In memoriam
I first laid eyes on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick at the Fourth Annual Lesbian and Gay Studies conference, at Harvard University, in 1990. The previous annual conferences had been held at Yale University, and now it was Harvard’s turn. Those were relatively early days in the emergence of lesbian and gay studies as an intellectual project and as a “legitimate” scholarly enterprise, although the scandal was at least half the fun. If it is hard to recapture in words the heady mixture of intellectual adventure and plain old libidinal pulse that shaped those early moments of field formation, it is surely impossible to overstate Sedgwick’s own luminous, path-clearing, and sometimes wickedly playful role in the imagination and formation of lesbian and gay studies.
After a long and public battle with breast cancer, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died on Sunday, April 12th. She was 58. She was a renowned literary critic who left her imprint on numerous fields, but most distinctively on an interdisciplinary field she helped inaugurate: queer studies.
Truth be told, I do not remember the paper she gave at the Harvard conference. Instead, what stands out most sharply for me from that first personal encounter were the T-shirts Sedgwick was selling — which she had a prominent hand in designing — as a fund raiser for Harvey Gantt’s insurgent and ultimately unsuccessful campaign to unseat Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Sedgwick was teaching at Duke University then, in the department of English. At the time, Duke was the hot zone for queer theory; Sedgwick herself had arrived there in 1988, recruited from Amherst College. The T-shirt (black, natch) featured a profile — in neon pink, if memory serves — of firm buttocks juxtaposed with the unmistakable face of Helms. Bright-pink lettering proclaimed and, more to the point, dared: “Know your asshole. This one deserves pleasure and respect.” Lest there be any doubt, an arrow identified just which “one” was being spoken about, tracing a line to the buttocks. Needless to say, I bought one, and over the years it caused more than one turned head and whiplashed stare. The T-shirt has long since seen its last wash cycle, but how I loved it, with its bright emblem of queer theory’s political promise and, especially, the way it bore the signature of Sedgwick’s distinctive wit.
The real whiplash that Sedgwick created, the one that would not just turn heads but blow minds, was provided by the publication, later in 1990, of her Epistemology of the Closet (University of California Press). In that, her most influential book, she began with the stunning claim: “This book will argue that an understanding of 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; and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modern gay and antihomophobic theory.” Antihomophobic. With that word, Sedgwick pulled heterosexual scholars, too, into the project of investigating the social meanings and sometimes violent force fields generated by the crisis of homo/heterosexual definition.
That one of the founders of queer studies should have herself been not just heterosexual but married (for 40 years, to Hal Sedgwick, who survives her) is surprising only to those who posit a straightforward identity between what one studies and who one is. It is not simply that Sedgwick’s own example confounds such an assumption; disorganizing and deconstructing those alignments were among the deeper claims of her body of work and of queer studies more generally.
As she wrote in Epistemology of the Closet, “Axiom 1: People are different from each another.” She went on, “It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact.” In the face of the dazzling and dizzying ways in which people differ from each other (and themselves), sexual orientation is a pretty blunt instrument. That is a deceptively simple argument, which Sedgwick went on to unfurl without ever losing sight of how and why self-identifying as gay or lesbian in the face of a homophobic world does vitally, urgently continue to matter.
Sedgwick always understood the role she and gay studies were playing in the culture wars of the 1990s, but she was never cowed, as the neon signature of that long-ago T-shirt illuminated. Perhaps the most powerful and politically catalyzing aspect of Epistemology of the Closet was her devastating dissection of what she called the “regime of the open secret” and the structures of knowing and not knowing (heterosexuality’s willful ignorance) that surround, sometimes claustrophobically, the experience and possibility of gay identity. Sedgwick was writing on the heels of Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding sodomy statutes (since overturned in Lawrence v. Texas, in 2003), but her analysis of the dilemmas of disclosure, what it is possible to know or say about homosexuality, and by whom, seems no less vital today, nearly 20 years after its first publication.
