Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Dzieła

• 1985Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Między mężczyznami. Literatura angielska i męskie pożądanie homospołeczne)

  Lektury od sonetów Szekspira po Dickensa: więzi między mężczyznami często tworzą się za pośrednictwem kobiety w erotycznych trójkątach, a w nowoczesnej kulturze zachodniej homofobia przecina kontinuum między męskim pożądaniem homospołecznym a homoseksualnym – układ związany z podporządkowaniem kobiet.

• 1990Epistemologia szafy

  Lektury Melville’a, Wilde’a, Nietzschego, Henry’ego Jamesa i Prousta: definicja homo- i heteroseksualności od końca XIX wieku kształtuje kategorie nowoczesnej kultury zachodniej – tajemnicę i ujawnienie, prywatne i publiczne, wiedzę i niewiedzę – a szafa jest jej określającą strukturą.

• 2003Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Dotykając uczuć. Afekt, pedagogika, performatywność)

  Eseje o afekcie, przede wszystkim o wstydzie, z odwołaniem do psychologa Silvana Tomkinsa, o wypowiedziach „periperformatywnych” wokół performatywów Austina i o pedagogice buddyjskiej; „Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” (Lektura paranoiczna i lektura reparacyjna) prosi krytyków, by nie czytali wyłącznie w trybie podejrzliwości i demaskowania.

Stanowisko

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).

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980)
• Epistemology of the Closet (1990)
• 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)