RIP Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

There doesn't seem to be any formal announcement of her passing yesterday yet -- Wikipedia's been updated while there's a remembrance up over at Oh! Industry. Suffice to say that Epistemology of the Closet in particular was one of 'those' books that everyone seemed to know about when I was in grad school in the early 1990s, and I'm guessing folks here like Neotropical pygmy squirrel would have more to say about her and her work in general.

This is a terrible loss. Eve's work has transformed the way so many people read and think. She put into the intellectual bloodstream terms and ideas that have now taken on lives of their own that are going to be used for generations to come because they show us things that were there all along that we didn't quite have the means to think through before her example (anyone who's introduced a room full of undergraduates to the distinction between "homosocial" and "homosexual" and watched the initial skepticism and wrinkled noses give way to the "aha!" moment when the utility of this concept sinks in will know what I mean here). She's distinctive for having written not just one "big book" that turned people on but (at least) three. "Between Men" was the breakthrough, and got people thinking and arguing about narrative structure and "the homosocial" as an "affective glue" that makes certain regimes of sexual knowing and un-knowing possible. She took this much, much further in the wonderfully complex and generative "Epistemology of the Closet", whose theoretical introductory chapter is still one of the best and most passionately intelligent works of queer theory ever written (though my heart belongs to the chapter on Melville's "Billy Budd"). For lots of folks, this would be enough to put her in the pantheon of important American literary critics already- but her more recent work "Touching Feeling" had an even greater and wider impact on the field of English studies, going beyond queer issues and into how we theorize emotion and embodiment as such. Her chapter with Adam Frank effectively resuscitated the work of Silvan Tomkins from intellectual obscurity and sparked some ongoing methodological debates about we might reconcile empiricism and theory in new ways. I have found her work indispensable and deeply inspiring. I can recall the thrill of reading her books and the kind of giddy fandom I felt when she came and gave an incredible talk on Oscar Wilde at Berkeley while I was a grad student there. I hate that I will never read a "new book" by her, but I am quite confident that her contributions to how we read literature and how we think about sexuality are permanent.

anyone who's introduced a room full of undergraduates to the distinction between "homosocial" and "homosexual" and watched the initial skepticism and wrinkled noses give way to the "aha!" moment when the utility of this concept sinks in will know what I mean here

I can't remember whether I learned this in undergrad or grad days but you're correct about how its sheer usefulness as a paired but separate set of terms was and remains essential. And I can't but think you're completely OTM with regards to her legacy.

Wow very weird. I just last night pulled out my copy of Tendencies for the first time in ages. RIP. Someone once complained to me at a conference that she was het and thus should not be taken seriously on matters queer. I never researched the matter because give her contributions, I couldn't see how it possibly mattered.

Oh shit, I was just reading her a week ago. Her texts were sometimes a bit difficult to decipher, but her ideas and concepts also touched some things few other writers have touched. She was, and will be, utterly essential to anyone interested in queer and gender. RIP.

"the epistemology of the closet" was key for me. RIP.

never read her, will try to start

Her prose reeked in places of too much time spent in the musty closets (heh) of academe, but Epistemology deserves all the praise it gets. I saw her as the Sontag to Camille Paglia's Pauline Kael.

What the doc said.

damn! RIP.