In Memoriam | Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1950-2009

Words are too often insufficient. And yet there is something about Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's words that have always felt like everything: like a poem being written, like desire finding a new language, like reading repaired.

We each had various relationships with Sedgwick and her work. Some of us were fortunate enough to meet and study with her. Others of us admired her from afar through the pages of books, or from conference audiences. All of us were blessed to benefit spiritually from what she wrought, not just what she wrote--especially through our many mentors and friends who flourished in her care, and in turn nurtured our languages of desire, our faith in an intellectual universe in which one can lead with generosity rather than paranoia.

In the preface to Between Men she reflects about "the young author of the book" and the intimate configurations she, and other queers, improvise through shared provincial desires and textual imaginaries. This incidental passage, at first glance, seems like an homage to the metropolitan, and yet becomes a sweet tribute to the provincial within. It continues to be a keynote, a touchstone for what we do or at least dream of doing here and beyond. We echo those words below with loss in our hearts, and share them with each of you who, in your own way, belong in "the site of that second and belated life, those newly constituted and denaturalized ‘families.’"

And finally, we seek solace in the elegant heartsong of Fred Astaire, whispering this truth in our goodbye: "The way you changed my life...they can't take that away from me." - (KT for ALOTR)

“That there was something (in this sense) irrepressibly provincial about the young author of this book is manifest. But will it make sense if I describe that provinciality not as a measure of her distance from the scenes of gay male creativity, whose utopian invocation tacitly motivates the book, but also a ground of her passionate, queer, and fairly uncanny identification with it? The more than Balzacian founding narrative of a certain modern identity for Euro-American gay men, after all, vibrates along a chord that stretches from provincial origins to metropolitan destinies. As each individual story begins in the isolation of queer childhood, we must compulsorily and excruciatingly misrecognize ourselves in the available mirror of the atomized, procreative, so-called heterosexual pre-or-ex-urban nuclear family of origin, whose bruisingly inappropriate interpellations may wound us–those of us lucky enough to survive them–into life, life of a different kind. The site of that second and belated life, those newly constituted and denaturalized ‘families,’ those tardy, wondering chances at transformed and transforming self-and other-recognition, is the metropolis. But a metropolis continually recruited and reconstituted by having folded into it the incredulous energies of the provincial. Or–I might better say–the provincial energies of incredulity itself” (ix).

They Can't Take That Away...



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