Eve Sedgwick, Civil Rights, and Perversion

Abstract

It is hard to imagine where queer theory would be without Eve Sedgwick. Indeed, I can’t imagine where my own thinking would be had it not been informed, enriched, challenged, repulsed, and seduced by Sedgwick’s writing. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire1 and The Epistemology of the Closet,2 the early work, gave me the tools to think about the fundamental landscapes of my intellectual world in ways that decoupled and reconfigured the binaries of male/ female, heterosexual/homosexual, friend/lover, and public/private. Sedgwick gave us the idea of homosociality and a critique of identity and identification that exploded the male/female and homo/hetero divide. From that point forward our previous work undertaken without the benefit of these ideas seemed pathetically naive and, well, modernist (not that!) for their absence. Stopping myself from lapsing into the bromides of hagiography, I’ll resist elaborating further on the debt I owe to Eve Sedgwick’s intellectual estate, except to offer some thoughts on her short essay, A Poem is Being Written,3 when held up against Freud’s important tract on female psychic development, A Child Is Being Beaten.4 As a lawyer and law professor, I must confess great delight in returning to Freud’s A Child Is Being Beaten, even though it is a la mode to mock Freud’s rigid, structural approach to psychic development in which the father figures, somehow inevitably, as the hero in every story. In so many familiar ways, A Child Is Being Beaten reads like a legal text. Its rigid formalism, its three-part structure, and its master narrative in which law—the law of the father, which produces the Oedipal complex—is used to explain and give order to the problem at hand. This approach struck me as a kind of adjudication of female disorder that is methodologically familiar turf to a lawyer. Freud’s essay recounts the diagnosis and treatment of a female patient who suffers from sexual neurosis, which he traces back to childhood sexual