Heather Love, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the original speakers at "Honoring Eve," a conference held at Boston University in 2009 in memory of the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, returned to BU on March 30, 2023 to deliver the Eleventh Annual Sedgwick Lecture: "To Be Real: The Passion of the Self in Queer Writing." Professor Love is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard) and the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor of a special issue of Representations ("Description Across Disciplines"). She has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press) came out in Fall 2021. She is currently at work on a project on the uses of the personal in academic criticism.
The rise of queer theory around 1990 represents the convergence of two intellectual movements: post-structuralism and identity politics. The combination of philosophical skepticism about identity and investment in minority experience is the signature of queer writing. Since its inception, queer criticism has been known for its rigorous interrogation of the grounds of personhood. But it is also known for its renovation of academic style in the direction of the personal and the anecdotal. Early critics broke with scholarly convention to include narrative, slang, obscenity, song lyrics, and passages of heightened emotion. The tension between “subjectless critique” and self-revelation is everywhere in the field, but has mostly gone unnoticed. It is visible in two signal statements from the early 1990s. In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler cited Nietzsche’s dictum that there is no “doer behind the deed” to question the grammar of the self. At almost the same moment, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick countered a century of writing about homosexuality from a clinical distance, arguing that “Queer can only signify properly in the first person.” In this talk, I will address this defining tension in the field, which values both the undermining of the self and personal authenticity. My central text will be a crucial early work of queer/trans theory, Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” Finally, I will reflect on the afterlife of this defining tension in the rise of contemporary queer autotheory.
This event was presented by the Boston University Gender and Sexuality Studies Group and co-sponsored by The Boston University Center for the Humanities, The Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Foundation and H. A. Sedgwick, The Departments of English, History, Religion, Romance Studies, Sociology, and World Languages & Literature, and the Programs in African American Studies and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, the Office of the Associate Dean for Diversity & Inclusion and the LGBTQIA+ Center for Faculty & Staff.
Негізгі бет 2023 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Memorial Lecture in Gender + Sexuality Studies by Heather Love
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