Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950 – 2009)
by Advocate Staff
Robert Reid-Pharr
The tremendous impact that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center, has had on the intellectual lives of an entire generation of scholars cannot be overstated. As a writer, teacher, mentor, and friend her sophisticated, precise engagements with questions of sexuality, desire, affect, and emotion have revolutionized literary and cultural studies, gender studies, critical theory, and feminism. Her many books, including Between Men (1985); Epistemology of the Closet (1991); Tendencies (1992); and Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003) are at once foundational works in queer studies and queer theory while also being rare examples of creativity, sensitivity, theoretical sophistication, and intellectual rigor.
After graduating with a B.A. from Cornell and a Ph.D. from Yale Sedgwick taught at a number of institutions including Amherst College, Boston University, Hamilton College, and Cornell University, finally becoming the Newman Ivey White Professor of English at Duke University. While at Duke she helped to secure that department’s reputation as an international leader in both critical theory and gender and sexuality studies. Arriving at the Graduate Center in 1998, Sedgwick continued to distinguish herself as a generous, attentive teacher and a breathtakingly productive scholar.
In addition to her work in gender and sexuality studies, Sedgwick published poetry, a memoir, and seminal essays on both psychoanalytic theory and Buddhism. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2006, Eve was plainly nice, archly funny, witty, wry, and unfailingly interested in human emotion, culture, and life. The profound loss that her many friends, students, and colleagues feel is only eclipsed by the sense of awe evoked by having been privileged to work and study in the presence of one of this nation’s greatest intellectuals. Teacher, friend, visionary, and pioneer, she will be greatly missed and long remembered.
Steve Kruger
I first encountered Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing in the mid-1980s. A graduate school friend, a fellow medievalist, had Between Men on his desk in the library; writing a dissertation on twelfth-century Latin love lyrics found in English manuscripts, he was using Sedgwick to think through the erotics of these obscure poetic texts. It was a while before Sedgwick found her way into my own work: in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I turned my attention to contemporary lesbian and gay writing, and especially writing about HIV/AIDS, I also found myself turning to Sedgwick, and particularly her formulations about “homosexual panic.” In understanding the constructions of masculinity at work in the AIDS crisis, I depended on her observation that, “at least since the eighteenth century in England and America, the continuum of male homosocial bonds has been brutally structured by a secularized and psychologized homophobia, which has excluded certain shiftingly and more or less arbitrarily defined segments of the continuum from participating in the overarching male entitlement – in the complex web of male power over the production, reproduction, and exchange of goods, persons, and meanings” (Epistemology of the Closet 185). Later, I met Eve Sedgwick in person, though I’m not sure whether that happened in the Spring of 1998 in the halls of the English Program’s former home in the Grace Building, when Eve began teaching at the Graduate Center, or at a downtown party for the magazine MAMM, which was focused on breast cancer advocacy, and for which Sedgwick wrote an advice column.
Years of shared oral examinations, dissertation defenses, Friday Forum events, discussions of course offerings, Admissions Committee meetings – all the dailiness of academic life – leave too many impressions to reflect on here. But Eve always showed herself to be thoughtful, sharply intelligent, and, most of all, generous in the attention she gave to students, to colleagues, and to the program of which she was such an important member.
In reflecting on my years of reading and knowing Eve Sedgwick, I keep returning to one moment in Epistemology of the Closet, in the first chapter, where Eve lays out her stunningly complex understanding of how the closet shapes modern regimes of knowledge and power. Within this discussion, she deploys a quirky juxtaposition of texts – the recent Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick and Racine’s Esther–to reflect on how (in Bowers) a potential, imagined act of coming out on the part of “a closeted gay court assistant, or clerk, or justice, who might have had some degree, even a very high one, of instrumentality in conceiving or formulating or ‘refining’ or logistically facilitating this ruling, these ignominious majority opinions, the assaultive sentences in which they were framed” (74 – 75) might be similar to and yet radically different from Esther’s highly efficacious, religious/ethnic coming out in Racine’s version of the biblical story. Within this complex argument, parenthetically framed, comes this Sedgwickian reflection:
(Even today, Jewish little girls are educated in gender roles – fondness for being looked at, fearlessness in defense of “their people,” nonsolidarity with their sex – through masquerading as Queen Esther at Purim; I have a snapshot of myself at about five, barefoot in the pretty “Queen Esther” dress my grandmother made [white satin, gold spangles], making a careful eyes-down toe-pointed curtsey at [presumably] my father, who is manifest in the picture only as the flashgun that hurls my shadow, pillaring up tall and black, over the dwarfed sofa onto the wall behind me.) (82)
The passage stands in a tangential relation to the main lines of Sedgwick’s argument, and it could probably be taken out of Epistemology without changing too much how we read that book’s argument. Why, then, do I find it compelling, so compelling in fact that I “remember” seeing the snapshot Sedgwick describes, even though that cannot really be the case? In part, it is Sedgwick’s remembering herself in the scene of her own theorizing that is remarkable: rather than keep the dynamics of religious/ethnic, gender, and sexual knowing at a comfortable distance, here – as so often in her work – she shows herself brave enough to consider her own implication in the complex structures she analyzes. And the self painted here is not a simple one; at the same time that she carefully curtseys at her father, she is transformed into something powerful, “hurled” and “pillared” into another form, a tall, black shadow that “dwarfs” the domestic scene she inhabits. Something here resonates with my own dimly remembered scenes of Purim masquerade – was I the clever, avuncular Mordechai, or the “befuddled but omnipotent king” (75 – 76) Ahasuerus? – but it also chimes with my memories of Eve, polite, even shy, on the one hand, and yet an enormously powerful intellectual, ethical, and political presence. This snapshot, brought to life in a flash in her writing, gives us one of many images to remember her by.
