Eve Sedgwick: Between Men and The Country Wife
Summary points from Between Men selection:
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Thinking about desire as a structure allows us to analyze the complex relations
of power and sexuality.
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Although it is easier in western culture to think of women's bonds on a
continuum of homosocial to homosexual, we also need to analyze menís bonds
in this way to uncover the operations of patriarchy and one of its most
powerful tools, homophobia.
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Gone With The Wind is a fine example of the historically situated
meaning of female sexuality and rape; they only exist in relation to class
and race, and are hence not stable terms.
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Sedgwick tries to negotiate the split between Marxist feminist theory and
radical feminist theory by reading sexuality as ideology.
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What counts as sexual is variable and political.
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The exchange of women cements bonds between men in Western European culture.
On The Country Wife:
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Pinchwife and Sparkish represent two extremes of the male traffic in women:
Pinchwife fears the exchange to an obsessive degree and tries to take himself
out of it (which he canít do) while Sparkish seeks it out to an obsessive
degree such that he becomes "a pander to [his] own wife."
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Cuckholding is an act performed by a man on another man.
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The gender and power system of The Country Wife classifies manipulators
and the manipulated through gender coding, working from the exchange of
women.
Axioms from Epistemology of the Closet:
Axiom 1: People are different from each other
Axiom 2: The study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study
of gender; correspondingly, antihomophobic inquiry is not coextensive with
feminist inquiry. But we canít know in advance how they will be different.
Axiom 3: There canít be an a priori decision about how far it
will make sense to conceptualize lesbian and gay male identities together.
Or separately.
Axiom 4: The immemorial, seemingly ritualized debates on nature
versus nurture take place against a very unstable background of tacit assumptions
and fantasies about both nurture and nature.
Axiom 5: The historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may
obscure the present conditions of sexual identity.
Axiom 6: The relation of gay studies to debates on the literary
canon is, and had best be, tortuous.
"Has there ever been a gay Socrates? Has there ever been a gay
Shakespeare? Has there ever been a gay Proust? Does the Pope
wear a dress? If these questions startle, it is not least as tautologies.
A short answer, though a very incomplete one, might be that not only have
there been a gay Socrates, Shakespeare, and Proust, but that their
names are Socrates, Shakespeare, and Proust;Ö" p. 52, Epistemology of
the Closet