Eve Sedgwick

Eve Sedgwick passed away on Sunday after battling metastatic breast cancer for several years. Though my connection to her did not extend beyond class discussions of her work or a few citations of her theories of gender and identity politics, I was very saddened to learn about her death. She was 58 (she had been diagnosed in the early 90s).

Eve contributed here and there to a well established discussion thread for women with metastatic cancer. I had been following this discussion for a few years after a close family member died of the disease, and I remember seeing Eve's name pop up and thinking, "The Eve Sedgwick? No way!" But sure enough, it was her; a theorist/woman/patient suddenly made more real and unsettlingly vulnerable.

I never knew Sedgwick personally, but somehow her precence on bcmets made her so much more real to me than the pages of brilliant theory I had buried myself in as a graduate student. She was humble, kind, and encouraging in her comments to the other women on the list, and unless one already knew who she was, they would have never known that this prolific woman had written numerous well respected texts.