The Position Paper's final position is one of genuflection: prostrate, rump raised, ready to proffer thanks for something already received and also waiting receptively, patiently, for something else. If this deferential position is immediately recognizable as a whole-body symbol of gratitude, it is also simultaneously recognizable as an indication of one's readiness for punishment: my butt is extended as you commanded, or, I'm inviting you to inflict pain. It would be imprudent, perhaps even impudent, of the Position Paper to proceed any further without addressing the bared butt in the room: its very name, a tribute, of course, to one of literary theory's legendary masochists, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The Latin infinitive form of "tribute" is tribuere, "to give, distribute" (AHD). …show more content…
As mutually illuminating texts, Paradise Lost and "A Poem is Being Written," with their respective Eves, reveal the price paid for being a pioneer; for being daring …show more content…
As Sedgwick shares with us in the canonical "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," the presentation of the topic of masturbation in its pre-paper iteration earned her peer approbation and flagellation in equal admensuration (109). Those of us who crave a particular kind of knowledge look to her as the bearer of a particularly mouth-watering fruit--heedless, or welcoming, of the price we might pay for biting into it. But "if such pleasure be / In things to us forbidden, it might be wished, / For this one tree had been forbidden ten" (Milton