Meena Alexander
I was in Sarnath. Walking over the rough green grass in between the stones, I saw a line of children in their red checked uniforms, boys and girls with bright black hair, waiting to see the stupa. A few children skipped away from the lines the teachers tried to make them stand in, and were lost for a few minutes in the low pile of ruins. A child knelt down, put out her hand, and stroked a brick. Over and over again she touched the brick, running her fingers over the cracks, the split grains. That brick had once been part of an ancient monastery. Eve flashed into my mind. She was ill. She is meant to be here I thought and later in the deer park standing next to the spotted, freckled deer, in the gathering heat, I thought of her again.
Eve loved the tone, the textures of things and her Buddhism existed not in spite of, but quite precisely through her finely tuned sense of how desire cuts and courses through us, marking the world, our world, with a rich and fierce complexity.
We were colleagues and I used to sit with her, for just a few moments here and there, on a comfortable chair in the fourth floor lounge, in her office or mine, or more likely we’d stand in the corridor, lean against the wall and speak of this and that – Cavafy and the palimpsest of memory; how our department printer was not working; textures of woven cloth; lines from the Heart Sutra on disappearance; the difference it makes for a window to jut open so the breeze can blow in.
In Eve, thought and feeling were so finely woven together that her brilliance was always true to her awareness of the sensual body, of how light strikes flesh and passes through. It was written sometime ago. I would like to dedicate this poem to her.
Deer Park at Sarnath
It seems impossible to begin
To speak of those gone ahead
Intact, fired by breath:
Through flowering mustard
They race past a main road
Northwards to the deer park.
In the terrible kindness of the dead,
They whisper as they pass –
Inscribe yourself if you can
On brick or bone or slate
Then surrender it all with grace,
Rejoice in these trees
Jutting windward.
A threshold cut in rock
With seven kingdoms visible
Is still no stopping place.
Clouds consume the palaces of the gods
Stone chariots stir in soil
All Sarnath is covered in dirt.
There is no grief like this,
The origin of landscape is mercy.
Rob Faunce
Eve demanded dialogue. The only rule in her classroom was that you must speak. She cannily noted in “The Pedagogy of Buddhism” that, like the psychotherapist’s office, the classroom is not a space where students can simply inhale “right answers” proffered by a professor; her reaction, with those of us lucky enough to be her students, was to let us be her collaborators and eschew one “right” answer. Eve, with her beautifully calm demeanor, was an iron panda – demanding our rigor while she kept us in her bear embrace. How fortunate we’ve been to be so protected while we blossomed under her stewardship!
Eve didn’t switch gears – she was always the shy, bright, intense lady, full of ideas and love, and whether you were a bubbly first-year intoxicated to be in her eminent presence or a grief-stricken colleague, she was contemplative, compassionate, and considerate of your worth as an individual. Knowledge is not always easy; neither, of course, is love. Eve made both seem easy by living authentically with integrity, rigor, and intense commitment to ideas.
In the days after my mother suddenly passed, Eve (and her marvelous Hal) invited me to dinner, and the gift she gave transcended mere compassion and sympathy. She interrogated me, characteristically, with the charm and ruthlessness of an iron panda – demanding I explore my most raw emotions, interpreting my responses, and collaborating with me to establish apparatuses of mourning that not only helped me sustain in those numbest days of my life but enriched our understanding of loss, hope, internal objects, and the affects of grief and mourning. Tea and flowers could never properly thank her for that concomitant gift of her warmth and intellect, but I honor her best by keeping her with me, as that most cherished of what Melanie Klein termed “internal objects” that we access when we need to feel loved and nurtured. As we mourn this great lady of arts and letters, I suspect she will live on not just in her immense academic legacy, but as good internal objects for the many colleagues she nurtured and with whom she will constantly be part of the dialogue.
