Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1950-2009

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Notice the Dalai Lama picture in the background?

I'm in the midst of studying for my Ph.D. exams right now, which entails building bibliographies on subjects I care about (Queer Theory being one of them) and reading through said bibliographies. One of the authors I've been prodigiously rereading (my copy of The Epistemology of the Closet is well-worn at this point) is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a theorist who is central in the formation of the Queer Studies/Theory discipline within the walls of academia (a fact she demurely denied often), has passed on from this world. And every queer should observe a moment of silence, because we have truly lost something. Because, to echo a familiar refrain spoken about Michel Foucault by David Halperin, as far as I'm concerned she was a fucking saint.

Like cultural/literary/discourse theorists before her, most notably Michel Foucault, Sedgwick was committed to thinking about queer activity in the most unlikely of places.

A good example is her reading of shame as not simply a repressive force but a productive one. What Sedgwick offered the world was a way of articulating radical queerness outside of mainstream (and liberal) constructions of gay life. The closet, for example, is perhaps inescapable even when we are 'out.' This doesn't mean that we wallow in the despair created by such a constructions, but rather that one can harness and utilize it to differentiate their self from what everyone else seems to want it to be.

She was anti-family, not because she literally hates families, but rather because the rhetoric surrounding acceptance for queers is built around their acceptance within the normative roles of family (hellooo White House Easter Egg roll!). Even when we do have kids and partner up, we're not that version of 'family.' And in this way we are accorded (by an antagonistic set of contexts and by ourselves) a special place of existing, a different kind of selfhood.

"...the most productive strategy (intellectually, emotionally) might be, whenever possible, to disarticulate [the self and the family] from one another, to disengage them - the bonds of blood, of law, of habituation, of privacy, of companionship and succor - from the lockstep of their unanimity in the system called 'family'" - Queer and Now, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

In, Regarding Sedgwick, a collection of essays paying homage to Sedgwick she is quoted as saying, "I have an intense wish to be assured that the people and communities I'm leaving behind can take care of themselves - that they don't need 'me,' my thought, my labor of regenerating a first person to keep them going"

Four hours ago I was reading Sedgwick in a coffee shop. I thought I understood so clearly, and now it's so clear that I don't.