Remembering Eve Sedgwick

The death of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in April 2009 reminded me of how significant Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Columbia UP, 1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (U of California P, 1990) were in establishing the exciting potential of “queer” reading during the 1990s. Sedgwick also helped to revitalize that interstitial literary era, the fin de siècle, then rather uncertainly located between the Victorian and the Modern. While Judith Butler probably traveled further because she offered an abstract theory suitable for processing a wide array of texts, Sedgwick was always interested in the concrete, local, and difficult experience of reading specific texts in their detailed historical contexts. There is much in Sedgwick’s work from which sf studies could still learn