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Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 195 pp. Hardcover, $69.95. Paperback, $18.95.
Currently a Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick began her academic career at Amherst College and then taught at Duke University in the late eighties and early nineties. During this time at Duke, Sedgwick and her colleagues were in the academic avant-garde of the culture wars, using literary criticism to question dominant discourses of sexuality, race, gender, and even literature itself. Sedgwick first presented her particular collection of critical tools and interests in the dazzling and hugely influential volumes Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and The Epistemology of the Closet (1990). The latter work became one of gay and lesbian studies' and queer theory's founding texts. If one is familiar with these works, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, her latest book, will be a poignant reminder of those early days, which she discusses briefly in the introduction in order to reference the affective conditions-chiefly the emotions provoked by the AIDS epidemic-that prevailed at the time and to bring into focus her principle theme: the relationship between feeling, learning, and action.
Sedgwick's recollections of the early years of the AIDS epidemic underscore her observation that given "the strategic banalization of gay and lesbian politics . . . the moment may be past when theory was in a very productive relation to sexual activism" (13). In response to this state of affairs, she sets out in Touching Feeling to explore critical methods that may, once again, engage politically and help shift the foundations for individual and collective experience. While this takes her into the familiar territory of sexual politics, she focuses on elements that appear, at first, to be unlikely tools or venues for either criticism or activism, including shame, paranoia, disavowal, and dying. The common thread to these topics is that they provide a trace of experience, a mechanism for recollection, and, consequently, an opening for analysis. An additional virtue is that they are unlikely to translate into solid foundations for dogma or identity and will, therefore, keep us productively unsettled.
Sedgwick draws on a wide array of texts in her investigations,...