Queer narratives of cancer: Eve K. Sedgwick’s “White Glasses”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v1i1.26Keywords:
cancer, breast turn, E.K. Sedgwick, feminism, queer temporalityAbstract
Through a reading of “White Glasses”, an essay included in Eve K. Sedgwick’s Tendencies, this paper invites a double perspective: on the one hand, a comparative approach to feminist narratives of cancer (from Audre Lorde to Gayatri Spivak reading and translating Mahasweta Devi); on the other, a reflection on Sedgwick’s contribution to queer thinking on temporality. It is also an attempt to broaden our own perception of Eve K. Sedgwick by turning to her later interest in Buddhism and textile art. Thus, the focus on “White Glasses” shifts between the temporal scale of Sedgwick’s lifetime and the wider cultural history of feminist body politics in the 1980’s and early ‘90s. This is the decade when feminism increasingly became queered, a shift that is followed here through the lens of AIDS, illness and bodily transformation – a nexus powerfully interrogated, and embodied, by Eve K. Sedgwick.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Whatever is an open access journal, which means that all articles are available on the Internet to all users immediately upon publication. Our articles are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Licence 4.0 by-nc, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial.
Authors hold copyright without restrictions. Also, authors retain publishing rights on their articles; however, it is recommended to keep track of the CC-BY-NC license and to quote original publication.
