Tendencies

“Tendencies is a selection of Sedgwick’s brilliant and provocative essays. . . . The associations she makes are novel and imaginative.” - Karla Jay, New York Times Book Review

“Sedgwick is one of the smartest and wittiest critics writing. The play of her mind as it goes from Henry James to John Waters and Divine, from AIDS to Jane Austen and women’s anal eroticism, is dazzling. Her work is often as moving as it is acute: Like the best of the gay male writers whose work has been her principal subject, in her prose flawless surface lures the reader to explore new depths.” - Marilyn Hacker, The Nation

"Because of the polymorphousness of its disciplinary perversity, Tendencies, taken together with Sedgwick's two previous books, virtually defines the new field of queer studies. The opulent availability of an embodied self who also happens to be a brilliant reader marks Sedgwick's effort throughout this volume. It is also what allows one the tutelary space for taking, not only pleasure from her work, but courage from her example." - James Creech, author of Closet Writing/Gay Reading

"Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is deservedly recognised as the primum mobile of lesbian & gay studies. Yet her real achievement lies not so much in the creation of a new academic discipline, as in the profound implications her work carries for the rest of the academy, and the wider world beyond. For she assigns an absolutely fundamental, constitutive role to homophobia in the construction of Modernity, and its myriad institutions, discourses, pleasures, and pains. Tendencies provides a marvelously exhilarating excursion across the range of her interests and involvements. . . . She is the most consistently intelligent, courageous, perceptive, daring and sensible critic currently writing in the United States. I strongly recommend panic-buying." - Simon Watney, author of Policing Desire