Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (May 2, 1950 – April 12, 2009) was an American 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.

Sedgwick's essays became the framework for critics of poststructuralism, multiculturalism, and gay studies.

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."—but it gained both psychological and autobiographical depth as she turned her critical gaze toward friends' experiences of the AIDS epidemic.

Her sexuality was confusing to some people as a queer theorist, that used queer as general term, but Sedgwick never publicly identified as anything aside from straight.

In her 1985 book Between Men, she analyzed male homosocial desire and English literature.

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).

In 1990, she found a lump on her breast while she was getting her post-doctoral fellowship.

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 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.

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.

Eve Kosofsky was raised in a Jewish family in Dayton, Ohio, and Bethesda, Maryland.

She had two siblings: a sister, Nina Kopesky and a brother, David Kosofsky.

She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and her masters and Ph.D. from Yale University in the field of English, where studied under Allan Bloom, among others.

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.

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.

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.

She received the 2002 Brudner Prize at Yale, a lifetime achievement award, for her extensive work in LGBT studies.

By 2005, Sedgwick's basic cancer treatment had been stable.

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

Sedgwick encouraged readers to consider "potential queer erotic resonances" in the writing of Henry James.