Abstract
problem could be overdetermination: there are so many things I might mean. Insofar as Sedgwick helped to launch queer literary studies, she played a significant role in allowing me to have a job that I could tolerate in academia, or even in a profession at all; along with a handful of others, she helped to make it possible for me to live a queer life that I could never have imagined. In addition to this most direct sense in which I have been enabled, there is also the fact that Sedgwick in her work explicitly sought to clear intellectual and affective space for others—to grant permission. She really knew how to reach out and touch someone. Reading her work tends to open unexpected conceptual possibilities, ways of thinking, ges tures, and tones. I think this sense of opening or enlargement is what Ju dith Butler has in mind when she observes that an encounter with
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