Vibrating to the Chord of Queer

Elaine Showalter

  • Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
    Duke, 216 pp, £14.95, March 2003, ISBN 0 8223 3015 6
  • Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory edited by Stephen Barber and David Clark
    Routledge, 285 pp, £55.00, September 2002, ISBN 0 415 92818 4

In the introduction to her new book, Touching Feeling, the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes its strange and haunting black and white cover photograph as ‘the catalyst that impelled me to assemble the book in its present form’. It depicts a woman clumsily embracing an object that resembles an enormous wasps’ nest made of sticks and twine. The woman’s eyes are shut, and her face is squashed against the side of the bundle, which is resting on a table. Sedgwick explains that this woman is the ‘outsider’ artist Judith Scott, with one of her works, a core ‘hidden under many wrapped or darned layers of multicoloured yarn, cord, ribbon, rope and other fibre . . . whose scale bears comparison to Scott’s own body’.

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