Publisher's Synopsis
What is at stake in male homo/heterosexual definition? Grounded in gay theory and politics and offering new paradigms for them, Sedgwick's book explores the consequences for our culture of a radical shift in turn-of-the-century Euro-American discourse: the moment when each person, in addition to having a gender based on the male/female dichotomy, also came to have a sexuality based on the particular dichotomy, homo/hetero. Through readings of the work of Melville, Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Henry James and Proust, Sedgwick shows how questions of sexual definition are at the heart of every form of representation in this century. She further shows that the work of all modern disciplines needs to apply a specifically anti-homophobic analysis if it is to avoid being fundamentally flawed. Sedgwick combines theoretical sophistication and personal revelation in this contribution to gay theory and debate.
