A review by ralowe
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

5.0

for me this is like part 2 in my quest to read around the canonical. one day i may actually read epistemology of the closet, but for now it's fun to read sedgwick's other work. i guess technically this would be part 3 or 2 1/2 since i've just finished the sylvan tomkins book she co-edited. i'm kind of strung out on affect because it's such a mesmerizing way to describe unsystematically how objects relate to other objects relate to subjects. that fuzzy gloopy metaphoricity that lurks behind the world is so addictive. her ideas are handy with talking about what always felt so campy about twilight, how edward and jacob really want to bone each other and bella just becomes their arena of homophobic hostility due to the prohibition of them ever really getting down. that subjective sense of camp or something i always think as having some connection to the tacit tones that lurk between and behind and saturates everything that people now seem to call affect. but i don't know. as i was reading this book i kept thinking about how i wanted to say that sedgwick really wants to talk about gay misogyny when she's writing this. the english literature thing is just a euphemistic diversion for the gyneophobic networks that exist between gay men. why do i think that? i also think that her essay in periperformatives also served as a platform for her to tangentially rant against the institution of marriage. between men was written way before gay men had the kind of institutional power where they're openly out and her attention to dickens, tennyson, sterne and so on all functions as a queer feminist cautionary tale.