Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Works

• 1985Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire

  Readings from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Dickens: bonds between men are often formed through a woman in erotic triangles, and in modern Western culture homophobia cuts the continuum between male homosocial and homosexual desire – an arrangement bound up with the subordination of women.

• 1990Epistemology of the Closet

  Readings of Melville, Wilde, Nietzsche, Henry James and Proust: the definition of homo- and heterosexuality since the late nineteenth century shapes the categories of modern Western culture – secrecy and disclosure, private and public, knowledge and ignorance – and the closet is its defining structure.

• 2003Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity

  Essays on affect, above all shame, with the psychologist Silvan Tomkins, on the “periperformative” utterances around Austin’s performatives and on Buddhist pedagogy; “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” asks critics not to read only in the mode of suspicion and exposure.

Position

Sedgwick is on the map as one of the founders of queer theory. “Between Men” (1985) took up René Girard’s erotic triangle and Gayle Rubin’s analysis of the “traffic in women” to show how bonds between men in English literature from Shakespeare to Dickens are formed through women: “homosocial” desire – friendship, rivalry, mentorship – lies on a continuum with homosexual desire that modern Western culture cuts with homophobia, and this arrangement is bound up with the subordination of women. “Epistemology of the Closet” (1990) argued, taking up Foucault, that the definition of people as homosexual or heterosexual, fixed around 1900, structures far more than sexuality – oppositions such as secrecy and disclosure, private and public, knowledge and ignorance – and that the closet is the defining structure of gay oppression in the twentieth century. She distinguished “minoritising” views, for which homosexuality concerns a distinct minority, from “universalising” views, for which it concerns the sexuality of everyone, and held that the two stand in unresolved conflict in modern culture; her first axiom was simply that “people are different from each other”. In “Touching Feeling” (2003) she turned to affect, above all shame, drawing on the psychologist Silvan Tomkins, and, with Melanie Klein, contrasted “paranoid” reading, which seeks to expose hidden violence, with “reparative” reading. Annamarie Jagose (1996) and later introductions count her, with Butler and Teresa de Lauretis, among the founders of queer theory; the turn to reparative reading has been widely taken up and also discussed critically (for example by R. Wiegman, Feminist Theory, 2014).

Life & context

Eve Kosofsky was born on 2 May 1950 in Dayton, Ohio. She studied at Cornell University (BA 1971) and at Yale, where she took her doctorate in English in 1975 with a thesis on the conventions of the Gothic novel, published in 1980. She taught at Hamilton College, Boston University and Amherst College, from 1988 at Duke University and from 1998 at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York as Distinguished Professor of English. In the late 1980s and the 1990s her books, together with those of Judith Butler and others, made queer theory a field of research in the humanities. In 1991 she was diagnosed with breast cancer; she wrote about illness, therapy and Buddhism in “A Dialogue on Love” (1999) and in essays, and also published poetry. She died in New York on 12 April 2009.

Further main works

• The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980)
• Tendencies (1993)
• Performativity and Performance (ed. with A. Parker, 1995)
• Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (ed. with A. Frank, 1995)
• A Dialogue on Love (1999)
• The Weather in Proust (posthumous, ed. J. Goldberg, 2011)