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Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950 - )
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 A
Dialogue on Love by
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Queer studies owes its status as an academic
discipline in large part to the literary criticism and theoretical
writings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (including, most famously, Epistemology
of the Closet). In A Dialogue on Love, she applies her
skills to the analysis of a far more personal text: herself. This
stunningly intimate memoir is an exploration of Sedgwick's journey
through therapy for depression, beginning 18 months after a
diagnosis of breast cancer. She places her therapist's notes in
dialogue with her own words, which take the 17-century Japanese
form of haibun, traditionally reserved for travel
narratives; a description of another work structured in this way
applies equally to her own writing: "Spangled with haiku is
more what it feels like, [the] very sentences fraying
into implosions
of starlike density or
radiance, then out
into a prose that's never quite not the
poetry." A Dialogue on Love is an engaging,
brilliantly constructed portrait of the unique intimacy between
therapist and patient, exploring the intricate relationships
between childhood precocity, positioning within the family,
fantasy, sex, the body, depression, and attitudes toward death.
Through these issues, Sedgwick comes to a highly personal, yet
expansive, definition of sexuality inclusive of fantasy,
autoeroticism, and cultural intimacy. --Julia Steinmetz
 Epistemology
of the Closet by
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have
become vital to the intellectual life of the U.S. This has been,
to no small degree, due to the popularity of Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick's critically acclaimed Epistemology of the Closet.
Working from classic texts of European and American
writers--including Herman Melville, Henry James, Marcel Proust,
and Oscar Wilde--Sedgwick delineates a historical moment in which
sexual identity became as important a demarcation of personhood as
gender had been for centuries.
Sedgwick's literary analysis, while provocative
and often startling (you will never read Billy Budd or The
Picture of Dorian Gray the same way again), is simply the
basis for a larger project of examining and analyzing how the
categories of "homosexual" and "heterosexual"
continue to shape almost all aspects of contemporary thought. Epistemology
of the Closet is a sometimes-dense work, but one filled with
wit and empathy. Sedgwick writes with great intelligence and an
eye for irony, but always makes clear that her theories and
critical acumen are in the service of a politic that seeks to make
the world a better and more humane place for everyone. An
extraordinary book that reshapes how we think about literature,
sexuality, and everyday life. --Michael Bronski
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This is the homepage of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick at
Duke University.
Site includes:
Articles include:
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By Maria Russo, salon.com
Excerpt:
It's true that many of Sedgwick's followers have
used her ideas and techniques in ham-handed ways. They undertook
her signature technique of "queering" literary works
(showing how texts encode meanings that work against the sexually
circumscribed, homophobic culture in which they were written) with
a vengeance, creating some pretty horrendous scholarship in the
process. But it's just as silly to blame Stephen Greenblatt for
the endless pages of mechanistic new historicism that came in his
wake; you can't hold pioneers responsible for all the foibles of
their imitators...
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By Michael Moon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Written for an architecture show called Social
Constructions, Mark Robbins, Curator, Wexner Center for the
Arts, Ohio State University
Excerpt:
I grew up in a small 3-bedroom suburban ranch
house that was built in 1950, the same year I was born. My big
sister and I shared a bedroom until my parents got worried about
her climbing into my bed every night: then they gave us separate
rooms, bumping our little brother up into the finished attic.
The house has thin walls, so that while closed
doors created a fiction of privacy that was generally respected,
in fact my bedroom was full of sounds from the living room, my
parents' and sister's rooms, and the bathroom. I think I must have
disciplined the "valves of my attention" (in Emily
Dickinson's phrase) so I'd be able to exclude the public part of
our rather intensive family culture, when I was in my so-called
apple-blossom pink little bedroom. I've always been good at
getting completely absorbed in reading. The only other absorbing
thing I spent as much time doing was masturbating. I used to
assume I craved privacy in order to masturbate so much--now I also
imagine I masturbated so much as a way of hollowing out a privacy
for myself within the permeable ear of my room...
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By Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
These paragraphs emerged as part of the long
thinking/planning process for a group show, "Queer
Space," that opened at the Storefront for Art and
Architecture in SoHo...
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By Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Excerpt:
The most dramatic thing that happened to me this
summer was when I passed out for television. The TV cameras from
the local news shows were there because we were having a
demonstration, organized by an Ad Hoc Coalition of Black Lesbians
and Gays, with participation from ACT UP-Triangle, against the
University of North Carolina's local PBS station, which was
refusing to air Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied, a stunning
film on the genocidally underrepresented topic of black gay men in
the U.S. It was a muggy southern summer afternoon, by the side of
a highway in Research Triangle Park. I had thought I was feeling
strong enough for what looked to be a sedate demonstration (no
civil disobedience), in spite of several months of chemotherapy
which had pretty much decimated my blood cells...
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By Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Excerpt:
"Gender criticism" sounds like a
euphemism for something. In practice it is a euphemism for several
things, and more than that. One of its subtexts is gay and lesbian
criticism. There can be no mystery about why that highly stigmatic
label, though increasingly common, should be self-applied with
care--however proudly--by those of us who do this scholarship. For
instance, I almost never put "gay and lesbian" in the
title of undergraduate gay and lesbian studies courses, though I
always use the words in the catalog copy. To ask students to mark
their transcripts permanently with so much as the name of this
subject of study would have unpredictably disabling consequences
for them in the future: the military, most churches, the CIA, and
much of the psychoanalytic establishment, to mention only a few
plausible professions, are still unblinking about wanting to
exclude suspected lesbians and gay men, while in only a handful of
places in the U.S. does anyone have even nominal legal protection
against the routine denial of employment, housing, insurance,
custody, or other rights on the basis of her or his perceived or
supposed sexual orientation. Within and around academic
institutions, as well, there can be similarly persuasive reasons
for soft-selling the challenge to an oppression whose legal,
institutional, and extrajudicial sanctions extend, uniquely, quite
uninterruptedly up to the present...
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Names Index:
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