Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Sedgwick 2007

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (born May 2, 1950 in Dayton , Ohio ; † April 12, 2009 ) was one of the most important American theorists with regard to gender studies and queer theory . Her work was influenced by feminism , Marxism and deconstructivism or post-structuralism .

Life

Sedgwick received her PhD from Yale University in 1975. She has taught literature at Hamilton College , Boston University , Amherst College, and Dartmouth College, and was Newman Ivey White Professor at Duke University . Most recently she gave graduate courses in English philology at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City .

Sedgwick was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1991 , after which she wrote the book A Dialogue on Love , which explores her thoughts about death, her depression, and her uncertainty about her gender identity during chemotherapy and mastectomy.

In 2005 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2006 to the American Philosophical Society .

job

Sedgwick has written various books that were and are fundamental to queer theory. Translations of their texts into German are still rare. Her most important books are Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and Epistemology of the Closet . Her work can be seen as an attempt to elucidate how male homophobia has shaped modern Western culture, namely in terms of the concepts of sexuality, intimacy, family and gender roles.

Performative utterances
One of Sedgwick's assumptions is that apparently non-performative utterances can still be performative in nature, especially those with homophobic or anti-homophobic effects. The consequent power of these utterances does not only reveal implicit theses about the world, but also helps to enforce, hypostatize and reinforce them, thereby supporting existing value systems, suppressing minorities and strengthening power relationships. Sedgwick specifically postulates that at a social level, apparently simple labeling as "normal" or "abnormal" has normative effects.

Works

• Between Men - English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire . Columbia Univ. Press, New York 1985, ISBN 0-231-08273-8 .
• A Dialogue on Love . 2000, ISBN 0807029238 .
• Epistemology of the Closet . Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead 1991, ISBN 0-5200-7874-8 .
• Fat Art, Thin Art . 1995, ISBN 0822315017 .
• Shame and its sisters . Duke Univ. Press, Durham 1995, ISBN 0-8223-1694-3 .
• Tendencies . Routledge, London 1994, ISBN 0-415-10815-2 .
• Touching Feeling - Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity . Duke Univ. Press, Durham 2003, ISBN 0-8223-3028-8 .

Translations into German

• Epistemology of Hiding . In: Andreas Kraß (Ed.): Queer Thinking . 2003, ISBN 3518122487 .
• The Beast in the Chamber: Henry James and the Writing of Homosexual Fear . In: Barbara Vinken (Ed.): Deconstructive Feminism. Literary Studies in America . Frankfurt am Main 1992, pp. 247-277, ISBN 3-518-11678-9 .
• Queer performativity. Henry James' "The Art of the Novel" . In: Matthias Haase (Ed.): Outside. The politics of queer spaces . B_Books, Berlin 2005, pp. 13–37, ISBN 3-933557-25-9 .
• One response to C. Jacob Hale . In: Haase 2005, pp. 146-148.

Web links

• Sedgwick's homepage