Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

654:, Sedgwick argues that "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." According to Sedgwick, the homo/heterosexual definition has become so tediously argued over because of a lasting incoherence "between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority ... seeing it on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities." 527:. She suggests that critics should instead approach texts and look at "their empowering, productive as well as renewing potential to promote semantic innovation, personal healing and social change." This is Sedgwick's idea of reparative reading which to her is the opposite of "paranoid reading" which focuses on the problematic elements in a given text. Reparative readings "contrasts with familiar academic protocols like maintaining critical distance, outsmarting (and other forms of one-upmanship), refusing to be surprised (or if you are, then not letting on), believing the hierarchy, becoming boss." 703:

pornography" of Austen scholarship, she used Tanner's treatment of Emma Woodhouse as a woman who has to be taught her place. Furthermore, Sedgwick accused Austen scholars of presenting Austen herself as a "punishable girl" full of a "self-pleasing sexuality" who was ever ready to be "violated". Sedgwick ended her essay by writing that most Austen scholars wanted to de-eroticize her books, as she argued there was an implicit lesbian sexual tension between the Dashwood sisters, and scholars needed to stop repressing the "homo-erotic longing" contained in Austen's novels.

694:'s "vengeful" treatment of Emma Woodhouse as a woman who had to be taught her place. Sedgwick argued that by the middle of the 18th century, the "sexual identity" of the onanist was well established in British disclosures and that Austen writing at the beginning of the 19th century would have been familiar with it. Sedgwick used Austen's description of Marianne Dashwood, whose "eyes were in constant inquiry", whose "mind was equally abstracted from everything actually before them" as she was "restless and dissatisfied" and unable to sit still. She then compared 42: 699:

doctor tried to keep her from masturbating by such methods as having her hands tied together, closely matched Austen's description of Marianne Dashwood. Sedgwick argued that both patient X and Dashwood were seen as suffering from an excess of sexuality that needed to be brought under control, arguing that though Elinor Dashwood did things considerably more gently than the doctor who repeatedly burned Patient X's clitoris both were agents of discipline and control.

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conventional subject-verb-object armature is disrupted, if never quite ruptured, as the sac of the sentence gets distended by the insinuation of one more, qualifying phrase or clause" can best be apprehended as either giving readers the vicarious experience of having their rectums penetrated with a finger or fist, or of their own "probing digit" inserted into a rectum. Sedgwick makes this claim based on certain grammatical features of the text.

463: 499:, Sedgwick suggests that grammatical inversion might have an equally intimate relation to sexual inversion; she suggested that readers may want to "sensitise" themselves to "potentially queer" rhythms of certain grammatical, syntactical, rhetorical, and generic sentence structures; scenes of childhood spanking were eroticised, and associated with two-beat lines and lyric as a genre; 759:. Sedgwick recounts the therapy she undergoes, her feelings toward death, depression, and her gender uncertainty before her mastectomy and chemotherapy. The book incorporates both poetry and prose, as well as Sedgwick's own words and her therapist's notes. Though the title connotes the Platonic dialogues, the form of the book was inspired by 626:

alternatives to challenge the idea that hetero-, bi- and homosexual men and experiences could be easily differentiated. She argued that one could not readily distinguish these three categories from one another, since what might be conceptualized as "erotic" depended on an "unpredictable, ever-changing array of local factors."

403:"vanilla" — but it gained both psychological and autobiographical depth as she turned her critical gaze toward friends' experiences of the AIDS epidemic. Her sexuality was confusing to some people as a queer theorist, that used queer as general term, but Sedgwick never publicly identified as anything aside from straight. 492:, Sedgwick was said to have observed that words and concepts like 'fond', 'foundation', 'issue', 'assist', 'fragrant', 'flagrant', 'glove', 'gage', 'centre', 'circumference', 'aspect', 'medal' and words containing the sound 'rect', including any words that contain their anagrams, may all have "anal-erotic associations." 698:

with the 1881 document "Onanism and Nervous Disorders in Two Little Girls" where the patient X has a "roving eye", "cannot keep still" and is "incapable of anything". In Sedgwick's viewpoint, the description of Patient X, who could not stop masturbating and was in a constant state of hysteria as the

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explores critical methods that may engage politically and help shift the foundations for individual and collective experience. In the opening paragraph, Sedgwick describes her project as the exploration of "promising tools and techniques for non dualistic thought and pedagogy." Sedgwick integrates

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In 1993, Duke University Press published a collection of Sedgwick's essays from the 1980s and early 1990s. The book was the first entry in Duke's influential "Series Q", which was initially edited by Michele Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Sedgwick herself. The essays span a wide

