GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

"Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel," by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

GLQ 1.1 (1993).

The first time I encountered the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I was reading Silvan Tomkins for my honor's thesis. The text was Sedgwick and Adam Frank's impressive condensation of Tomkins's four volumes into one: Shame and Its Sisters. I felt many affects in this first read-through: despair (How do I write my thesis, let alone apply to graduate school, which I was also trying to do); interest (I intended to cruise it, hoping to get the lay of the critical landscape); and shame (I didn't understand the opening essay; how could I possibly enter a conversation whose terms were beyond my reach?). To read Shame and Its Sisters felt, and still feels, collaborative, and not just because Tomkins's own writing, they note, "excited and calmed, inspired and contented" while "listing the possible" and "embrac[ing] multiple overlapping voices" even as those voices threaten to take over (Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 2–3). But, because one cannot ignore while reading the presence of Sedgwick and Frank as the caretakers of the ideas therein, my first encounter with Sedgwick as a scholar was as someone who carefully crafted the story to be told, who inspired and contented while asking the reader to endure the terrifying until their fear response was "burned out."

The next time I read Sedgwick's work was during revisions for an article on a portion of my thesis. My interest in shame had brought me back around again to her work in Touching Feeling. A friend had directed my attention to the text, which had the same effect on me as her other work that I had by then engaged: illuminating yet simultaneously mystifying. The essays found there are themselves important interventions in the fields of queer theory and affect studies. Sedgwick's trenchant critique of suspicious reading practices in "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is [End Page 17] about You" has, on its own, transformed the way scholars of all stripes think about criticism and its functions. Similarly, the version of "Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity" included there resonates across literary studies and studies of sexuality. Touching Feeling remains a cornerstone of my own work as well; every return encompasses those same, early feelings of despair (Do I actually understand this book?); interest (I never thought of "x" that way before …); and shame (My poor mimicry of Sedgwick has revealed me as an imposter). Yet again and again I find myself brought back into the neighborhood of Sedgwick's core ideas.

Recently, I returned to Sedgwick because my adviser told me to take all the hard copies he had of GLQ to my office. Having never read a hard copy of the journal, I didn't know that both Sedgwick and Judith Butler opened the inaugural issue with their respective takes on the work done by the term queer. But what impressed me even more than my lack of historical knowledge was the way in which Sedgwick's ideas not only endure but in that enduring perform the very concepts they seek to unpack. Indeed, her endurance seems to stem from the way in which her writing plays out the tension between the figurative and the lived, formally taking up the challenge of performing in the "structural position," as Lee Edelman (2004: 24) writes, of queerness as an "imperative of figuration." Although part of my claim here is, at first glance, that I've (re)read Sedgwick (as one does), my other claim is that her essay "Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel" is significant not just for the theory of shame it puts forward but for the way in which Sedgwick's careful crafting of the piece makes it possible for scholars of sex and sexuality to revisit the figure of the queer in their work.

Take, for example, her central claim in the opening pages about the speech act that J. L. Austin leaves out of his discussion. "'Shame on you,' she writes, "is performatively efficacious because its grammar—admittedly somewhat enigmatic—is a transformational grammar: both at the level of pronoun positioning … and at the level of the relational grammar of the affect shame itself" (Sedgwick 1993: 4). In this description, shame becomes a structural position as well as a structuring one; to paraphrase Pierre Bourdieu (1977: 72), shame functions as a kind of habit between a you and an us whose "durable, transposable dispositions" are precisely what enable shame to shift the subject between introversion and extroversion. Or, to quote Sedgwick (1993: 6) again, "Shame is the affect that mantles the threshold between introversion and extroversion, between absorption and theatricality, between performativity and—performativity." As a principle of estrangement, then, shame, Sedgwick (2003: 37) elaborates in the later essay, "is the place where the question of identity arises most originarily and most relationally." [End Page 18] This question raised by shame is precisely why I continue to return to her essay—both the early and late versions. Not because she asserts that such is the case, but because the question of identity emerges as a question of style in the "intergenerational flirtation" staged between the versions of the piece every time I (re)turn to them.

