Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Born	May 2, 1950 (1950-05-02) (age 57) Dayton, Ohio, United States
Occupation	Academic, author, essayist, critic, poet
Genres	literary criticism
Influences Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, J.L. Austin, Jacques Lacan, Silvan Tomkins, Melanie Klein
Influenced Judith Butler, Michael Warner, Judith Halberstam, David Halperin, Teresa de Lauretis

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (b. May 2, 1950) is an American theorist in the fields of gender studies, queer theory (queer studies), and critical theory. Influenced by feminism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, her work reflects an abiding interest in a wide range of issues and topics, including queer performativity and performance; 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. Image File history File links Metadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (3264 × 2448 pixel, file size: 6. ... is the 122nd day of the year (123rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1950 (MCML) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... : Gem City : Birthplace of Aviation United States Ohio Montgomery 56. ... This article is about work. ... Plato is credited with the inception of academia: the body of knowledge, its development and transmission across generations. ... For other uses, see Author (disambiguation). ... An essayist is an author who writes compositions which can be about any particular subject. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Sappho and Alcaeus of Mytilene, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1881). ... A literary genre is one of the divisions of literature into genres according to particular criteria such as literary technique, tone, or content. ... Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. ... Jacques Derrida (IPA: in French [1], in English ) (July 15, 1930 – October 8, 2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher, known as the founder of deconstruction. ... Sigmund Freud (IPA: ), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939), was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. ... Proust redirects here. ... Image:J Butler. ... Michel Foucault (pronounced ) (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher, historian and sociologist. ... John Langshaw Austin (March 28, 1911 - February 8, 1960) was a philosopher of language, who developed much of the current theory of speech acts. ... Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (French IPA: ) (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor, who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. ... Silvan Solomon Tomkins (b. ... Melanie Klein Melanie Klein (March 30, 1882 – September 22, 1960) was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst, who devised therapeutic techniques for children with great impact on contemporary methods of child care and rearing. ... Image:J Butler. ... Michael Warner Michael Warner is a literary critic and social theorist. ... Judith Halberstam is Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California. ... David Halperin (born April 2, 1952) is an American theorist in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, critical theory, material culture and visual culture. ... Teresa de Lauretis is an Italian born author and Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. ... is the 122nd day of the year (123rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1950 (MCML) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... The word theory has a number of distinct meanings in different fields of knowledge, depending on their methodologies and the context of discussion. ... Gender studies is a theoretical work in the social sciences or humanities that focuses on issues of sex and gender in language and society, and often addresses related issues including racial and ethnic oppression, postcolonial societies, and globalization. ... The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. ... Queer studies is the study of issues relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. ... In the humanities and social sciences, critical theory has two quite different meanings with different origins and histories, one originating in social theory and the other in literary criticism. ... Feminists redirects here. ... Today psychoanalysis comprises several interlocking theories concerning the functioning of the mind. ... Deconstruction is a term in contemporary philosophy, literary criticism, and the social sciences, denoting a process by which the texts and languages of Western philosophy (in particular) appear to shift and complicate in meaning when read in light of the assumptions and absences they reveal within themselves. ... Performativity is a concept that is related to speech act theory, to the pragmatics of language, and to the work of John L. Austin. ... Proust redirects here. ... Cover of Elisabeth Roudinescos biography of Lacan Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. ... Today psychoanalysis comprises several interlocking theories concerning the functioning of the mind. ... A statue of the Sakyamuni Buddha in Tawang Gompa, India. ... Pedagogy (IPA: ) , the art or science of being a teacher, generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction[1]. The word comes from the Ancient Greek (paidagōgeō; from (child) and (lead)): literally, to lead the child”. In Ancient Greece, was (usually) a slave who supervised the... Silvan Solomon Tomkins (b. ... Melanie Klein Melanie Klein (March 30, 1882 – September 22, 1960) was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst, who devised therapeutic techniques for children with great impact on contemporary methods of child care and rearing. ...

