An "Open Mesh of Possibilities": Thinking Queerness with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Archive

Untitled mixed media portrait. No Date.

In the 1990s, Sedgwick became increasingly interested in affect theory, which studies how feelings and emotions shape social relations and people’s embodied experiences. Having studied psychoanalytic theories of sexual desire, Sedgwick was interested in other approaches to psychic life and sexuality. Her scholarship on affect and affect theory opened up new ways to think about interiority, identification, knowledge, and desire.

Tomkins, Silvan S. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank with a biographical sketch by Irving E. Alexander. Duke University Press, 1995.

Discontented with prominent psychological theories of affect, Sedgwick turned to the writings of twentieth-century American psychologist Silvan Tomkins. She co-edited this collection of Tomkins’s writings and co-authored the introduction with Adam Frank, a literary scholar and then-graduate student in English at Duke.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2002.

Touching Feeling is Sedgwick’s fifth book, which explores the role of affect in studying literature and sexuality. In this book, Sedgwick draws on the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and psychologist Silvan Tomkins to theorize her notion of “reparative reading.” She offers “reparative reading” as an alternative to “suspicious” or “paranoid” reading practices, which she argues gives ultimate authority over a text to the critic who is tasked with uncovering its secrets. She investigates how a reparative position may instead open ways to think with and be surprised by a text, adding meaning rather than revealing it. Sedgwick’s notion of “reparative reading” continues to animate scholarship today.