Another major innovation was to allow for, rather than to smooth over, the incoherences and contradictions that have historically structured — and continue to do so — homosexual and heterosexual definition. In so doing, Sedgwick helped to clear a path through the debate on whether sexual identity is inherent or socially constructed; that debate organized, often acrimoniously, some early conversations among scholars in lesbian and gay studies. For one thing, Sedgwick pointed out how homo/heterosexual definition is caught between two apparently opposing views: the “minoritizing” claim that homosexuals constitute a “small, distinct, relatively fixed minority” population (one version of that is the claim that homosexuals are “born that way”); and the “universalizing” claim that sexual desire is such an unpredictable, and unpredictably powerful, solvent of stable identities that even the most apparently heterosexual persons, and those to whom they are drawn, may be marked by same-sex influences and desires (and vice versa for homosexual persons and the people to whom they are drawn). Let’s call the latter, universalizing view the “queer possibility of possibility.”
As Richard Kim pointed out in his own tribute to Sedgwick on The Nation’s blog, it is just that queer possibility that frightens so many opponents of gay parenting, same-sex marriage, and gay rights more generally: not just, what if gays recruit, but what if I am recruitable?
Answering that worry with assertions of gay and straight immutability — the minoritizing argument — would not, according to Sedgwick, solve the problem. It would rather land us in a different set of quandaries and perhaps play into what she diagnosed as the “genocidal fantasy” of a world with, if not no homosexuals at all, at least with as few as possible. It is less that Sedgwick refused to take sides — she was, after all, resolutely for a world not just with many homosexuals but with the space to be gay or “do” gay in lots of different ways, as her lesson plan “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys” suggests. It was more that she was crucially attuned to the perils of both arguments and humble in the face of the future either ushered in or foreclosed by choices made in the present. (“How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” is among the most reprinted of Sedgwick’s essays. It first appeared in the journal Social Text in 1991, was subsequently reprinted in the book Tendencies, by Duke University Press in 1993 and Routledge the next year, and has been included in several anthologies.)
A through-line in Sedgwick’s work is the way she joins humility to fierce protectiveness of difference. Although she seemed to land on the constructivist side of debates, seeing gay identity and sexuality as constructed by social norms, she remained a passionate advocate of attending seriously to the stories that gay men and lesbians have told about themselves, whether they were “born” gay or made a radical choice. For Sedgwick, the queer studies or queer theory that could not make room for self-narratives that did not fit the frame of acacademic theory was not worth having or preserving.
If Epistemology of the Closet and the earlier Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Duke University Press, 1985) helped to spark a focus in Anglo-American literary studies on lesbian and gay issues, with students inspired to read for gay or queer subtexts in essays and books, we can see Sedgwick at once anticipating and inaugurating new directions for lesbian and gay studies beyond the literary. And that was so, even as her own essays were gorgeously literary. One especially noteworthy example is “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” which was the very first article in the very first issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, in 1993. As the keyword “performativity” suggests, the article found Sedgwick engaged both with the speech-act theory of the late J.L. Austin and with Judith Butler’s feminist and queer reuses of Austin’s concept of performativity.
The term “performativity” was introduced by Austin, a British philosopher of language, to describe a class of utterances in which speech acts: Saying is at the same time doing. The authority of such utterances depends in large part on being utterly conventionalized. Austin’s ur-example (to which Sedgwick devoted her critical attention and sharp wit) was the marital “I do,” those two magic words that, if said in the right way, in the right kind of company, under the right conditions, transform a “man” and a “woman” into a “husband and wife.” Butler, now a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, picked up on the notion that saying was authorized and authorizing to propose gender as itself a kind of stylized performance: Gender performatives create the illusion that gender is natural and stable. Sedgwick stepped into this conversation to observe that performatives work two ways: inwardly (à la French deconstruction) and outwardly (à la theatricality). But Sedgwick also pointed out how discussions too easily degenerated into debates about whether a particular performance was truly subversive. “The bottom line,” in her memorable words, “is generally the same: kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic.”
