Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

American poet and educator, a creative writer and professor of English at prestigious eastern universities.

Eve Sedgwick's strikingly original work on male homosocial desire has made her one of the founders of gay and lesbian studies in America. She sees her work as "being strongly marked by a queer politics that is at once antiseparatist and antiassimilationist; by a methodology that draws on deconstruction among other techniques, and by writer experimentation." Sedgwick's name has become near synonymous with "queer theory" since the publication of her "Epistemology of the Closet," 1990. This witty, empathetic and often-dense book draws on classic texts of Western European and North American writers -- including Herman Melville, Henry James, Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde - to delineate a modern history in which sexual identity became as important to a sense of self as one's gender identity. "Epistemology" examines and analyzes how the categories of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" continue to shape modern outlooks, particularly through the ways they are encoded in literary texts.

Sedgwick's quick draw critics have, however, characterized her founding work in Queer Studies as therapy-in-writing via a self-indulgent area of research in which academics typically revel in their unhappy childhoods and personal sexual histories. The funky and provocative titles of some of Sedgwick's essays (e.g., "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay," and "Is the Rectum Straight?: Identification and Identity in The Wings of the Dove"), provide plenty of fuel for their fire.

Eve Kosofsky's father was an engineer and her mother was a high school teacher. Pale and fat, she felt vastly different to her darkly handsome family. Academic life provided an intellectual escape where she would also develop her intense identification with gay men through close friendships in order to be accepted "as an essential, central member of a queer family.