Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009)
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
Trikster mourns over the death of the brilliant theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick April 12 2009.
Sedgwick was one of the most influential and important theorists for the development of queer theory, with seminal books such as Between Men (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Tendencies (1992), and Touching Feeling (2003). Her death at only 59 years leaves a big gap in contemporary queer theory, literary analysis, affect theory, and poetry.
According to the obituary in The New Yorker, it was the breast cancer she had been battling with for over a decade that caused her early death. In A Dialogue of Love (1999), her book on her diagnosis of breast cancer, she writes about one of her conversations with her therapists, where she says “What I am proudest of is having a life where work and love are impossible to tell apart.” That’s an ideal to strive for.
