Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was a bright and beloved academic star who helped bring “queer theory” into the world. Sedgwick’s thoroughly original work put Duke — where she was a professor from 1988 to 1997 — on the map of cutting-edge scholarship in the humanities.
For Sedgwick, queer theory was much more than an academic field devoted to thinking about gay and lesbian sexualities. She made it into an imaginatively expansive, welcoming space where thinking itself can live and thrive and move — lovingly, erotically — across the boundaries of identity and discover an “open mesh of possibilities.”
Sedgwick published “White Glasses” in The Yale Journal of Criticism in 1992, the same year she received the Newman Ivy White Chair in Duke’s English department. Full of sharp formulations, her tone is often warm and her style can be colloquial, even talky.
“White Glasses” was originally intended to be an obituary for her close friend Michael Lynch, a gay activist, writer, poet and teacher from Toronto. Lynch, who was living with AIDS, introduced Sedgwick to the “potent and numinous” scene of gay men’s community. For a while at least, an obituary wasn’t needed: Buoyed by the care of many friends, he started to get better and the essay became, as Sedgwick explains, “an act of homage to a living friend.” But “White Glasses” records other, less auspicious, surprises: While composing the essay, Sedgwick was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Best known for her central place in queer theory, Sedgwick was also a poet, and she brought a poet’s attention to sound, rhythm, repetition and imagery to everything she wrote. “White Glasses” is no exception. It begins with her awe of the stylish white framed glasses Lynch wore. As the essay unfolds, these glasses become not only figures of perception and framing, but testaments to the deeply felt intimacies of their friendship. The glasses are apertures that allow us to see how we compose ourselves by extending our bodies into the lives of others and “wearing” their vision. “When I am with Michael,” Sedgwick writes, “often suddenly it will be as if we were fused together at a distance of half an inch from the eye.”
The beating heart of Sedgwick’s intellectual, political and creative work is a rebellion against fixed definitions of gender and sexuality. As she explains in “White Glasses,” she identified — like Michael Lynch — as a gay man, and they loved each other across the imaginative terrains of lesbian writers Willa Cather and Emily Dickinson. Breast cancer and AIDS underscored the significance of these counter-intuitive rebellions. In one of her many signature and unforgettable insights, Sedgwick reflects on their ethical stakes: “If what is at work here is an identification that falls across gender, it falls no less across sexualities, across ‘perversions.’ And across the ontological crack between the living and the dead.”
When Sedgwick exposes her breast cancer in “White Glasses” it is as though she is talking to us. With a dark, self-deprecating wit, she writes, “One of the first things I felt when I was facing the diagnosis of breast cancer was, ‘shit, now I guess I really must be a woman.’” Echoing Audre Lorde’s “The Cancer Journals” (1980), Sedgwick recoiled against the world of breast cancer treatment, as it relies on and consolidates one definition of woman, limiting her unquestionably to breasts and heterosexual femininity. She recalls a well-meaning social worker telling a support group they could get the images of their bodies back and “feel just as feminine as we ever had and no one (i.e, no man) need ever know that anything had happened.” Sedgwick sees right through these ministrations and identifies the sexist denial of death that animates them: “As if our unceasing function is to present, heterosexually, the spectacle of the place where men may disavow their own mortality and need as well as ours.”
For Sedgwick, this ancient, mythically fixed definition of woman connects to the efforts of breast-cancer activists to place borders around breast cancer activism and resentfully rail against the “supposed riches being poured into AIDS research” and make it an enemy. Such embattled comparisons — identity thinking at its worst — negate the queer transformations of terminal illness and deny, as she puts it, the “mangling differential world of health care under American capitalism” to which we are all subjected.
Sedgwick died in 2009 at the age of 58, almost 20 years after Michael Lynch. Luckily, Duke keeps traces of her life: in the Sedgwick memorial lecture the department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies puts on every year; in her many books published by Duke University Press and those she edited for “Series Q”; and in the archives of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, which lovingly holds the materials of her generous and generative work. Through these holdings, we can see, touch and feel how Sedgwick perceived through the “white glasses” she shared with her beloved Michael.
Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
