Professor Eve Sedgwick, an important founder of the academic sub-discipline 'Queer theory,' has died of cancer. She was 58. When she took to the academic stage in the 1970s at Yale University, English and other humanities departments were rarely welcoming to discussions of Feminism, of same-sex desire, of the fluidity of gender, or of homophobia. As an agressive and radical teacher, advocate and scholar, Professor Sedgwick worked tirelessly to change that situation. The fact that universities across America are more open than ever to the study of Feminism and Gay and Lesbian Studies is, in part, the result of the great conversations on identity, desire, and culture that Professor Sedgwick helped begin with essays like "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" and books like Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and Epistemology of the Closet.
Both "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" and Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire examine great works of Western literature and find many places where something "queer" is going on. In Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, for example, Sedgwick finds coded expressions of repressed female sexuality. In a study of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, Sedgwick shows how homophobia, heterosexual desire, and homosexual desire can all become entangled among a set of multiple fictional characters. She believed firmly that life was like that -- to her, nobody was completely "straight," and the concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were far too simple to describe the way live, love, and hate. Building on Michel Foucault's theories of sexual behavior and the evolution of systems for controlling populations, Sedgwick developed "queer theory" as a set of reading strategies that could show how our sexual desires, our senses of gender, and even our very basic senses of identity are constructed by larger cultural forces.
"It's about trying to understand different kinds of sexual desire and how the culture defines them," she told The New York Times in 1998. In the obituary by Patricia Cohen for the New York Times, Ms. Cohen wisely asks us to
Consider the issue of gay marriage. Some contend that gays are like everyone else (what Ms. Sedgwick called the “universalizing view”) and should be treated that way; others portray them as an oppressed minority (the “minoritizing view”) who deserve protection. At the same time, those who would outlaw gay marriage can argue either that homosexuals are a deviant subgroup (minoritizing) or that the ubiquity of homosexual tendencies (universalizing) endangers the traditional institutions that underlie civilized society.
The persistence of the deadlock between the universalizing and minoritizing views, she wrote, is “the single most powerful feature of the important 20th-century understandings of sexuality, whether hetero or homo, and a determining feature too of all the social relations routed, in this sexualized century, through understandings of sexuality.” Ms. Butler said, “her brilliance was to show how both of these claims are often made at the same time, and that this is actually a productive tension.”
Much of Sedgwick's work, and many of her close readings of literary work, remain controversial. The constructivist view of sexual identity is problematic to many historians of gay and lesbian culture, including Jim Kepner, Louis Crompton, Warren Johansson, and the University's own Jean-Nickolas Tretter. To these scholars and archivists, gays and lesbians throughout history share a common, essential experience of same-sex desire that they are born with, and they also share a common experience of homophobia. Both scholarly perspectives have made great contributions to the study of sexual identity in American universities; surely this is another "productive tension."
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