If the first iteration of Sedgwick’s article placed her right in the thick of conversations about identity as performative, it also forecast later queer critical currents having to do with gay shame and the matter of affect. Precisely because there is something contagious about shame, she said, it could also provide surprising points of contact. Sedgwick herself returned to “Queer Performativity” in the wake of September 11, 2001, and importantly revised it, lifting out and expanding her analysis of shame to ask how shame delineates identity without being its endpoint. How it can lead to something else, like the political collectivity that other theorists have suggested. The final version of this essay appears in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003). That text, along with A Dialogue on Love (Beacon Press, 1999) and Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Duke University Press, 1995), which she co-edited with Adam Frank, placed Sedgwick at the forefront of queer investigations of affect, which is one of the liveliest areas of truly interdisciplinary discussion and debate in queer studies (and beyond) today.
A Dialogue on Love was a kind of cancer journal. She wrote it in company with her therapist, Shannon Van Wey, after the cancer she had been suffering with recurred and she underwent a mastectomy. Sedgwick drew verbatim conversations with the therapist into the text. It is neither a purely solo-written book nor co-written in any formal sense. Standing somewhere in between, it’s a hybrid text that rather reveals the social life and generosity of Sedgwick’s thought.
But the formal experimentation of the book was not new for Sedgwick. Think here of the serious playfulness of the essay she co-wrote with Michael Moon — their two voices braiding and unbraiding — “Divinity: A Dossier, a Performance Piece, a Little-Understood Emotion” (in Tendencies). In those essays, and in Fat Art, Thin Art (Duke University Press, 1994), a book of poetry, Sedgwick broke form to suggest not only how many new things we might discover with her, but also in how many unexpected modes. The diversity and queerness of the forms to no small degree mime the arguments themselves. As she puts it in Touching Feeling, she is less interested in “prescriptive forms” than in the possibility of “a mind receptive to thoughts, able to nurture and connect them, and susceptible to happiness in their entertainment.” Sedgwick seems to have achieved that for herself. One of her enduring gifts to us — her readers, her students, her colleagues — is the charge to just keep open to such receptivity, with all the perils and possibilities it holds out.
There is some irony that Sedgwick should have died on Easter. She who brilliantly analogized issues like the workings of the homosexual closet and the dilemma of Jewish self-disclosures in Epistemology of the Closet turned to Buddhism in the last decade of her life as a way to undo some, in her words, “painful epistemological/psychological knots” to do with illness and dying. In her essay “Pedagogy of Buddhism,” which appears in Touching Feeling, Sedgwick refused the either/or charge to believe or disbelieve in rebirth. Rather, she opened herself to a space freed from the demand to know and given instead to the meditative play of “picturing your life, even your character, otherwise than as it is.” As she wrote, “So many questions emerge. Yet their emergence is not in the context of blame or self-blame, nor of will or resolve. The space is more like — what? Wish? Somewhere, at least, liberated by both possibility and impossibility, and especially by the relative untetheredness to self.”
Sedgwick’s turn to Buddhism was not a turning away from queer studies. In many ways, we can see her meditative practices, and the lessons she gleaned from them and shared with her readers and students, as participating in a larger turn in queer studies to think about religion and spirituality in less rigid and rigidly hostile ways. As at so many other turning points in queer studies, Sedgwick’s generosity and imagination were inspiring — she offered a pedagogy unafraid not to know, even when there seemed so much to be scared about. Here, amid a meditation on Tibetan Buddhism, we can see Sedgwick grappling with and expounding on some of the fundamental ethical and political claims of queer theory: namely, the hope, the risk, and the serious play of imagining otherwise, both in our deepest relations with others and in ourselves — however fictive “the self” or however fleeting Sedgwick herself’s time among us.
Because of Eve Sedgwick’s formative role in the shaping of queer studies, the absence left in her wake looms large. And yet her legacy lives on in the dazzling body of work she leaves behind, which we can continue to read and teach and find happiness in. Sedgwick was also, from all accounts, an amazing teacher and mentor to her students, so many of whom have themselves gone on to leave their marks on queer and feminist studies. She leaves us that other shining, pulsing legacy, then, in the form of her many students, whom she touched and graced, and whose own teaching is a kind of carrying forward of her torch and her touch.
Ann Pellegrini is an associate professor of performance studies and religious studies at New York University, where she also directs the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 33, Page B99
