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169: Sedgwick: Touching Feeling
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This is a proposal for a reading group focused on Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003). Eve Sedgwick is often credited with birthing queer theory as a field of study. Touching Feeling is her most recent book, and is comprised of essays spanning ten years. Major areas of focus include performativity and performance, spatial dynamics/metaphors, texture and affect, and what she calls “techniques for nondualistic thought and pedagogy.” The class would not be “taught.” Rather, it would be a loosely facilitated discussion/close reading group. Ideally, this discussion/reading would take place in three 2 - 3 hour installments. Participants should come to the first session having read a certain amount that we will determine as a group on The Public School list. About Touching Feeling Wayne Koestenbaum has written: “Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s gift is to electrify intellectual communities by reminding them that ‘thought’ has a temperature, a texture, and an erotics.” from Wikipedia: |
2 Comments
Would multiple teachers — (and/)or a moderators for a reading group — be a good idea for teaching/moderating this class or classes? For example, someone who teaches, or holds a reading group on, performance and performativity, psychology and shame, and (yet) another who teaches paranoid vs. reparative reading/s, and someone on Buddhisms, etc. This multi-teacher/moderator would seem in keeping with the idea of the text … would seem Sedgwickian …
i like the idea of multiple facilitators, and i’m with you in thinking that such an approach fits this particular text quite well. what i was thinking initially– and perhaps this matches what you’re saying– is that students be those multiple facilitators. as in, the class is divided up such that each member (at some point during our three sessions) guides us through a close reading of a facet of the text assigned for that week. this facet could be a word, an image, a section, an idea… this approach would also necessitate collaborations between classmates as they would work together to decide how much overlap and discontinuity they’d like between their individual readings. what i like about this idea is that it structures the class without too heavily thematizing (or compartmentalizing) sedgwick’s queerly mishmashed text. whaddaya think?