To describe the construction of identity as a matter of style does indeed seem to be what Sedgwick's (1993: 11) definition of queer performativity posits when she writes that it is "the name of a strategy for the production of meaning and being, in relation to the affect shame and to the later and related fact of stigma" (emphasis added). In many ways, her definition of queer performativity here is not only contemporaneous with the description of lesbian and gay studies by The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader but nearly the same. As the introduction explains: "Lesbian and Gay studies attempts to decipher the sexual meanings inscribed in many different forms of cultural expression while also attempting to decipher the cultural meanings inscribed in the discourses and practices of sex" (Abelove, Barale, and Halperin 1993: xvi; emphasis added). On the one hand, the terms emphasized here highlight a focus on the discourses producing and disseminating a meaning (or the meaning for particular historical moments) of sex, elucidating the task of lesbian and gay studies as the investigation of bodies as they act on and react to those technologies aimed at delimiting the possible meanings of sex and sexuality. On the other hand, Sedgwick's definition reintroduces the body as messy, inarticulate, but nonetheless communicative. The style of the body is not taken for granted as necessarily volitional or even just as a social construction. Style, in other words, emerges in Sedgwick (1993: 12) as a figural effect, as a consequence of shame precisely because "the structure 'identity,' marked by shame's threshold between sociability and introversion, may be established and naturalized in the first instance through shame."

I want to conclude by suggesting that in "Queer Performativity," Sedgwick makes it possible to read queer theory as a genre engaged in the figuration of the queer. Looking beyond the development of Sedgwick's own flavor of writerly style to the question of queer theory as a genre inherently concerned with the style of identity construction, it becomes possible to start thinking about how its formalist concerns, concerns about the form of the queer in literature especially, interact with and inform concerns with the not so formally delimitable. Or, it becomes possible to think about the relationship between the formed and unformed, how the two inform each other as they coalesce within or on an object. In her own estimation, shame is equally a heuristic: [End Page 19]

Like other affects, [shame] is not a discrete intrapsychic structure, but a kind of free radical that (in different people and also in different cultures) attaches to and permanently intensifies or alters the meaning of—of almost anything: a zone of the body, a sensory system, a prohibited or indeed a permitted behavior, another affect such as anger or arousal, a named identity, a script for interpreting other people's behavior toward oneself. Thus, one of the things that anyone's character or personality is, is a record of the highly individual histories by which the fleeting emotion of shame has instituted far more durable, structural changes in one's relational and interpretive strategies toward both self and others.

(ibid.: 12–13)

One's durability is thus more than the circulation of meaning "inscribed in the discourses and practices of sex"; it is an effect of shame's having deformed and reformed, and at times altered completely, the story one has for understanding being in relation to both one's self and others. And it is this dynamic that "Queer Performativity" helped illuminate. At the very moment when the queer is hailed, it is also constituted as such, culled from an eclectic array of sources and presumably pinned down. Such movement is perhaps what Heather Love (2007) aims to describe as the backward turn of feeling out the past. More specifically, such movement may be the movement of figuration that scholars such as Tim Dean (2000) and Michael Snediker (2008) name personification (that figuration sounds like "figure-eight" when enunciated is rather telling for this point, especially if one turns the figure of the eight on its side, turning the specificity of the numerical into the possibilities of the infinite). And yet, queer theory's conceit is that to pin down the queer is an impossible task; one can only ever approach it, be affected toward queerness but never of it. And as one begins to recognize this fundamental dissatisfaction that queer theory remains ambivalent toward yet narcissistically invested in, so does one begin the difficult process of reconciling the sense that "we" are both social and antisocial, introverted and extroverted. The trick is acknowledging that at the moment we mark ourselves as one or the other, we are engaging in a process of being both. What queer theory does, then, for readers and writers is offer us the option of forgetting we are either or both, the option of knowing otherwise. To that end, what Sedgwick has helped illuminate regarding queer theory, for me at least, is its interrogation of the duration—in the sense of one's self in time, but also the time-lapse of an emotion or an affective response—of the desire to figure, to be intelligible, to endure. [End Page 20]