Sonnets (Vol. 40) | Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (essay date 1985)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: "Swan in Love: The Example of Shakespeare's Sonnets," in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 28-49.
[In the following essay, Sedgwick distinguishes between homosocial bonding and homosexuall desire in the sonnets. Asserting that the poems depict male-male love in the context of social institutions that confirm men's power and hegemony, she maintains that the Dark Lady represents a disruptive force that threatens to emasculate the speaker and destroy the homosocial bonds between the poet and the youth.]
"A man is not feminized because he is inverted but
because he is in love."
Barthes1
. . . I would like to look briefly at Shakespeare's Sonnets. They are one of the two nonnovelistic texts that will frame this study (Leaves of Grass is the other), and I was...
[The entire page is 8946 words long]
Navigate