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was highly unfair, given she had not actually written the article, which was published only in the summer of 1991, and therefore he dismissed her article only on the basis of the title. The British critic Robert Irvine wrote that much of the negative reaction that "Jane Austen and the Masturbating

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Sedgwick aimed to make readers more alert to the "potential queer nuances" of literature, encouraging the reader to displace their heterosexual identifications in favor of searching out "queer idioms." Thus, besides obvious double entendres, the reader is to realize other potentially queer ways in

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By 2005, Sedgwick's basic cancer treatment had been stable. In the beginning of 2006, it was found that Sedgwick's cancer had resurfaced and spread again in her bone and liver. She died on April 12, 2009, at age 58 in New York City, after moving closer to her husband, though they continued to live

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Nobody knows more fully, more fatalistically than a fat woman how unbridgeable the gap is between the self we see and the self as whom we are seen... and no one can appreciate more fervently the act of magical faith by which it may be possible, at last, to assert and believe, against every social

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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,

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She married Hal Sedgwick in 1969. Sedgwick and her husband were happily married for nearly forty years, although from the beginning of their relationship until her death they lived independently from one another, usually in different states. Sedgwick described her relationship with her husband as

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Sedgwick's "male homosocial desire" referred to all male bonds. Sedgwick used the sociological neologism "homosocial" to distinguish from "homosexual" and to connote a form of male bonding often accompanied by a fear or hatred of homosexuality, rejecting the then-available lexical and conceptual

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Sedgwick argued that the pleasure that Austen's readers take from Marianne's suffering is typical of Austen scholarship, which was centered around what Sedgwick called the central theme of a "A Girl Being Taught a Lesson". As a prime example of what she called the "Victorian sadomasochistic

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Sedgwick encouraged readers to consider "potential queer erotic resonances" in the writing of Henry James. Drawing on and herself performing a "thematics of anal fingering and 'fisting-as-écriture'" (or writing) in James's work, Sedgwick put forward the idea that sentences whose "relatively

719:, Sedgwick first publicly embraces the word 'queer', defining it as: "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or 1185:

Creekmur, Corey K. "Homoeroticism and Homosociality." Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered History in America, edited by Marc Stein, vol. 2, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004, pp. 50-52. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Accessed 13 June

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Girl" generated, which became the subject of heated debate in the American "culture war" between liberals and conservatives, was due to the fact that many people could not accept the thesis that Jane Austen had anything to do with sex.

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Jagose, Annamarie. "Queer Theory." New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by Maryanne Cline Horowitz, vol. 5, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005, pp. 1980-1985. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Accessed 13 June

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Klosowska, Anna. "Homoaffectivity, Concept." Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, edited by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, vol. 2, Macmillan Reference USA, 2007, pp. 710-712. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Accessed 13 June

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argues that reparative reading can be defined as "a stance that looks to a work of art for solace and replenishment rather than viewing it as something to be interrogated and indicted." Felski's claims around

781:-inflected psychoanalysis, and new ways for thinking about sexuality, familial relations, pedagogy, and love. The book also reveals Sedgwick's growing interest in Buddhist thought, textiles, and texture. 795:

is written as a reminder of the early days of queer theory, which Sedgwick discusses briefly in the introduction in order to reference the affective conditions—chiefly the emotions provoked by the

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The book explores the oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural system where male-male desire could become intelligible only by being routed through nonexistent desire involving a woman.

1719: 503:(continuing a thought from one line, couplet, or stanza to the next without a syntactical break) had potentially queer erotic implications; finally, while thirteen-line poems allude to the 715:

range of genres, including elegies for activists and scholars who died of AIDS, performance pieces, and academic essays on topics such as sado-masochism, poetics and masturbation. In

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edited her late essays and lectures, many of which are segments from an unfinished study of Proust. According to Goldberg, these late writings also examine such subjects as Buddhism,

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form, by rejecting the final rhyming couplet it was possible to "resist the heterosexual couple as a paradigm", suggesting instead the potential masturbatory pleasures of solitude.

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Sedgwick drew on the work of literary critic Christopher Craft to argue that both puns and rhymes might be re-imagined as "homoerotic because homophonic"; citing literary critic

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works by Henry James, JL Austin, Judith Butler, Silvan Tompkins, and others, incorporating different levels of emotions and how they come together in our collective lives.

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possibility, that the self we see can be made visible as if through our own eyes to the people who see us... Dare I, after this half-decade, call it with all a fat

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was published in April 1990, Sedgwick's little known speech at the Modern Language Association suddenly became famous. Sedgwick felt Kimball's criticism of her in

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demonstrates "the immanence of men's same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to male-female bonds in nineteenth-century English literature."

