Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

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Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Born	May 2, 1950(1950-05-02) Dayton, Ohio, USA
Died	April 12, 2009 (aged 58) New York City, New York, USA
Occupation	Academic, author, essayist, critic, poet
Genres	literary criticism
Notable work(s)	Epistemology of the Closet
Influences Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, J.L. Austin, Jacques Lacan, Silvan Tomkins, Melanie Klein, James Merrill
Influenced Judith Butler, Michael Warner, Judith Halberstam, David Halperin, Teresa de Lauretis

Eve Sedgwick (née Kosofsky) (May 2, 1950 – April 12, 2009) was an American theorist in the fields of gender studies, queer theory (queer studies), and critical theory. Her works reflect a serious and abiding interest in a wide range of issues and topics, including queer performativity and performance; experimental critical writing; the works of Marcel Proust; non-Lacanian psychoanalysis; artists' books; Buddhism and pedagogy; the affective theories of Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein; and material culture, especially textiles and texture.

Biography

Eve Kosofsky was raised in a Jewish family in Dayton, Ohio.^[1] She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and her Ph.D from Yale University. She taught writing and literature at Hamilton College, Boston University, and Amherst College. She held a visiting lectureship at University of California, Berkeley and taught at the School of Criticism and Theory when it was located at Dartmouth College. She was also the Newman Ivey White Professor of English at Duke University, and then a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.^[2]

During her time at Duke, Sedgwick and her colleagues were in the academic avant-garde of the culture wars, using literary criticism to question dominant discourses of sexuality, race, gender, 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 Prize at Yale. She taught graduate courses in English as Distinguished Professor at the The City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY Graduate Center) in New York City, New York, until her death in New York City^[3] from breast cancer on April 12, 2009, aged 58.^{[4] [5] [6]}

Eve Kosofsky married Hal Sedgwick in 1969; he survives her.^[7]

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). Additionally, Sedgwick coedited several volumes (see below) 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 maps her interest in affect, pedagogy, infibulation, and performativity.

Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985)

In a later book, Sedgwick sums up her basic argument in Between Men:

[Between Men] attempted 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 oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural system in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily by being routed through nonexistent desire involving a woman (Epistemology 15).

Epistemology of the Closet (1990)

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." This contradiction between what Sedgwick refers to as a "minoritizing versus a universalizing" view of sexual definition is made by yet another set of definitional terms: that "between seeing same-sex object choice on the one hand as a matter of liminality or transitivity between genders, and seeing it on the other hand as reflecting an impulse of separatism — though by no means necessarily political separatism — within each gender".

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 for her feelings toward death, her depression, and her gender uncertainty before her mastectomy and during chemotherapy. The books weaves back and forth between poetry and prose as well as between Sedgwick’s own words and her therapist’s notes. While the title does resonate with the idea of the Platonic dialogues, the form of the book was inspired by James Merrill’s "Prose of Departure" which followed a seventeenth-century Japanese form of persiflage known as haibun. Sedgwick uses the form of an extended, double-voiced haibun to think about the many different possibilities within the psychoanalytic setting, especially 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.^{[citation needed]}

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003)

Touching Feeling offers a sad reminder of the early days of gay and lesbian studies and 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 enrage 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." Throughout the book, Sedgwick highlights the tension between words as the representation of things and words as the construction of things.

Important publications

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

• 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

Works edited by Sedgwick

• Performativity and Performance (1995, coedited with Andrew Parker)
• Shame & Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (1995, co-edited with Adam Frank)
• Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher (1996, coedited with Gary Fisher))
• Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997, coedited with Jacob Press)

References

External links

• CUNY faculty homepage