The scholar who pioneered ‘queer theory’

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

1950­–2009

“If Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick did not exist,” said The Toronto Star, “social conservatives might have had to invent her.” Beginning in the 1970s, Sedgwick was a leading proponent of the controversial academic field of queer studies, which sought to uncover homoerotic elements in the work of such literary giants as Shakespeare and Dickens.

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Sedgwick, who graduated from Yale with a Ph.D. in English, taught that “sexual desire and sexual identity exist on a continuum, spilling over the neat labels we create to contain them,” said The New York Times. Thus, she said, any understanding of literature must include “the possibility of a sexual relationship” between same-sex characters. In Melville’s Billy Budd, for example, she argued that Budd’s nemesis, John Claggart, is a homosexual “presented as different in his essential nature than the normal men around him.” Not until 1989, though, while a professor at Duke University, did she make headlines, with her paper “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” Teasing out Austen’s “hidden references” to self-abuse, the essay became a flashpoint in the modern culture wars and “a symbol of wacky, out-of-touch academics.” Time called her a “nutty professor.” Sedgwick weathered the storm and produced many other works, including papers with such titles as “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” and “Is the Rectum Straight?”

Sedgwick died of breast cancer, which had been diagnosed in 1991. At the time of her death, she was working on “Proust and the Little Queer Gods.” She is survived by her husband of 40 years, optometry professor Hal Sedgwick.