Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”

This essay by Eve Sedgwick is based on her 1991 presentation at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, a major scholarly conference in the humanities. The essay became a touchstone in an intense debate over perceptions of academic work inside and outside the academy: Sedgwick’s work in general and this essay in particular were taken up as a controversial example of the move toward critical theory in literary studies—a transformation that was criticized by traditionalists as self-indulgent, obscure, and overly radical. (Such critics generally advocated instead the teaching of works then considered canonical—a reading list dominated by white heterosexual male authors—and considered traditional approaches to interpretation to be more objective than approaches informed by critical theory.)

In the essay itself, Sedgwick explores the “literary aspects of auto-eroticism” and argues that masturbation, like homo- and heterosexuality, has a complex history worth further exploration. Using this lens, she reads Sense and Sensibility for its sexual subtext, positing Marianne’s erotic identity as one no longer recognized in the twentieth century: that of the “masturbating girl.”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”