Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Bio: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is an academic researcher from City University of New York. The author has contributed to research in topics: Queer & Performativity. The author has an hindex of 29, co-authored 53 publications receiving 12090 citations.

Epistemology of the Closet

Abstract: Nesta versao condensada de seu livro homonimo, Sedgwick esboca uma reflexao sobre o "armario" como um dispositivo de regulacao da vida de gays e lesbicas que concerne, tambem, aos heterossexuais e seus privilegios de visibilidade e hegemonia de valores. A pesquisadora norte-americana afirma que "o armario", ou o "segredo aberto", marcou a vida gay/lesbica no ultimo seculo e nao deixou de faze-lo mesmo apos o marco de Stonewall em 1969. Sedgwick argumenta ainda que esse regime, com suas regras contraditorias e limitantes sobre privacidade e revelacoes, publico e privado, conhecimento e ignorância, serviu para dar forma ao modo como muitas questoes de valores e epistemologia foram concebidas e abordadas na moderna sociedade ocidental como um todo.

Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire

Abstract: Introductioni. Homosocial Desireii. Sexual Politics and Sexual Meaningiii. Sex or History?iv. What This Book Does1. Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles2. Swan in Love: The Example of Shakespeare's Sonnets3. The Country Wife: Anatomies of Male Homosocial Desire4. A Sentimental Journey: Sexualism and the Citizen of the World5. Toward the Gothic: Terrorism and Homosexual Panic6. Murder Incorporated: Confessions of a Justified Sinner7. Tennyson's Princess: One Bride for Seven Brothers8. Adam Bede and Henry Esmond: Homosocial Desire and the Historicity of the Female9. Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital: The Example of Our Mutual Friend10. Up the Postern Stair: Edwin Drood and the Homophobia of EmpireCoda: Toward the Twentieth Century: English Readers of Whitman

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity

Abstract: Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Interlude, Pedagogic 27 1. Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel 35 2. Around the Performative: Periperformative Vicinities in Nineteenth-Century Narrative 67 3. Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins (Written with Adam Frank) 93 4. Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You 123 5. Pedagogy of Buddhism 153 Works Cited 183 Index 189

Shame and its sisters : a Silvan Tomkins reader

Abstract: Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank 1 A Note on the Text 29 1 What Are Affects? 33 2 Interest-Excitement 75 3 Enjoyment-Joy 81 4 Surprise-Startle 107 5 Distress-Anguish 109 6 Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust 133 7 Script Theory and Nuclear Scripts 179 8 Anger 197 9 Fear-Terror 235 10 Perception: The Body Image and Phantom Limbs 241 Silvan S. Tomkins: A Biographical Sketch / Irving E. Alexander 251 Index 265

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

Abstract: Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity. In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

Abstract: L anguage has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every “thing”—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. The ubiquitous puns on “matter” do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them. Rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the extent to which matters of “fact” (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here). Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter. What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented? How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture? How does one even go about inquiring after the material conditions that have led us to such a brute reversal of naturalist beliefs when materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility?

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Abstract: Evolutionary psychology is one of many biologically informed approaches to the study of human behavior. Along with cognitive psychologists, evolutionary psychologists propose that much, if not all, of our behavior can be explained by appeal to internal psychological mechanisms. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations—products of natural selection—that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive and reproduce. To understand the central claims of evolutionary psychology we require an understanding of some key concepts in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Philosophers are interested in evolutionary psychology for a number of reasons. For philosophers of science —mostly philosophers of biology—evolutionary psychology provides a critical target. There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise. For philosophers of mind and cognitive science evolutionary psychology has been a source of empirical hypotheses about cognitive architecture and specific components of that architecture. Philosophers of mind are also critical of evolutionary psychology but their criticisms are not as all-encompassing as those presented by philosophers of biology. Evolutionary psychology is also invoked by philosophers interested in moral psychology both as a source of empirical hypotheses and as a critical target.

Manifesto for a relational sociology

Abstract: Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily in substances or processes, in static "things" or in dynamic, unfolding rela...

The evidence of experience

Abstract: Feminist historian Joan Scott’s classic essay, “The Evidence of Experience,” many times reprinted, extends the semiotic principle that there is no unmediated access to reality-that language, in the form of available discourses, prefigures our perception of the world-to the heart of the traditional historian’s notion of historical transparency, the evidence of experience. For most historians, from Herodotus on, evidence (a word derived from the Latin videre, to see), typically functions as the bedrock of historical truth and objectivity, since it is grounded in the testimony of those who actually experience “what happened.” The essay opens with Samuel Delany’s account of a visit to a homosexual bathhouse, an experience that, in its powerful visibility, persuaded him of the “fact” of homosexuality as a mass movement, shaping the shared lives of millions of men and women, in contrast to the view of homosexuals at the time as “isolated” marginal figures. Delany’s reliance on the “truth” of the evidence provided by his experience of the bathhouse is analogous to the historian’s belief in a referential notion of evidence that presents it as a “reflection of the real.”