The reeducation of a queer theorist
Battling cancer, a nice male psychoanalyst and her own sexual demons, the diva of queer theory learned a new way of living.
By Maria Russo
Sept. 27, 1999 | In the 1980s, academia underwent many transformations. Among the most surprising was that literary studies became sexy: Through the lens of high theory, scholars began injecting libido into once dry and staid intellectual realms. It was in these heady, body-fixated years that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick came of age as the queen of queer theory. With her assertions that Henry James' fiction featured crypto-queers who longed to be fisted, or that masturbating girls lurked in Jane Austen's novels, Sedgwick became famous for her scandalous takes on classic literary works.
But in many ways Sedgwick, a soft-spoken, straight, married woman with no propensity for flesh-revealing costumes or public sexual drama, was an unlikely crusader in this intellectual sexual revolution. In fact, she embodied many of the stereotypes that have always shadowed scholars: She was a quiet, eminently bookish person who thrived within the conventional world of academia.
In other ways, however, Sedgwick was also a living example of the paradox that the new theoreticians of sex were grappling with. What was the relationship between life and theory? Were theorists meant to actually represent the ideas they gave voice to, or was this an utterly intellectual undertaking divorced from bodily ramifications? In "Epistemology of the Closet," Sedgwick implied that in some sense she did need to explain how her life informed her ideas. In explanation for the deep identification with gay men that obviously charged her work, she explained that she was a woman, a fat woman, a childless woman with no interest in children, a Jew and "a sexual pervert." The outsider stuff -- woman, overweight, childless, Jewish -- was all well and good, but it was in taking on the mantle of the "sexual pervert" that she aligned herself with gay men most conspicuously. But what exactly did it mean?
Sedgwick's new book, "A Dialogue on Love," further explores the complex relationship between theory and lived experience. The book chronicles the psychotherapy that helped put Sedgwick's emotional life back together after breast cancer and depression. It also reveals that Sedgwick's so-called sexual perversity was a relatively tame beast. She indulged in a private, baroque fantasy life, but flesh-and-blood sexual encounters, she confesses to her therapist, had never held out that much appeal.
"As far as 'having sex' goes, things couldn't possibly be more hygienic or routinized for me," she writes. "When I do it, it's vanilla sex, on a weekly basis, in the missionary position, in daylight, immediately after a shower, with one person of the so-called opposite sex, to whom I've been legally married for almost a quarter of a century."
This is pretty damning stuff from the scholar conservative critics have long painted as a sex-addled mangler of literature. In his jerky article last November in the New Republic, in which he decried "the sexualization of everything" by academics, Lee Siegel railed against Sedgwick as a threat not just to literature but to society itself. "The result of Sedgwick's inestimable influence has been, among her followers -- all of whom are college teachers or will someday be college teachers -- a deadness, not just to beauty and fineness of perception and fragile inner life, but also to human suffering."