Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (; May 2, 1950 – April 12, 2009) was an American feminist academic scholar in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, and critical theory. Sedgwick published several books considered groundbreaking in the field of queer theory, and her critical writings helped create the field of queer studies, in which she was one of the most influential figures.Jagose, Annamarie. "Queer Theory." New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by Maryanne Cline Horowitz, vol. 5, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005, pp. 1980-1985. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Accessed 13 June 2018.Murphy, Erin & Vincent, J. Keith. "Introduction." Criticism, vol. 52 no. 2, 2010, pp. 159-176. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/crt.2010.0034 Sedgwick's essays became the framework for critics of poststructuralism, multiculturalism, and gay studies.
In her 1985 book Between Men, she analyzed male homosocial desire and English literature. In 1991, she published "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl", an article that received attention as part of an American culture war and criticism for associating the works of Jane Austen with sex. She coined the terms homosocial and antihomophobic.Creekmur, Corey K. "Homoeroticism and Homosociality." Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered History in America, edited by Marc Stein, vol. 2, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004, pp. 50-52. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Accessed 13 June 2018.Klosowska, Anna. "Homoaffectivity, Concept." Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, edited by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, vol. 2, Macmillan Reference USA, 2007, pp. 710-712. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Accessed 13 June 2018.
Sedgwick argued that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture would be incomplete if it failed to incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition. Drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of Michel Foucault, Sedgwick analyzed homoerotic subplots in the work of writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James. Her works reflected an interest in a range of issues, including queer performativity, 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, and in Bethesda, Maryland. She had two siblings: a sister, Nina Kopesky and a brother, David Kosofsky. She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University, where she studied under Allan Bloom, among others, and her masters and Ph.D. from Yale University in the field of English. At Cornell, she was among the first women to be elected to live at the Telluride House, where she met her husband. She taught writing and literature at Hamilton College, Boston University, and Amherst College while developing a critical approach focusing on hidden social codes and submerged plots in familiar writers. 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.Mark Kerr; Kristin O'Rourke, "Sedgwick Sense and Sensibility: An Interview with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick" (interview conducted January 19, 1995) , Thresholds: Viewing Culture – University of California Santa Barbara, Volume 9, 1995 (Interviews Section), University of California, Santa Barbara (publisher) (University of California, Irvine -publication held on UCI's website). Accessed April 30, 2009.
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).
She married Hal Sedgwick in 1969. Sedgwick and her husband were happily married for nearly forty years, although from the beginning of their relationship until her death they lived independently from one another, usually in different states. Sedgwick described her relationship with her husband as "vanilla". She has described her own self-identification as a “gay man” with a “lesbian ego-ideal."
She received the 2002 Brudner Prize at Yale, a lifetime achievement award, for her extensive work in LGBT studies. In 2006, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She taught graduate courses in English as Distinguished Professor at The City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY Graduate Center) until her death in New York City"Obituaries", The Washington Post, April 21, 2009. Accessed April 30, 2009.
Death In 1990, during the period when she was getting her post-doctoral fellowship, she found a lump on her breast. She underwent a radical mastectomy where all of her right breast and all of the lymph nodes from her right armpit were removed. She underwent chemotherapy. In the fall of 1996, cancer was found in Sedgwick's spine as well. She received treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering for six months, where she had a series of radiation treatments to the portion of her spine affected by cancer.
By 2005, Sedgwick's basic cancer treatment had been stable. In the beginning of 2006, it was found that Sedgwick's cancer had resurfaced and spread again in her bone and liver. She died on April 12, 2009, at age 58 in New York City, after moving closer to her husband, though they continued to live separately.
Ideas and literary criticism
Sedgwick's work 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.Edwards (2009), p. 9
The queer lens Sedgwick aimed to make readers more alert to the "potential queer nuances" of literature, encouraging the reader to displace their heterosexual identifications in favor of searching out "queer idioms."Edwards (2000), p. 59 Thus, besides obvious double entendres, the reader is to realize other potentially queer ways in which words might resonate. For example, in Henry 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 sound '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 Dollimore, 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 sonnet 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.Edwards (2000), p. 59-60
Sedgwick encouraged readers to consider "potential queer erotic resonances" in the writing of Henry James.Edwards (2000), p. 60 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 penetrated 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.
Reparative reading Sedgwick argues that much academic criticism springs from a hermeneutics of suspicion as coined by Paul Ricœur. She suggests that critics should instead approach texts and look at "their empowering, productive as well as renewing potential to promote semantic innovation, personal healing and social change."Katrin Röder (2014) "Reparative Reading, Post-structuralist Hermeneutics and T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets" Anglia 132 1, 58–59 This is Sedgwick's idea of reparative reading which to her is the opposite of "paranoid reading" which focuses on the problematic elements in a given text. Reparative reading "contrasts with familiar academic protocols like maintaining critical distance, outsmarting (and other forms of one-upmanship), refusing to be surprised (or if you are, then not letting on), believing the hierarchy, becoming boss."Heather Love (2010) "Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading." Criticism 52 (2), 236 Rita Felski argues that reparative reading can be defined as "a stance that looks to a work of art for solace and replenishment rather than viewing it as something to be interrogated and indicted." Felski's claims around postcritique and postcritical reading draw heavily on Sedgwick's reparative approach.
Body of work Sedgwick published several foundational books 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 Goldberg edited her late essays and lectures, many of which are segments from an unfinished study of Proust. According to Goldberg, these late writings also examine such subjects as Buddhism, object relations and affect theory, psychoanalytic writers such as Melanie Klein, Silvan Tomkins, D.W. Winnicott, and Michael Balint, the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, philosophical Neoplatonism, and identity politics.
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) According to Sedgwick, Between Men demonstrates "the immanence of men's same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to male-female bonds in nineteenth-century English literature."
The book explores the 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.