Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, May 2, 1950 – April 19, 2009

It probably says something about the circles I run in that I heard about Marilyn Chambers before I heard about Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, but like Chamber she passed away on Sunday and at a relatively young age.

From the Times obituary:

“Ms. Sedgwick broke new ground when, drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault, she began teasing out the hidden socio-sexual subplots in writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James.”

Not being an academic most of my exposure to Sedgwick came via commentaries or quotes of hers, but the very idea of queer theory was like an insurance policy for me as a teenager. I remember the first high school teacher who, without using the term queer theory, explained the idea that classic texts and films had subtexts that reflected non-normative experiences and that we could find something of our own experiences by looking a little closer.

That idea of reading between the lines was something I was already good at in real life (as a way of not getting yelled at, beat up, or generally noticed) and learning that I could do it at school, and get called insightful for doing it, was pretty awesome.

It’s silly that I waited this long but I just ordered a copy of A Dialogue on Love, which she wrote following her own chemotherapy and thinking through of the social meaning of illness. It’ll be the first entire text of hers I’ve read and seems like a nice way to mourn and celebrate.

New York Times – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a Pioneer of Gay Studies and a Literary Theorist, Dies at 58