Eve’s Triangles, or Queer Studies Beside Itself

Abstract

Responding to the theme of the special issue, Queer Theory without Antinormativity, “Eve’s Triangles” returns to the work of one of queer theory’s most important foundational figures to consider critical sensibilities that are incompatible with the dyadic approach to power and politics now institutionalized in queer studies under the rubric of antinormativity. By focusing on Sedgwick’s appetite for incoherence, the double bind, and nondialectical understandings of contradiction, this essay studies the elegant and cogent model of reading found in Sedgwick’s work in order to value queer critical intuitions that have been subordinated to antinormativity’s allure.

Feeling otherwise: Ambivalent affects and the politics of critique in geography

“…The critic thus situates herself as epistemologically in command of and master over her object—as in a position of sovereignty with relation to her object. Sedgwick’s argument is that, while vitally important in the history of feminist and queer thought, paranoia has problematically become the only (or at least the most privileged) strategy for the pursuit of critique (Wiegman, 2015). She suggests another critical relationship to the object—the reparative—that is more capable of dealing with the messiness, ambivalence, and complexity of our never monolithic relation to objects.…”