Date: Sat, 19 Aug 1995 15:23:38 -0500 From: mohr richard d Review of Eve Sedgwick's _Tendencies_ by Richard D. Mohr (January 1994) _Tendencies_ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Duke University Press ISBN 0-8223-1421-5 paperback $15.95, 289 pp. + index The courier's knock heralding the arrival of proofs for Eve Sedgwick's wonderful and frustrating new book, _Tendencies_, catches me in mid-doubletake. Two grown men are kissing on the front page of the _New York Times_. One man embraces the other. His hands hug the back of the other's neck pulling him forward into a big smooch. A third figure, looking on, is out of focus but clearly sports a Mamie Eisenhower earring. It provides a whelm of relief for America's conception of itself. The woman's presence in the sexual triangle means the men can't be queer after all. It's a perfectly Sedgwickian moment. The theory of her first gay book, _Between Men_ (1985), is that in their most important exchanges men use women as intermediaries to keep men's deeply homosocial, buddy relations from tumbling into ones perceivable as homosexual. The _Times_' Sedgwickian "lovers" are the President of the United States and the retiring head of America's armed forces. Their "embrace" is the general's investiture with a presidential medal called "Freedom" but given in large measure for the general's role in making gays non-free and thereby helping the President overcome his perceived unmanly weakness. Immediately after the President and general ritualistically cleansed gays from the military, the Marine Corps moved to bar its members, the most manly of men, from marrying on the ground that wives "distract" Marines. Distract from what? Apparently, from each other, from their buddies, to whom they are properly wed. In the country's most intensely homosocial sphere, once gay possibility has been purged from consciousness, "real" men can do what they have always wanted to do -- hang out exclusively with each other. Women are no longer needed even as "beards." This cultural twist too is vibrantly Sedgwickian. In her second gay book, _The Epistemology of the Closet_ (1990), gay men largely replace women as the mediating ground across which "real" men define who they are. Enlarging on this theme, _Epistemology_, in breathtaking programmatic sweep, argues that the categories of sexuality, especially of homosexuality, are woven into every major distinction drawn in the modern West, so that nothing important can be adequately understood unless it is examined from the perspective of sexuality. This theoretical breakthrough shifts gay studies from being merely the examination of some discrete class of objects -- gays -- to being a necessary methodology for all forms of knowing. Still, there is something troubling in this sunny Sedgwickian programmatic in consequence of its explicit commitment to the tenets of postmodernism. The military's purge of gay possibility was largely the result of the political Right's mobilizing the very concept "difference" which is the heart of postmodernism. The black general used his racial difference to play the race card: gays can't possibly be like blacks, against whom military discrimination had simply been a "mistake." If, as postmodernism holds, all concepts, including norms and identities, are historically and culturally specific, if all concepts break apart and contain their opposites, if all concepts are to be defined at the most micro of levels, then the general couldn't have been wrong. For then drawing analogies between identities becomes impossible. In _Tendencies_, Sedgwick defines "queer" as the condition in which things "can't be made to line up neatly together." By this definition of queer -- which could easily serve as postmodernism's mantra -- the military disaster for gays is queer indeed. Postmodernism, however much it claims that everything is political, does not a politics make. _Tendencies_ frequently calls for a gay politics, but provides none. Indeed _Tendencies_ abandons the grandeur and programmatic sweep of Sedgwick's earlier work. By its own account, it is a loosely related collection of essays. Virtually all have previously appeared in journals published by the country's elite English Departments. And it is there, as subjects for seminars and fodder for doctoral theses, that the book is likely to find its keenest audience. Still, the book holds many specific insights, potent hints, and nuggets of inspiration. General readers might profitably read chapters' opening and closing pages, which frequently contain valuable ideas but which usually flank skippably intricate discussions of canonical texts (Austin, Wilde, James, Cather). Sedgwick's tangled and compressed writing style does not lend itself to easy summation, but here's some of what is on the menu. The first substantive chapter examines how power can erase its traces and so appear unbiased, in large measure by controlling who and what gets acknowledged in society and particularly by withholding acknowledgment of things and people known to exist but desired not to exist -- with shaming, even annihilating results. Sedgwick calls this aspect of power "the privilege of unknowing." She shows that this unknowing as applied to sexuality is central to fascism -- practically its defining mark. This insight throws an eerie light on the new military ban, for "don't ask, don't tell" operates exactly on this model of the privilege of unknowing -- with (if Sedgwick is right) long term fascistic consequences. Two chapters hint at models for alternative understandings of sources of sexual identity. One suggests that we look to uncles for sexual tutelage. The other turns psychiatry on its head by suggesting that we focus not on how gay men get to be "that way" but on how gay men create the sexual identities, even straight identities, of those around them. One of the best chapters shows that if one scratches the surface of some recent self-purportedly gay-positive psychiatry books, one discovers lurking below the same old damaging accounts and valuations of gays found in earlier openly phobic medical literature. A bubbly chapter on addiction gives a withering critique of twelve-step recovery programs. The one chapter that could be called fun is a campy meditation on the self-proclaimed divinity of John Waters' obese, shit-eating star Divine. The chapter is a romp through the relations among sex, waste, waists, abjection, and gender. But especially here, the self-deception and rationalization made so easy by postmodern theory are stealthily at work. The chapter, for example, rationalizes away the gay self-hatred that streaks Waters' films. All gay male characters are brutally knocked off in them. But the chapter excuses this slaughter as simply a way for Waters symbolically to excise his gay self from his films so that he can be queerer still behind the camera. What chiefly substitutes for theory building in this book is author aggrandizement. Sedgwick admits, "there's a lot of first person singular in this book (and some people hate that)" -- and rightly so in this case. When Sedgwick repeatedly blockquotes herself, astonishingly blockquotes this book in this book, she seems to be making her own run at self-proclaimed divinity, by posing as the Aristotelian godhead -- thought thinking itself. Sedgwick even uses obituaries and commemorations as vehicles for drawing attention to herself. One could more easily accept such self-indulgence and Sedgwick's leaden prose when they conveyed major ideas and theories, but here the reader will find that the text burns up far more interpretive energy than it generates. -30-