eve

Last week Eve Sedgwick died. This is part of the the NYT obit:

Ms. Sedgwick broke new ground when, drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault, she began teasing out the hidden socio-sexual subplots in writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James. In a 1983 essay on Dickens’s novel “Our Mutual Friend,” she drew attention to the homoerotic element in the obsessive relationship between Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone, rivals for the love of Lizzie Hexam but emotionally most fully engaged when facing off against each other.
... her best-known work, “Epistemology of the Closet” (1990), which argued that Western culture could be understood only by critically dissecting the socially constructed concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality.

In an interview she was asked about feminism: "When you were younger, were you interested in feminist theory? "

In graduate school there was no feminism; I was at Yale, feminism wasn't done. But when I was writing Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, that was very clearly to me an intervention in feminist theory, or in feminist thought, because at that time there was so little of it that you couldn't even distinguish between feminist theory and other kinds of feminist stuff.

This was a comment left about her death:

This is a stunning, saddening loss. Anyone who's ever read her words know what a gift she gave us all--the gift of seeing old things through new eyes, and opening new horizons and vistas to understanding. We will all miss her.