Life

Sedgwick received her undergraduate education at Cornell University and her PhD from Yale University in 1975. She taught writing and literature at Hamilton College, Boston University, and Amherst College. She held a visiting lecturship at UC Berkeley and has taught at the School of Criticism and Theory when it was located at Dartmouth College. Additionally, she was the Newman Ivey White Professor of English at Duke University.[1] During this 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 even literature itself. 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). The latter work became one of gay and lesbian studies' and queer theory's founding texts. She received the 2002 Brudner Prize at Yale. She currently teaches graduate courses in English as Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Cornell redirects here. ... PhD usually refers to the academic title Doctor of Philosophy PhD can also refer to the manga Phantasy Degree This is a disambiguation page — a list of pages that otherwise might share the same title. ... Yale redirects here. ... Year 1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... For other uses, see Literature (disambiguation). ... For other colleges with the same name, see Hamilton College (disambiguation). ... For the similarly named institution in Chestnut Hill, see Boston College. ... Amherst College is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. It is the third oldest college in Massachusetts. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, UC Berkeley, UCB, or simply Berkeley) is a prestigious, public, coeducational university situated in the foothills of Berkeley, California to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate and its bridge. ... Dartmouth College is a private, coeducational university located in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. Incorporated as Trustees of Dartmouth College,[6][7] it is a member of the Ivy League and one of the nine colonial colleges founded before the American Revolution. ... Duke University is a private coeducational research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. ... Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. ... This article is about human sexual perceptions. ... For other uses, see Race. ... Gender in common usage refers to the sexual distinction between male and female. ... The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. ... The James Robert Brudner Memorial Prize and Lecture at Yale University celebrates lifetime accomplishment and world-class scholarly contributions in the field of lesbian and gay studies. ... English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language (including literatures from the U.K., U.S., Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, India, South Africa, and the Middle East, among other areas), English linguistics (including English phonetics, phonology... The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York (known more commonly as the CUNY Graduate Center or the GC) is the sole doctorate-granting institution of the City University of New York. ... Midtown Manhattan, looking north from the Empire State Building, 2005 New York City (officially named the City of New York) is the most populous city in the state of New York and the entire United States. ...

Work

Sedgwick has published several books considered groundbreaking in the field of Queer Theory, including Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), and Tendencies (1993). Additionally, Sedgwick coedited several volumes (see below) and published a book of poetry Fat Art, Thin Art (1994) as well as A Dialogue on Love (1999), and an early work of criticism, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986). Her most recent book Touching Feeling touches upon her continuing interest in affect, pedagogy, and performativity. The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. ...

Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985)

In a later book, Sedgwick eloquently sums up her basic argument in Between Men:

[Between Men] attempted to demonstrate the immanence of men’s same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to male-female bonds in nineteenth-century English literature…[The book] focused on the oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural system in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily by being routed through triangular desire involving a woman (Epistemology 15). Theory of knowledge redirects here: for other uses, see theory of knowledge (disambiguation) According to Plato, knowledge is a subset of that which is both true and believed Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature, methods, limitations, and validity of knowledge and belief. ...

Epistemology of the Closet (1990)

In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick argues that "virtually any aspect of modern Western culture, must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition." According to Sedgwick, homo/heterosexual definition has become so angrily argued over because of a lasting incoherence "between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority... and seeing it on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities." This contradiction between what Sedgwick refers to as a "minoritizing versus a universalizing" view of sexual definition is made even more angrily argued over by yet another set of incoherent definitional terms: that "between seeing same-sex object choice on the one hand as a matter of liminality or transitivity between genders, and seeing it on the other hand as reflecting an impulse of separatism — though by no means necessarily political separatism — within each gender." Sedgwick is not interested in judging which of the two poles of these contradictions should be considered more correct. Rather, she makes a compelling argument for the "centrality of these nominally marginal yet conceptually intractable set of definitional issues to the important knowledges and understandings of twentieth-century Western culture as a whole." (Epistemology 1-2). This article does not cite its references or sources. ...

