Vibrating to the Chord of Queer 
Elaine Showalter
- Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
- Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory edited by Stephen Barber and David Clark
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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Elaine Showalter is a professor emeritus at Princeton; her book A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx will be published in 2009.
Other articles by this contributor:
Fade to Greige · Georgio Armani
Prada Queen · Elaine Showalter goes shopping
Das Nuffa Dat and BigGloria3 · Up and Down the Academic Ladder
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