Rogueish
02/05/13
Much might be said, then, following this clue, about the production and deployment, especially in contemporary U.S. society, of an extraordinarily high level of self-pity in nongay men. Its effects on our national politics, and international ideology and intervention, have been pervasive. (Snapshot, here, of the tear-welling eyes of Oliver North.) In more intimate manifestations this straight male self-pity is often currently referred to (though it appears to exceed) the cultural effects of feminism, and is associated with, or appealed to in justification of, acts of violence, especially against women. For instance, the astonishing proportion of male violence done on separated wives, ex-wives, and ex-girlfriends, women just at the threshold of establishing a separate personal space, seems sanctioned and guided as much as reflected by the flood of books and movies in which such violence seems an expression not of the macho personality but of the maudlin. (One reason women get nervous when straight men claim to have received from feminism the gift of “permission to cry.”)
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
02/05/13
Inexorably, from this grid of overlapping classifications – a purported taxonomic system that in fact does no more than chisel a historically specific point of stress into the unresolved issue of voluntarity – almost no individual practice in our culture by now remains exempt. The development of recent thought related to food is a good example: the concept of addiction to food led necessarily to that of addiction to dieting and in turn to that of addiction to exercise: each assertion of will made voluntarity itself appear problematical in a new area, with the consequence that that assertion of will itself came to appear addictive. (In fact, there has recently been a spate of journalism asserting that antiaddiction programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous and others modelled on it are addictive.) Some of the current self-help literature is explicit by now in saying that every extant form of behaviour, desire, relationship, and consumption in our culture can accurately be described as addictive. Such a formulation does not, however, seem to lead these analysts to the perception that “addiction” names a counter-structure always internal to the ethicizing hypostatization of “voluntarity”; instead, it drives ever more blindly their compulsion to isolate some new space of the purely voluntary.
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
01/17/13
So much has been gained by different ways we have learned to deconstruct the category of the individual that it is easy for us to read, say, Proust, as the most expert operator of our modern technologies for dismantling taxonomies of the person. For the emergence and persistence of the vitalizing worldly taxonomic energies on which Proust also depends, however, we have no theoretical support to offer. And these defalcations in our indispensable antihumanist discourse have apparently ceded the potentially forceful ground of profound, complex variation to humanist liberal “tolerance” or repressively trivializing celebration at best, to reactionary suppression at worst.
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
06/28/12
The dogged, defensive narrative stiffness of a paranoid temporality, after all, in which yesterday can’t be allowed to have differed from today and tomorrow must be even more so, takes its shape from a generational narrative that’s characterized by a distinctly Oedipal regularity and repetitiveness: it happened to my father’s father, it happened to my father, it is happening to me, it will happen to my son, and it will happen to my son’s son. But isn’t it a feature of queer possibility—only a contingent feature, but a real one, and one that in turn strengthens the force of contingency itself—that our generational relations don’t always proceed in this lockstep?
― Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, ”Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”
