Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Died
 Relevant Work

## Biography

Eve Kosofsky was raised in a Jewish family in Dayton, Ohio, and Bethesda, MD. She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and her Ph.D .from Yale University. At Cornell, she was among the first women to be elected to live at the Telluride House. She taught writing and literature at Hamilton College, Boston University, and Amherst College. She held a visiting lectureship at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at the School of Criticism and Theory when it was located at Dartmouth College.

A scholar in the fields of gender studies, queer theory (queer studies), and critical theory, Sedgwick 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). Her critical writings helped create the field of queer studies. Kosofsky married her partner Hal Sedgwick in 1969.

## From *Epistemology of the Closet*

### **Background and Historical Context**

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's inspiration for *Epistemology* came from reading D. A. Miller's essay, 'Secret Subjects, Open Subjects', subsequently included in *The Novel and the Police* (1988).

### **Key Words and Terms**

**Antihomophobic**

**Homosocial**

Designating social interaction between members of the same sex, esp. men; of, relating to, or characterized by such interaction. Contrasted with *heterosocial*.

**Sedgwick's Seven Axioms**

* **Axiom 1:** People are different from each other.
* **Axiom 2:** The study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of gender; correspondingly, antihomophobic inquiry is not coextensive with feminist inquiry. But we can't know in advance how they will be different.
* **Axiom 3:** There can't be an *a priori* decision about how far it will make sense to conceptualize lesbian and gay male identities together. Or separately.
* **Axiom 4:** The immemorial, seemingly ritualized debates on nature versus nurture take place against a very unstable background of tacit assumptions and fantasies about both nurture and nature.
* **Axiom 5:** The historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity.
* **Axiom 6:** The relation of gay studies to debates on the literary canon is, and had best be, tortuous.
* **Axiom 7:** The paths of allo-identification are likely to be strange and recalcitrant. So are the paths of auto-identification

### **Key Quotations**

"A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been
painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions"(23).

"In more familiar ways, Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and other engagé critical projects have deepened understandings of a few crucial axes of difference, perhaps necessarily at the expense of more ephemeral or less global impulses of differential grouping"(24).

"The most dramatic difference between gender and sexual orientation —that virtually all people are publicly and unalterably assigned to one or the other gender, and from birth—seems if anything to mean that it is, rather, sexual orientation, with its far greater potential for rearrangement, ambiguity, and representational doubleness, that would offer the apter deconstructive object"(34).

"Our culture still sees to its being dangerous enough that women and men who find or fear they are homosexual, or are perceived by others to be so, are physically and mentally terrorized through the institutions of law, religion, psychotherapy, mass culture, medicine, the military, commerce and bureaucracy, and brute violence"(58).

### **Related Works**

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

"Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" (1991)

*Tendencies* (1993)

*A Dialogue on Love* (1999)

*Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity* (2003)

## References

1. ↑ "homosocial, adj." *OED Online*, Oxford University Press, September 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/57091781. Accessed 15 September 2020.
2. ↑ Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. “Axiomatic.” Cultural Studies Reader: History, Theory, Practice, edited by Simon During, by Jessica Munns, Routledge, 2016, pp. 320–339, pages.ucsd.edu/~bgoldfarb/cocu108/data/texts/sedgaxio.pdf.