Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is primarily known for her foundational work in queer and affect theory, but her artistic work with textiles remains largely unexplored. In Reparative Craft, Jason Edwards examines a range of her textile art from a ten-year period in which she was also writing Touching Feeling. Employing the reparative approach that Sedgwick pioneered and analyzing her works from a series of four exhibitions, Reparative Craft demonstrates the necessity of connecting Sedgwick’s fiber art practice to her work as a theorist. Richly illustrated and presented in full color, this volume invites readers to connect Sedgwick’s art with her theory, presenting a new model of reparative reading that exemplifies ideas of queer and trans craft so vital to Sedgwick’s body of work.

Jason Edwards is Professor of Art History at the University of York. He is the author of Queer and Bookish: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as Book Artist.

“Jason Edwards offers a sophisticated, meticulously researched, and deeply thoughtful picture of the warp and weft of textile as an organizing metaphor and a committed practice of artmaking for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Reparative Craft makes a surprising contribution to Sedgwick’s ideas and to the history of fiber, unfolding as a story of living, making, and thinking that reorients queer theory’s relationship to art.”
-- David J. Getsy, author of Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art

List of Illustrations  ix
Introduction. Reparative Craft  1
1. The First Four Pages of a Texture Book (ca.1996–1999)  13
2. A Weft Is Being Beaten, or Weaving in the Cybernetic Fold (1996–1999)  33
3. Floating Columns (1999–2000)  49
4. In the Bardo (1999–2000), or Epistemology of a Different Closet  75
5. Bodhisattva Fractal World (2002)  119
6. Works in Fiber, Paper, and Proust (2005)  201
Coda. An Inward Accumulation of a Wealth of Materials  269
Acknowledgments  275
Notes  277
Bibliography  297
Index