The Problem of the Personal

tendencies book cover

Harriet Smith-Hughes' doctoral research, provisionally titled 'Genres of Intimacy: the problem of the personal in four genres of nonfiction' looks at the function of 'I's and 'we's in late-20th and early-21st century critical nonfiction. In this post, she looks at two moments in which Eve Sedgwick's mid-career 'I' appears to performatively write a queer collective into being, thereby gathering a collective critical authority around her 'powerful' first person singular.

The Problem of the Personal

In a notable moment from the foreword of Eve Sedgwick’s 1993 critical essay collection, Tendencies, the newly-tenured, recently-Victorianist-turned-queer-theorist explains how she understands her own critical ‘I’. ‘There’s a lot of first person singular in this book (and some people hate that)’, she writes, ‘[but] I’d find it mutilating and disingenuous to disallow a grammatical form that marks the site of such dense, accessible effects of knowledge, history, revulsion, authority, and pleasure.’ In fact, Sedgwick declares her ‘I’ to be ‘a heuristic’, faux-modestly and characteristically adding: ‘maybe a powerful one’. A few pages later, she will implicitly tie that heuristic first person singular to the performative function of the term ‘queer’, and in doing so bind her growing personal and critical authority to queer’s ‘continuing moment, movement’, its ‘eddying’ force, its ‘troublant’ quality. ‘There are important senses in which “queer” can signify only when attached to the first person’, she writes, in the first essay in the book. ‘[W]hat it takes—all it takes, to make the description “queer” a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person’.

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