Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
academic scholar in the fields of
gender studiesGender studies is a field of interdisciplinary study which analyses race, ethnicity, sexuality and location.Gender study has many different forms. One view exposed by the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one"...
,
queer theoryQueer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself...
(
queer studiesQueer studies is the critical theory based study of issues relating to sexual orientation and gender identity usually focusing on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people and cultures. Universities have also labeled this area of analysis Sexual Diversity Studies, Sexualities...
), and
critical theoryCritical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...
. Her critical writings helped create the field of queer studies. Her works reflect an interest in a range of issues, including queer
performativityPerformativity is an interdisciplinary term often used to name the capacity of speech and language in particular, as well as other non-verbal forms of expressive action, to intervene in the course of human events. The term derives from the work in speech act theory originated by the analytic...
; experimental critical writing; the works of
Marcel ProustValentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
; non-Lacanian
psychoanalysisPsychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
; artists' books;
BuddhismBuddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
and
pedagogyPedagogy is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching. The term generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction....
; the affective theories of
Silvan TomkinsSilvan Solomon Tomkins is best known as a psychologist and personality theorist and as the developer of Affect theory and Script theory...
and
Melanie KleinMelanie Reizes Klein was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had an impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis...
; and material culture, especially textiles and texture.
Drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of
Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
, Sedgwick uncovered what she claimed were concealed homoerotic subplots in writers like
Charles DickensCharles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
and
Henry JamesHenry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
. Sedgwick argued that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture would be incomplete or damaged if it failed to incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition. She coined the terms "homosocial" and "antihomophobic."
Noted works include "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay," "Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel," and "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," which was heavily criticised for the "scandalous" interpretation it took.
Biography
Eve Kosofsky was raised in a
JewishThe Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
family in
Dayton, OhioDayton is the 6th largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Montgomery County, the fifth most populous county in the state. The population was 141,527 at the 2010 census. The Dayton Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 841,502 in the 2010 census...
. She received her undergraduate degree from
Cornell UniversityCornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
and her Ph.D from
Yale UniversityYale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. She taught writing and
literatureLiterature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
at Hamilton College,
Boston UniversityBoston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
, and
Amherst CollegeAmherst College is a private liberal arts college located in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 1,744 students in the fall of 2009...
. She held a visiting lectureship at
University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
and taught at the School of Criticism and Theory when it was located at
Dartmouth CollegeDartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...
. She was also the
Newman Ivey White Professor of EnglishNewman Ivey White was a professor of English at Duke University. He was born February 3, 1892 in Statesville, North Carolina, the town in which Tom Dooley was tried, convicted, and executed...
at
Duke UniversityDuke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
, and then a Distinguished Professor at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New YorkThe Graduate Center of the City University of New York brings together graduate education, advanced research, and public programming to midtown Manhattan hosting 4,600 students, 33 doctoral programs, 7 master's programs, and 30 research centers and institutes...
.
During her time at Duke, Sedgwick and her colleagues were in the academic avant-garde of the culture wars, using
literary criticismLiterary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
to question dominant discourses of
sexualityHuman sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...
, race,
genderGender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
, and the boundaries of literary criticism. Sedgwick first presented her particular collection of critical tools and interests in the influential volumes
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and
Epistemology of the Closet (1990). The latter work became one of gay and lesbian studies' and queer theory's founding texts.
She received the 2002
Brudner PrizeThe James Robert Brudner Memorial Prize and Lecture at Yale University celebrates lifetime accomplishment and scholarly contributions in the field of lesbian and gay studies. It is bestowed annually by the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale...
at Yale. She taught graduate courses in
EnglishEnglish studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language , English linguistics English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language (including literatures from the U.K., U.S.,...
as Distinguished Professor at
The City University of New York Graduate CenterThe Graduate Center of the City University of New York brings together graduate education, advanced research, and public programming to midtown Manhattan hosting 4,600 students, 33 doctoral programs, 7 master's programs, and 30 research centers and institutes...
(CUNY Graduate Center) in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
,
New YorkNew York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, until her death in New York City from
breast cancerBreast cancer is cancer originating from breast tissue, most commonly from the inner lining of milk ducts or the lobules that supply the ducts with milk. Cancers originating from ducts are known as ductal carcinomas; those originating from lobules are known as lobular carcinomas...
on April 12, 2009, aged 58.
Eve Kosofsky married Hal Sedgwick in 1969; he survives her.
