On Monday April 12, writer activist and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick lost her more than fifteen year battle with breast cancer. While I did not know her work personally, I know many people who were impacted by her writing.
From the NYTimes:
It's about trying to understand different kinds of sexual desire and how the culture defines them," she told The New York Times in 1998, explaining the function of queer theory. "It's about how you can't understand relations between men and women unless you understand the relationship between people of the same gender, including the possibility of a sexual relationship between them.In 1988, Stanley Fish, who was transforming the English department at Duke University into a center of the new trends in criticism, recruited Ms. Sedgwick to Chapel Hill, where she taught for the next 10 years. While there, she published "Tendencies" (1993), "Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction" (1997) and her best-known work, "Epistemology of the Closet" (1990), which argued that Western culture could be understood only by critically dissecting the socially constructed concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality.
Sometimes you read something and it changes the course of your life forever. Whether it's a text, or a poem, or a story, there are some things that just rock you to your core, and you emerge at the end of the page, altered, seeing the world from a whole new perspective.During my junior year of college, I read Epistemology of the Closet in a class called the Politics of Sexuality. At that point in my life I was a firmly established lesbian but after reading that text, I had only just begun to grasp the possibilities of queerness. I don't think that when I first read it--painstakingly, over the course of hours--I understood half of it. But what I did know was that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was on to something and that her words were opening up to further exploration the idea that sexuality is not a binary system and that gender is not a binary fact.
I have only ever worn out one book. The first copy--which I still keep as an artifact of my 20s--became a palimpsest of sorts, its text underlined in four different colors of pencil, emblazoned with streaks of yellow and green neon highlighter. Little enigmatic notes crawl up and down the margins of dog-eared pages, and decomposing Post-it notes jut out untidily from the edges; the spine has long since given way. At a certain point, picking up this particular copy became too overwhelming an encounter with my old selves, and so I bought a fresh one, which I tried in vain to keep clean. That book is Epistemology of the Closet, and its author is the brilliant, inimitable, explosive intellectual Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who died last night from breast cancer at the age of 58.
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I can't believe that no one has commented on this post.
It is absolutely heartbreaking to hear that one of the most important pioneers in queer theory has passed away. Epistemology of the Closet is one of the most important texts in understanding queer relationships, homosexuality, and heterosexuality -- and most importantly, homosocial relationships and how they function.
I'm heartbroken to hear that she's passed on -- I first picked up her book my sophomore year in college and always wanted to take a class with her, where she taught at CUNY Graduate Center.
She was truly inspirational.
I'm also shocked that no one's commented. Sedgwick was a phenomenal scholar and a terrific person. Her refusal to offer simplistic answers about gender and sexuality--particularly sexual desire--has always impressed me. If you can't make time to read the entirety of Epistemology of the Closet, you should at least try to read "Introduction: Axiomatic." You won't regret it!
ahhh! you haven't read her work? really? If you have some time, you should. The short version of Epistempology of the Closet is anthologized in the Gay & Lesbian Studies Reader (which was the big blue anthology from the 1990's which has many of the very pivotal queer theory/queer studies texts). Epistemology of the Closet (the book) was really groundbreaking, and even very relevant today. She does an amazing job explaining how coming out can unite glbtq individuals because we all have that common experience (though the details of the experience can vary widely). She also explains how "the closet" is not simply a "gay" experience, but something that many people go through for one reason or another which often has nothing to do with sex or sexuality. She goes into about 1000 other ideas, too, but I just remember vividly how it felt to read her work as an undergraduate struggling to find myself as a queer, especially at a university where all the queers were gay, white, male, wealthy, and pretentious. She helped me find a sense of community but also deconstruct that community in a way that priviledged individual experience and recognized how outside stereotyping can hurt on a individual and (social) group level.
She was amazingly supportive and inclusive, and I don't just mean of white, middle-class gays and lesbians. I think she laid a lot of groundwork for many scholars looking at queer and trans issues from various lenses, like Fausto-Sterling and Halberstam. Plus, it could have been academic suicide for her to focus her career on discussing gender, sex, and queers, especially when everyone else who did so was automatically labeled as queer (though most were). University politics can be harsh and unforgiving. Instead, she rocked out. I definitely pay my respects; we have lost an amazing scholar and a talented woman.
EKS revolutionized the way we think about gender. We owe her SO much in the spheres of philosophy, critical theory, queer theory, and of course, feminist thought. She was so young, and so, so brilliant.