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OCTOBER 1, 2010: FOR BEAUTY IS A SERIES OF HYPOTHESES
Author and scholar Eve Sedgwick was also a devoted and passionate fiber artist. In this lecture, scholar Jason Edwards examined a broad range of Sedgwick’s art works, as the culminating presentation in a series of seminars on Sedgwick’s art.
To date, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is best known as the author of a series of quickly paradigmatic texts on queer and affect theory, including Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Epistemology of the Closet, Tendencies, and Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Much less appreciated is the fact that Sedgwick was also a devoted and passionate fiber artist, whose works were shown in exhibitions including Floating Columns/In the Bardo, Bodhisattva Fractal World and Works in Fiber, Paper and Proust. Jason Edwards (Reader in Art History at the University of York and author of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Alfred Gilbert’s Aestheticism: Gilbert Amongst Whistler, Wilde, Leighton, Pater, and Burne-Jones) contextualized her artwork in relation to her better-known literary theoretical and other works on paper.
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SEPTEMBER 2010: JASON EDWARDS SEMINAR SERIES
Jason Edwards, who is currently working on a book focused on Eve’s textile art, led an intimate series of seminars in Eve’s studio and at the Graduate Center. In-depth discussions focused on Eve’s work in “fiber, paper, and Proust” as well as her bookworks, weavings, and panda calendars. The series of seminars culminated in an opportunity for former students to bring and discuss their own work produced in Eve’s book arts classes.
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SPRING 2010 ISSUE OF CRITICISM
The Spring 2010 issue of Criticism (vol. 52 no. 2) is titled “Honoring Eve: A Special Issue on the Work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.” The special issue grew out of the event Honoring Eve: A Symposium Celebrating the Work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, which was held on October 31, 2009, at Boston University.
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MARCH 2010 PMLA: REMEMBERING EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK
The March 2010 issue of PMLA (Vol. 125, No. 2) includes a section titled “Remembering Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,” which features essays by Laura Doan, Jonathan Goldberg, Annamarie Jagose, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Andrew Parker.
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FEBRUARY 25-26, 2010: SPANKING AND POETRY CONFERENCE, CUNY
From the call for proposals:
“When I was a child the two most rhythmic things that happened to me were spanking and poetry.” (Tendencies 182)
Eve Sedgwick lovingly, if none too gently, slapped open the sphincter-tight boundary rings of critical scholarship on the sexual and affective relations between bodies. This conference invites continued play with the tools she created for examination of “all the different surfaces that make a self for most of us, printed pages, ‘our’ ideas, institutional relations and activism, vibrations of a voice, the gaping abstractions and distractions of creativity, the weird holographic projections of our names and public personae, the visible and impressible extent of the parts of our bodies” (Tendencies 104-05). We welcome paper proposals on any aspect or application of her critical, literary, and artistic work, inviting scholars to broadly consider and reconsider Sedgwick’s intersections with and influences upon their fields. In the spirit of her own perversion of academic style, we particularly encourage proposals that expand the boundaries of the conventional conference paper through experimental or creative critical practices. We also seek papers engaging with Sedgwick’s pedagogical practices and proposals, as expressed in her written work or as performed in her classes at The Graduate Center or other institutions.
The Spanking and Poetry conference was nearly canceled due to an unexpected snowstorm that shut down much of the city—including the CUNY Graduate Center, where the conference was to be held. Many incoming flights were delayed or canceled, and keynote speakers Jonathan Goldberg and Michael Moon were unable to get to the city. Thanks to the efforts of the conference’s organizers, Tracy Riley and Margaret Galvan, CUNY agreed to open its doors for an informal plenary session. Around fifty people made their way through the snowy streets to attend a lively and moving series of panels. Attendee and presenter Mia Chen wrote an in-depth review of the conference here.