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Introduction
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick presented the notion of homosocial desire in 1985 in her introduction to what was ostensibly a book of literary criticism, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, which investigates bonds between men as depicted in a number of literary texts. Between Men has been enormously influential beyond the confines of the discipline, but it was clear from the outset that Sedgwick's approach exceeded the study of literature: "The subject of this book is a relatively short, recent, and accessible passage of English culture, chiefly as embodied in the mid-eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century novel".1 Between Men is often regarded as crucial to the development of both Lesbian and Gay Studies and Queer Studies. It has been suggested that the publication of the book, with its implicit invocation of a queer audience, was a performative act, creating a readership which had been "imagined", "interpellated" and "desired" by Sedgwick.2
The central idea in Between Men is that triangular formations involving two men who desire a woman, often found in canonical English literary texts, have an erotic component central to the bond between the rival males. Sedgwick suggests that the men symbolically give themselves to each other through the exchange of a woman. That is, a cultural enforcer of heterosexuality - the 'fight for a woman' narrative - is made intelligible in certain texts through a symbolically homosexual liaison, from which follows that heterosexuality and homosexuality may be entangled in complex ways, even (perhaps specially) in homophobic societies. The ramifications of this thesis are important, and Sedgwick herself developed some of them in her book Epistemology of the Closet (1990), which takes a closer look at the thesis that repression and paranoia are ingrained in societies where heterosexuality is the only morally acceptable sexual choice.3 Thanks to Between Men, a new picture of relationality between men has emerged, one which highlights the eroticised male power transactions in patriarchal systems. This essay will focus on the introduction of her book to consider Sedgwick's palette, looking at how she mixed a number of colours in order to provide a power-full argument.
Kinship
In her introduction to Between Men, Sedgwick points out that "René Girard, Freud, and Lévi-Strauss, especially as he is interpreted by Gayle Rubin, offer...