391:, and the boundaries of literary criticism. Sedgwick first presented her particular collection of critical tools and interests in the influential volumes 2193: 2064: 686:

In her article, Sedgwick juxtaposed three treatments of female suffering, namely Marianne Dashwood's emotional frenzy when Willoughby abandons her in

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while developing a critical approach focusing on hidden social codes and submerged plots in familiar writers. She held a visiting lectureship at

203:. Sedgwick published several books considered groundbreaking in the field of queer theory, and her critical writings helped create the field of 443: 2168: 1241: 1105: 1042: 1028: 963: 949: 935: 921: 384: 666:

The very title of her article attracted much attention from the media, most of it very negative. The conservative American cultural critic

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Murphy, Erin & Vincent, J. Keith. "Introduction." Criticism, vol. 52 no. 2, 2010, pp. 159-176. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/crt.2010.0034

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Sedgwick is perhaps best known not for her books, but rather for an article she published in 1991, "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl

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gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) studies. Her theoretical interests have been synoptic, assimilative, and eclectic.

2188: 1346: 799:—that prevailed at the time and to bring into focus her principal theme: the relationship between feeling, learning, and action. 2253: 674:, when Sedgwick delivered a talk on her upcoming article at a conference of the Modern Language Association in late 1989. When 253:

culture would be incomplete if it failed to incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition. Drawing on

1005: 411: 1396: 230:. In 1991, she published "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl", an article that received attention as part of an American 2213: 324:. She had two siblings: a sister, Nina Kopesky and a brother, David Kosofsky. She received her undergraduate degree from 2208: 1509: 2016: 1595: 341: 650: 690:, a 19th-century French medical account of the "cure" inflicted on a girl who liked to masturbate, and the critic 1328:"Sedgwick Sense and Sensibility: An Interview with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick" (interview conducted January 19, 1995) 1327: 1277: 520: 375:

During her time at Duke, Sedgwick and her colleagues were in the academic avant-garde of the culture wars, using

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at Yale, a lifetime achievement award, for her extensive work in LGBT studies. In 2006, she was elected to the

207:, in which she was one of the most influential figures. Sedgwick's essays became the framework for critics of 2098: 577: 430:

In 1990, she found a lump on her breast while she was getting her post-doctoral fellowship. She underwent a

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Katrin Röder (2014) "Reparative Reading, Post-structuralist Hermeneutics and T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets"

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to explore possibilities within the psychoanalytic setting, particularly those that offer alternatives to

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used the title of her article as evidence of left-wing "corruption" in higher education in his 1990 book

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Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. "Tendencies." Durham and London: Duke University Press (Series Q), 1993. pg. 8.

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came from reading D. A. Miller's essay, 'Secret Subjects, Open Subjects', subsequently included in

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investment lying at and as the great heart of her queer project." He goes on to quote Sedgwick:

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in the field of English. At Cornell, she was among the first women to be elected to live at the

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2002 Brudner Prize for her academic contributions to the field of LGBT Studies, Yale University

442:. In the fall of 1996, cancer was found in Sedgwick's spine as well. She received treatment at 1548: 1538: 1437: 1404: 1371: 1237: 1162: 1101: 1038: 1024: 1001: 987: 973: 959: 945: 931: 917: 903: 889: 875: 861: 847: 573: 471: 447: 361: 357: 345: 1776: 1728: 589: 467: 305: 212: 162: 1673:

Heather Love (2010) "Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading."

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focuses on not only Sedgwick's illness, but illness in general and how we deal with it.

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Sedgwick published several foundational books in the field of queer theory, including

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In 1991, Sedgwick was diagnosed with breast cancer and subsequently wrote the book

601: 533: 439: 317: 196: 66: 191:; May 2, 1950 – April 12, 2009) was an American academic scholar in the fields of 1732: 731: 528: 489: 329: 270: 235: 231: 1341:– University of California Santa Barbara, Volume 9, 1995 (Interviews Section), 462: 1052: 764: 763:'s "Prose of Departure" which followed a seventeenth-century Japanese form of 556:(1993). Sedgwick also coedited several volumes and published a book of poetry 500: 435: 262: 223: 1552: 1441: 1408: 1375: 1166: 1072:"Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "Between Men" at Thirty: Queer Studies Then and Now" 17: 1532: 730:

is also relevant, for it is here that Sedgwick "has revealed her personal

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and postcritical reading draw heavily on Sedgwick's reparative approach.

293: 289: 282: 273:. Her works reflected an interest in a range of issues, including queer 249:

Sedgwick argued that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern

1788: 1596:"The College Years of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a Founder of Queer Theory" 1278:"The College Years of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a Founder of Queer Theory" 2091: 2017:"Haiku as Queer Tourism: From Bashō to David Trinidad | New Criticals" 769: 597: 504: 388: 1933: