Articles

Eve Sedgwick, Civil Rights, and Perversion

Franke, Katherine M.

It is hard to imagine where queer theory would be without Eve Sedgwick. Indeed, I can’t imagine where my own thinking would be had it not been informed, enriched, challenged, repulsed, and seduced by Sedgwick’s writing. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and The Epistemology of the Closet, the early work, gave me the tools to think about the fundamental landscapes of my intellectual world in ways that decoupled and reconfigured the binaries of male/ female, heterosexual/homosexual, friend/lover, and public/private. Sedgwick gave us the idea of homosociality and a critique of identity and identification that exploded the male/female and homo/hetero divide. From that point forward our previous work undertaken without the benefit of these ideas seemed pathetically naive and, well, modernist (not that!) for their absence.

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Title
Harvard Journal of Law and Gender

More About This Work

Academic Units
Law
Publisher
Harvard University, Harvard Law School
Published Here
May 5, 2016