of many, many other binarisms . . . the meaning of gender is seen as culturally mutable and variable, highly relational . . . and inextricable from a history of power differentials between genders' (Sedgwick 1990, 27-28).

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is a kind of wordplay which, viewed through a queer lens, might be re-magined as homoerotic on account of its being homophonic.

Sedgwick drew on the work of literary critic Christopher Craft to argue that both puns and rhymes might be re-imagined as 'homoerotic because homophonic'... citing literary critic Jonathan Dollimore, Sedgwick suggests that grammatical inversion might have an equally intimate relation to sexual inversion... she suggested that readers may want to 'sensitise' themselves to 'potentially queer' rhythms of certain grammatical, syntactical, rhetorical, and generic sentence structures... scenes of childhood spanking were eroticised, and associated with two-beat lines and lyric as a genre... enjambment (continuing a thought from one line, couplet, or stanza to the next without a syntactical break) had potentially queer erotic implications... finally, while thirteen-line poems allude to the sonnet form, by rejecting the final rhyming couplet it was possible to 'resist the heterosexual couple as a paradigm', suggesting instead the potential masturbatory pleasures of solitude.[14]' (wiki)

is simultaneously contagious and isolating, a double movement toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality.

As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has noted, one of the strangest features of shame is the way in which someone else's humiliation that seemingly has nothing to do with another individual, can so easily enter him or her. Shame is simultaneously contagious and isolating, a double movement ''toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality.' This is how shame can aid us to define who we are and who we wish to be... in shame identity both derives from and aims toward the social. When shame occurs there is to only a sudden withdrawal of the individual's incorporation from his or her cultural environment, but also a raising self-consciousness to his or her identity.

Eve Sedgwick

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Eve SedgwickThinkers

Eve Sedgwick