Ideas and literary criticism
Sedgwick's oeuvre ranges across a wide variety of media and genres; poetry and artworks are not easily separated from the rest of her texts. Disciplinary interests included literary studies, history, art history, film studies, philosophy, cultural studies, anthropology, women’s studies and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) studies. Her theoretical interests have been synoptic, assimilative and eclectic.
Her work may be best suited to literary students who can cope with, make up their own minds about, and appreciate Sedgwick’s sometimes elaborate prose. She was fond of neologisms, and of extending the meaning of existing words and phrases in new directions. In her own estimate, her style of writing cannot be called easy to understand or clear in meaning, either. Sedgwick was not without her critics, however. Elizabeth Kantor, for example, suggests that Sedgewick's scholarship is seriously lacking, as when she "find[s] some slight similarity between a Jane Austen novel and another text, and then argue[s] from the other text."
The queer lens
Sedgwick’s writing is supposed to make the reader more alert to the "potential queer nuances" of literature, encouraging the reader to displace their heterosexual identifications in favour of searching out "queer idioms." Thus, besides obvious double entendres, the reader is to realise other potentially queer ways in which words might resonate. For example, in
Henry JamesHenry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
, Sedgwick was said to have observed that words and concepts like ‘fond’, ‘foundation’, ‘issue’, ‘assist’, ‘fragrant’, ‘flagrant’, ‘glove’, ‘gage’, ‘centre’, ‘circumference’, ‘aspect’, ‘medal’ and words containing the phoneme ‘rect’, including any words that contain their anagrams, may all have "anal-erotic associations."
Sedgwick drew on the work of literary critic Christopher Craft to argue that both puns and rhymes might be re-imagined as "homoerotic because homophonic"; citing literary critic
Jonathan DollimoreJonathan Dollimore is a British sociologist and social theorist in the fields of Renaissance literature , gender studies, queer theory , art, censorship, history of ideas, death studies, decadence, and cultural theory...
, Sedgwick suggests that grammatical inversion might have an equally intimate relation to sexual inversion; she suggested that readers may want to "sensitise" themselves to "potentially queer" rhythms of certain grammatical, syntactical, rhetorical, and generic sentence structures; scenes of childhood spanking were eroticised, and associated with two-beat lines and lyric as a genre; enjambment (continuing a thought from one line, couplet, or stanza to the next without a syntactical break) had potentially queer erotic implications; finally, while thirteen-line poems allude to the
sonnetA sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
form, by rejecting the final rhyming couplet it was possible to "resist the heterosexual couple as a paradigm", suggesting instead the potential masturbatory pleasures of solitude.
Sedgwick encouraged readers to consider the "potential queer erotic resonances" purportedly able to be found in the writing of Henry James. Drawing on and herself performing a "thematics of anal fingering and ‘fisting-as-écriture’" (or writing) in James’s work, Sedgwick put forward the idea that sentences whose "relatively conventional subject-verb-object armature is disrupted, if never quite ruptured, as the sac of the sentence gets distended by the insinuation of one more, qualifying phrase or clause" can best be apprehended as either giving readers the vicarious experience of having their rectums crammed with a finger or fist, or of their own ‘probing digit’ inserted into a rectum. Sedgwick makes this claim based on certain grammatical features of the text.
Body of work
Sedgwick published several books considered "groundbreaking" in the field of queer theory, including
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985),
Epistemology of the Closet (1990), and
Tendencies (1993). Sedgwick also coedited several volumes and published a book of poetry
Fat Art, Thin Art (1994) as well as
A Dialogue on Love (1999). Her first book,
The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986), was a revision of her doctoral thesis. Her last book
Touching Feeling (2003) maps her interest in affect, pedagogy, and performativity.
Jonathan GoldbergJonathan Goldberg is a literary theorist; formerly the Sir William Osler Professor of English Literature at Johns Hopkins University, he is currently Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English at Emory University where he directs Studies in Sexualities...
is currently editing her unpublished late essays and lectures, many of which are fragments from an unfinished study of Proust. According to Goldberg, these late writings also examine such subjects as Buddhism,
object relationsObject relations theory is a psychodynamic theory within psychoanalytic psychology. The theory describes the process of developing a mind as one grows in relation to others in the environment....
and affect theory, psychoanalytic writers such as Klein, Tomkins,
D.W. WinnicottDonald Woods Winnicott was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who was especially influential in the field of object relations theory. He was a leading member of the British Independent Group of the British Psychoanalytic Society, and a close associate of Marion Milner...
, and
Michael BalintMichael Balint or Bálint Mihály was a Hungarian psychoanalyst and proponent of the Object Relations school.-Life:...
, the poetry of C. V. Cavafy, philosophical
NeoplatonismNeoplatonism , is the modern term for a school of religious and mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century AD, based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonists, with its earliest contributor believed to be Plotinus, and his teacher Ammonius Saccas...
, and identity politics.
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985)
Sedgwick summed up her basic argument in
Between Men in a
Epistemology, a later work.
Between Men was supposed to demonstrate "the immanence of men’s same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to male-female bonds in nineteenth-century English literature…"
The book focused on the putatively oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural system where male-male desire could become intelligible only by being routed through nonexistent desire involving a woman.
Sedgwick’s "male homosocial desire" referred to all male bonds, including, potentially, everyone from overt heterosexuals to overt homosexuals. Sedgwick coined the neologism "homosocial," which was supposed to be a rejection of the then-available lexical and conceptual alternatives to challenge the idea that hetero-, bi- and homosexual men and experiences could be easily differentiated. She argued that these three categories could not actually be readily distinguished from one another, since what might be conceptualised as "erotic" depended on an "unpredictable, ever-changing array of local factors."
One reviewer asserts that the structures of "homosocial desire" that Sedgwick is said to uncover in the book are so "omnipresent" in Western literature, and so often read through other ideological screens, that "we should beware."
"Homosocial" is a neologism meant to be distinguished from "homosexual" and connotes a form of male bonding often accompanied by a fear or hatred of homosexuality.
Epistemology of the Closet (1990)
Sedgwick's inspiration for
Epistemology came from reading D. A. Miller’s essay, ‘Secret Subjects, Open Subjects’, subsequently included in The Novel and the Police (1988).
In
Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick argues that "virtually any aspect of modern Western culture, must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition." According to Sedgwick, homo/heterosexual definition has become so tediously argued over because of a lasting incoherence "between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority ... [and] seeing it on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities."
A Dialogue on Love (1999)
In 1991, Sedgwick was diagnosed with breast cancer and subsequently wrote the book
A Dialogue on Love. Sedgwick recounts the therapy she undergoes, her feelings toward death,
depressionMajor depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and by loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities...
, and her gender uncertainty before her mastectomy and during chemotherapy. The book incorporates both poetry and prose, as well Sedgwick’s own words and her therapist’s notes. Though the title connotes the Platonic dialogues, the form of the book was inspired by
James MerrillJames Ingram Merrill was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Divine Comedies...
’s "Prose of Departure" which followed a seventeenth-century Japanese form of persiflage known as
haibunHaibun is a literary composition that combines prose and haiku. The range of haibun is broad and includes, but is not limited to, the following forms of prose: autobiography, biography, diary, essay, history, prose poem, short story and travel literature....
. Sedgwick uses the form of an extended, double-voiced
haibun to explore possibilities within the psychoanalytic setting. In particular, those that offer alternatives to Lacanian-inflected psychoanalysis, and new ways for thinking about sexuality, familial relations, pedagogy, asthma, and love. The book also reveals Sedgwick's growing interest in Buddhist thought, textiles, and texture.
Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003)
Touching Feeling is written as a reminder of the early days of queer theory, which Sedgwick discusses briefly in the introduction in order to reference the affective conditions—chiefly the emotions provoked by the AIDS epidemic—that prevailed at the time and to bring into focus her principal theme: the relationship between feeling, learning, and action.
Touching Feeling explores critical methods that may engage politically and help shift the foundations for individual and collective experience. In the opening paragraph, Sedgwick describes her project as the exploration of "promising tools and techniques for nondualistic thought and pedagogy."
List of publications (incomplete)
- The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (ISBN 0-405-12650-6), 1980
- Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (ISBN 0-231-08273-8), 1985
- Epistemology of the Closet (ISBN 0-520-07874-8), 1991
- Tendencies (ISBN 0-8223-1421-5), 1993
- Fat Art, Thin Art (ISBN 0-8223-1501-7), 1995
- A Dialogue on Love (ISBN 0-8070-2923-8 ), 2000
- Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (ISBN 0-8223-3015-6), 2003
- Performativity and Performance (1995, coedited with Andrew Parker) ISBN 978-0415910552
- Shame & Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (1995, coedited with Adam Frank) ISBN 978-0822316947
- Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher (1996, coedited with Gary Fisher) ISBN 978-0822317999
- Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997, coedited with Jacob Press) ISBN 978-0822320401
External links