LGBT-affirmative scholar and feminist academic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has died aged 58. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1950-2009 Sedgwick is best remembered for her Epistemology of the Closet (1990). As a member of the English Department at Duke University, she was an incisive critic of how homophobia operated to create fissures, discontinuities and hidden textual spaces where gay readings could be accomplished within modern classics. She explained 'queer theory' to the New York Times in 1998: "It's about trying to understand different kinds of sexual desire and how the culture defines them. "You can't understand relations between men and women unless you understand the relationship between people of the same gender, including the possibility of a sexual relationship between them." Sedgwick also cared deeply for the lives of gay men lost to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, including at least one of her own students. She battled breast cancer for seventeen years before her death earlier this week in New York.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News Staff
First published: Thursday, 16th April 2009 - 10:06am