Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet by Christien Garcia

Author:Christien Garcia [Garcia, Christien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, General, Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, LGBTQ+ Studies, Gay Studies, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780429818684
Google: A31aDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2018-05-11T21:07:04+00:00

MODULE 8

PLACE IN THE AUTHOR’S WORK

KEY POINTS

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Epistemology of the Closet forms, in many respects, the centerpiece of Sedgwick’s professional life.

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It builds on the theme of male-male relations established in her earlier work and foreshadows later preoccupations in queerness and affect.

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EC is widely regarded as Sedgwick’s most influential work.

Positioning

Sedgwick’s intellectual trajectory can be described as a move from a focus on specifically male same-sex reactions (Between Men [1985], and Epistemology of the Closet [1990]) towards an interest in the subtler register of affect, and a more expansive frame of queerness (A Dialogue on Love [1999], Touching Feeling [2003]), with Tendencies (1993) working as a kind of bridge in between. Thus, Epistemology of The Closet can be positioned within Sedgwick’s work as a text that helped establish the terms of her life-long project of investigating the tensions between meaning and sexuality, but also a launching pad for directions and preoccupations that could hardly have been anticipated in 1990. It is perhaps worth noting, as well, that Sedgwick was diagnosed with cancer shortly after the publication of Epistemology of The Closet, and this no doubt had some influence in shaping the path of Sedgwick’s subsequent work. At the very least, as Sedgwick writes in Tendencies, her diagnosis allowed her not to let herself become ensnared in the cynical criticisms she was facing at the time. It may also have something to do with a shift in the senses of urgency that characterized her earlier and later work. Tendencies concludes with a piece about friendship and mourning that is part autobiography and love letter. It is a piece that foreshadows, in many respects, A Dialogue on Love about her experience in therapy and what it means to be without fully being a “cancer patient.” Both texts blur the lines of genre and are deeply attuned to the subtleties and ambiguities of feeling, affection, and desire.

“What I’m proudest of, I guess, is having a life where work and love are impossible to tell apart.”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love

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