SOURCE: "Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital: The Example of Our Mutual Friend," in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 161-79.

Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire became a standard in the new field of gay and lesbian studies on its publication in 1985. In her work, Sedgwick argues that heterosexual culture depends on homosocial relations between men: that is, on a male-male sexual desire played out through exchange of women. In the following chapter, Sedgwick presents her thesis in relation to Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend.

Eight years ago, writing a narrative poem about a musicologist with a writing block, I included a little literary joke: a fictional psychoanalyst in the poem was writing a fictional essay for Thalassa: A (fictional) Journal of Genitality, on the then-fictional topic,

"Sustained Homosexual
Panic and Literary Productiveness" (which
includes close readings from Our Mutual...