The New York Times, January 17, 1998:

"It's about trying to understand different kinds of sexual desires and how the culture defines them," said Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the Newman Ivey White professor of English at Duke University....

Ms. Sedgwick, 47, was sitting in the shadows at a restaurant in Manhattan and trying to explain "queer theory," the academic field she has helped create. Her voice is light and fragile, her message authoritative....

In provocatively titled essays like "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay," and "Is the Rectum Straight?: Identification and Identity in The Wings of the Dove," Ms. Sedgwick took texts traditionally seen as heterosexual and exposed what she says are their homoerotic themes....

In one essay, "A Poem Is Being Written," she writes about associating the rhythm of being spanked as a child with the rhythms of poetry. The essay, she said, "is about the relationship between art and sex, between poetry and those for whom spanking fantasies, or spanking behavior during sex, are part of their sex life."

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