Search results
Filter
29 results
Sort by:
The 1001 Seances
In: GLQ: a journal of lesbian and gay studies, Volume 17, Issue 4, p. 457-481
ISSN: 1527-9375
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."
Anality: News From the Front
In: Studies in gender and sexuality: psychoanalysis, cultural studies, treatment, research, Volume 11, Issue 3, p. 151-162
ISSN: 1940-9206
A epistemologia do armário
In: Cadernos pagu, Issue 28, p. 19-54
Nesta versão condensada de seu livro homônimo, Sedgwick esboça uma reflexão sobre o "armário" como um dispositivo de regulação da vida de gays e lésbicas que concerne, também, aos heterossexuais e seus privilégios de visibilidade e hegemonia de valores. A pesquisadora norte-americana afirma que "o armário", ou o "segredo aberto", marcou a vida gay/lésbica no último século e não deixou de fazê-lo mesmo após o marco de Stonewall em 1969. Sedgwick argumenta ainda que esse regime, com suas regras contraditórias e limitantes sobre privacidade e revelações, público e privado, conhecimento e ignorância, serviu para dar forma ao modo como muitas questões de valores e epistemologia foram concebidas e abordadas na moderna sociedade ocidental como um todo.
Three Poems
In: Women & performance: a journal of feminist theory, Volume 16, Issue 2, p. 327-328
ISSN: 1748-5819
Eulogy
In: Women & performance: a journal of feminist theory, Volume 13, Issue 1, p. 233-236
ISSN: 1748-5819
A Response to C. Jacob Hale
In: Social text, Issue 52/53, p. 237
ISSN: 1527-1951
Pandas in trees
In: Women & performance: a journal of feminist theory, Volume 8, Issue 2, p. 175-183
ISSN: 1748-5819
Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel
In: GLQ: a journal of lesbian and gay studies, Volume 1, Issue 1, p. 1-16
ISSN: 1527-9375
How to Bring Your Kids up Gay
In: Social text, Issue 29, p. 18
ISSN: 1527-1951
The weather in Proust
In: Series Q
The Performative and the Peri-
In: The women's review of books, Volume 21, Issue 6, p. 12
All the World's a Closet
In: The women's review of books, Volume 8, Issue 7, p. 17