Tendencies (1993)

In Tendencies, Sedgwick "attempts to find new ways to think about lesbian, gay, and other sexually dissident loves and identities in a complex social ecology where the presence of different genders, different identities and identifications, will be taken as a given"(xiii). Queer is a key term in Tendencies, and while Sedgwick does use the term to refer to "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically," she also points out that "a lot of the most exciting recent work around 'queer' spins the term outward along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses"(8-9). The book itself is a queer collection of essays, with topics ranging from Henry James and lesbianism to John Waters and Divine, from opiate dens and contemporary arguments around addiction to sexualities and nationalism, from the war on effeminate boys to the activism around AIDS and breast cancer. Throughout, Sedgwick experiments with and transforms many different received forms of writing-- the autobiographical narrative, the performance piece, the atrocity story, the polemic, the prose essay that quotes poetry, the obituary-- in an on-going project she refers to as Queer Performativity. As Sedgwick states, "these essays are about passionate queer things that happen across the lines that divide genders, discourses, ‘perversions’"(Tendencies xiii).

A Dialogue on Love (1999)

In 1991, Sedgwick was diagnosed with breast cancer and subsequently wrote the book A Dialogue on Love. Sedgwick recounts the therapy she undergoes for her feelings toward death, her depression, and her gender uncertainty following her mastectomy and during chemotherapy. The books weaves back and forth between poetry and prose as well as between Sedgwick’s own words and her therapist’s notes. While the title does resonate with the idea of the Platonic dialogues, the form of the book was inspired by James Merrill’s "Prose of Departure" which followed a seventeenth-century Japanese form of writing known as haibun. Sedgwick uses the form of an extended, double-voiced haibun to think about the many different possibilities within the psychoanalytic setting, especially those that offer alternatives to Lacanian-inflected psychoanalysis and new ways for thinking about sexuality, familial relations, pedagogy, and love. The book also reveals Sedgwick's growing interest in Buddhist thought, textiles, and texture. Year 1991 (MCMXCI) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the 1991 Gregorian calendar). ... Breast cancer is cancer of breast tissue. ... On the Threshold of Eternity. ... In medicine, mastectomy is the medical term for the surgical removal of one or both breasts, partially or completely. ... Chemotherapy is the use of chemical substances to treat disease. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003)

Touching Feeling offers a poignant reminder of the early days of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory, which Sedgwick discusses briefly in the introduction in order to reference the affective conditions—chiefly the emotions provoked by the AIDS epidemic—that prevailed at the time and to bring into focus her principal theme: the relationship between feeling, learning, and action. Touching Feeling explores critical methods that may engage politically and help shift the foundations for individual and collective experience. In the opening paragraph, Sedgwick describes her project as the exploration of "promising tools and techniques for nondualistic thought and pedagogy." Throughout the book, Sedgwick highlights the tension between words as the representation of things and words as the construction of things. The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. ... AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, sometimes written Aids) is a human disease characterized by progressive destruction of the bodys immune system. ...

Important publications

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

• Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (ISBN 0-231-08273-8), 1985
• Epistemology of the Closet (ISBN 0-520-07874-8), 1991
• Tendencies (ISBN 0-8223-1421-5), 1993
• Fat Art, Thin Art (ISBN 0-8223-1501-7), 1995
• A Dialogue on Love (ISBN 0-8070-2923-8 ) 2000
• Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (ISBN 0-8223-3015-6), 2003

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Works Edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

• Performativity and Performance (1995, coedited with Andrew Parker)
• Shame & Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (1995, co-edited with Adam Frank)
• Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher (1996, coedited with Gary Fisher))
• Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997, coedited with Jacob Press)

See also

• The Closet
• Gender
• Gender and sexuality studies
• Gender role
• Sex
• Sexual orientation
• Social constructionism
• Queer Theory

This article is about sexual orientation. ... Gender in common usage refers to the sexual distinction between male and female. ... Gender and sexuality studies is a collective term for the interdisciplinary study of human gender and sexuality. ... A bagpiper in Scottish military clan-uniform. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Sexual orientation refers to the direction of an individuals sexuality, usually conceived of as classifiable according to the sex or gender of the persons whom the individual finds sexually attractive. ... For the learning theory, see Social Constructivism (Learning Theory). ... The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. ...

External links

• Faculty homepage