Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

After all of my professors this year referred to this Landmark Text of queer theory at least fifty thousand times, I decided I should probably read it. To my infinite frustration, I found that battling my way through the vicious, thorny tangle of Kosofsky's academic vocabulary and syntax was so mentally tasking that I could barely make it to the ideas themselves. Also, I was already familiar with most of the ideas in the book (presented in far more digestible form) from reading more contemporary criticism which takes this text as its foundational theory (it was published in 1985). But the ideas put forward in this book are very nuanced, clever and bold. The way she reads text though, is a nightmare, it's so reductionist and she only sees what she wants to, completely ignoring the wider context of the entire text. So basically, really great theorist, deplorable reader. It was very interesting to read the source of all these theories that have been used (and misused) in queer and gender criticism since the 1980s. I don't know if I'd recommend reading it; if you study literature, you have probably come across these theories already in a form that the human mind can actually understand, if you're just curious, it's really not an easy read. (That being said, it might just be that I'm really stupid, and it's really hard from me to understand her writing that a more intelligent person would find easier to comprehend.)