The 11th Annual Sedgwick Lecture with Professor Heather Love
Boston University Sedgwick Lecture with Dr. Heather Love
To Be Real: The Passion of the Self in Queer Writing
March 30, 2023 at 5pm
The Howard Thurman Center
808 Commonwealth Avenue
Brookline, MA 02446
There will also be a post-lecture lunch discussion with Professor Love for undergraduate and graduate students on Friday, March 31, at noon in the Eichenbaum Colloquium Room at the Kilachand Honors College, 610 Commonwealth Avenue.
Thanks to a generous donation from the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Foundation and H. A. Sedgwick, the lecture will be professionally recorded and made available after the event on the event website. The lecture will not be Zoomed.
About Dr. Heather Love
Heather Love, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, received her A.B. from Harvard and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, twentieth-century literature and culture, affect studies, sociology and literature, disability studies, film and visual culture, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard) and the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor of a special issue of Representations (“Description Across Disciplines”). She has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies.
About the Lecture, from Dr. Heather Love
The rise of queer theory around 1990 represents the convergence of two intellectual movements: post-structuralism and identity politics. The combination of philosophical skepticism about identity and investment in minority experience is the signature of queer writing. Since its inception, queer criticism has been known for its rigorous interrogation of the grounds of personhood. But it is also known for its renovation of academic style in the direction of the personal and the anecdotal. Early critics broke with scholarly convention to include narrative, slang, obscenity, song lyrics, and passages of heightened emotion. The tension between “subjectless critique” and self-revelation is everywhere in the field, but has mostly gone unnoticed. It is visible in two signal statements from the early 1990s. In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler cited Nietzsche’s dictum that there is no “doer behind the deed” to question the grammar of the self. At almost the same moment, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick countered a century of writing about homosexuality from a clinical distance, arguing that “Queer can only signify properly in the first person.” In this talk, I will address this defining tension in the field, which values both the undermining of the self and personal authenticity. My central text will be a crucial early work of queer/trans theory, Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” Finally, I will reflect on the afterlife of this defining tension in the rise of contemporary queer autotheory.