"This book brings together two pieces of writing. In the first, "After Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick," Jonathan Goldberg assesses her legacy, prompted mainly by writing about Sedgwick's work that has appeared in the years since her death in April 2009. Writing by Lauren Berlant, Jane Gallop, Katy Hawkins, Scott Herring, Lana Lin, and Philomina Tsoukala are among those considered as he explores questions of queer temporality and the breaching of ontological divides. Main concerns include the relationship of Sedgwick's later work in Proust, fiber, and Buddhism to her fundamental contribution to queer theory, and the axes of identification across difference that motivated her work and attachment to it. "Come As You Are," the other piece of writing, is a previously unpublished talk Sedgwick gave in 1999-2000. It represents a significant bridge between her earlier and later work, sharing with her book Tendencies the ambition to discover the "something" that makes queer inextinguishable. In this piece, Sedgwick does that by contemplating her own mortality alongside her creative engagement with Buddhist thought, especially the in-between states named bardos and her newfound energy for making things. These were represented in a show of her fabric art, "Floating Columns/In the Bardo," that accompanied her talk, a number of images of which are included in this book. They feature floating figures suspended in the realization of death. They are objects produced by Sedgwick, made of fabric; they come from her, yet are discontinuous with her, occupying a mode of existence that exceeds the span of human life and the confines of individual identity. They could be put beside the queer transitive identifications across difference that Goldberg's essay explores"--Publisher's description

Tendencies brings together for the first time the essays that have made Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick "the soft-spoken queen of gay studies" (Rolling Stone). Combining poetry, wit, polemic, and dazzling scholarship with memorial and autobiography, these essays have set new standards of passion and truthfulness for current theoretical writing. The essays range from Diderot, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James to queer kids and twelve-step programs; from "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" to a performance piece on Divine written with Michael Moon; from political correctness and the poetics of spanking to the experience of breast cancer in a world ravaged and reshaped by AIDS. What unites Tendencies is a vision of a new queer politics and thought that, however demanding and dangerous, can also be intent, inclusive, writerly, physical, and sometimes giddily fun.

Looks at the central importance of the homosexual/heterosexual dichotomy in the Western culture of the last century, in particular by a series of provocative readings of Melville, Wilde, James and Proust. A book of both political and literary importance.

DIVA collection of essays examining theories of affect and how they relate to issues of performance and performativity./div

When she begins therapy for depression after breast cancer treatment, the author brings with her an extraordinarily open and critical mind, but also shyness about revealing herself. Resisting easy responses to issues of dependence, desire, and mortality, she warily commits to a male therapist who shares little of her cultural and intellectual world. Although not without pain, their improvised relationship is as unexpectedly pleasurable as her writing is unconventional: Sedgwick combines dialogue, verse, and even her therapist's notes to explore her interior life--and delivers and delicate and tender account of how we arrive at love.

At the time of its first appearance in 1985 Between Men was viewed as an important intervention into Feminist as well as Gay and Lesbian studies. It was an important book because it argued that "sexuality" and "desire" were not a historical phenomenon but carefully managed social constructs. This insight (that actually originated with Michael Foucault) is often viewed as anti-humanist or post-humanist because it argues that men and women are simply the products of patriarchal power relations over which they have no control. By mobilizing Foucault's theories of the history of sexuality Sedgwick re-fashions Feminism and Gay and Lesbian Studies to make it seem as though Feminism and Gay and Lesbian studies are ideally situated to continue those interventions into the history of sexuality begun by Foucault.

At the time of her death in after a long battle with cancer, Eve Sedgwick had been working on a book on affect and Proust, and on the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. This volume, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, brings together a collection of her last work.