Koestenbaum Wayne - Between men: English literature and male homosocial desire

GENDER AND CULTURE

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BETWEEN MEN

EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

Foreword by Wayne Koestenbaum

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York

Columbia University Press

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 1985, 2016 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-54104-6

ISBN 978-0-231-17629-3 (pbk : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-54104-6 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number : 2015948126

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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Cover design: Faceout Studio/Kara Davison

Cover image: douard Manet, The Luncheon on the Grass,

1863 Heritage Images/Contributor/Getty

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To
Hal Sedgwick

CONTENTS

T HE remarkable book you are now holding in your hands, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, first came out in 1985, one hundred years after the notorious Labouchere Amendment criminalized sexual relations (gross indecency) between men in the United Kingdom. (This legislation destroyed Oscar Wilde.) In 1985, five years into the disastrous reign of Ronald Reagan, the world discovered that Rock Hudson had AIDS. One year earlier, the retrovirus later designated as HIV had been isolated; two years after Between Men, ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded. Between Men might not seem to you a book concerned with catastrophe, but it gained heat from its tragic context. The book spoke to the hunger for health, the craving to figure out history, the urge for accurate, sensitive, radically informed threshings of prior time. Looking backward to the ambiguous treasures of English literature, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sought to illuminate the revolutionary present and to shatter the binary fortresses that delimited contemporary bodies. Walter Benjamins name never appears in Between Men, but his dialectical spirit is latent in its pages: as critics, readers, gleaners, recollectors, we look backward because we want to march forward.