Life & Background
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was born in Ohio in 1950 into a Jewish family and took her doctorate at Yale. She taught at Hamilton, Boston University, Amherst, Duke — where she was part of the department that made it a centre of theory in the late 1980s — and finally at the CUNY Graduate Center. Between Men in 1985 and Epistemology of the Closet in 1990 established the field of queer theory almost at a stroke, appearing in the same period as Butler's Gender Trouble. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1991 and wrote about illness, treatment, and mortality in A Dialogue on Love and elsewhere, alongside poetry and textile art. Her late work turned toward affect theory and Buddhism. She died in 2009 at fifty-eight.
Epistemology of the Closet
Sedgwick argues that virtually any aspect of modern Western culture will be not merely incomplete but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it fails to incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition. The book proceeds through readings of Melville's Billy Budd, Wilde, James's The Beast in the Jungle, Nietzsche, and Proust, showing how a whole set of governing binaries — secrecy and disclosure, knowledge and ignorance, private and public, innocence and initiation, natural and artificial — became structured around the crisis of sexual definition that crystallised at the end of the nineteenth century. The closet, in her account, is not a private predicament but a public epistemological structure, and ignorance is not a gap in knowledge but something actively produced and maintained.
Her earlier book Between Men supplied the concept that travelled furthest: homosocial desire, and the observation that in the classic English novel the bond between two men is often routed through a woman, so that a triangle which appears to be about rivalry over her is structurally about the men's relation to each other. Alongside this she describes homosexual panic, the policing anxiety that keeps homosocial bonds from tipping into the homosexual. Her later essay on paranoid and reparative reading questioned the discipline's default suspicion, asking what criticism might do besides expose — an argument that anticipated the current turn toward postcritique.
Key Concepts
Why Sedgwick Matters
With Butler, Sedgwick founded queer theory, and Epistemology of the Closet is its other founding text. Homosocial desire is now standard vocabulary for reading nineteenth-century fiction, and the paranoid/reparative distinction has become central to debates about the future of critique. For examinations she is the necessary complement to Butler: Butler theorises gender's construction, Sedgwick theorises how sexual definition organises knowledge itself.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Coherence of Gothic Conventions1980
- Between Men1985
- Epistemology of the Closet1990
- Tendencies1993
- A Dialogue on Love1999
- Touching Feeling2003