Introduction

This special issue grew out of the event “Honoring Eve: A Symposium Celebrating the Work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,” which was held on 31 October 2009 at Boston University (BU), about six months after Sedgwick passed away on 12 April. More than two hundred people came to the symposium from all over the United States and as far away as Spain and Israel. They were not just academics, but artists, musicians, writers, and many others who had been touched by Sedgwick’s work. Within BU, faculty members from across the university prepared for the symposium by assigning Sedgwick’s work in courses whose diversity testifies to the breadth of her influence: from “Family Trouble: Contesting Kinship in Theory and Literature” to “Japanese Popular Culture” to “Buddhism in America” and the “New Testament Seminar on Gender and Christian Origins.” In honor of Sedgwick’s commitment to pedagogy and activism, in the week before the event we also held two workshops at which faculty members and one hundred undergraduates gathered to discuss her essay “How to Bring Your Kids up Gay.” Although this essay was written before many of these students were born, Sedgwick’s fiery insistence that the existence of gay people be understood not just as a fact to be tolerated but as a “positive desideratum, a needed condition of life”¹ remains just as powerful as when she wrote it in 1991.

The day itself began with introductory remarks by Hal Sedgwick (included here) in which he recalled their time in Boston when Eve taught at BU from 1981 to 1983. The symposium itself included four panels at which speakers were asked to address specific texts by Sedgwick that were chosen to represent the depth and breadth of her intellectual legacy in four areas: “Feminism and Queer Theory,” “Writing and Illness,” “Affect and Reparative Reading,” and “Reading Proust.” The essays in this issue are revised and, in some cases, expanded versions of the papers from these panels. The relevant Sedgwick texts were made available to the BU community on the symposium website, and participants were encouraged to read or reread them in advance. This helped focus discussions on Sedgwick and her work both during the panels and the breaks as the notes of her inimitable prose rang fresh in everyone’s heads. The speakers stood in various degrees of intellectual and personal proximity to Eve: some were her peers, some her students, many were close friends, while others knew her primarily through her writing. Those who knew Eve personally knew her from various points in her life—some from her days at BU, some from her time at Duke, and some from her years at the CUNY Graduate Center. The result was quite a multifaceted picture of Eve, combining rigorous intellectual engagement with her work with personal anecdotes of her as teacher, reader, mentor, and friend.

Figure 1.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, September 2008. Rubin Museum of Art, New York City. Photograph by H. A. Sedgwick.

Many people commented during the day and after on how different “Honoring Eve” was from the typical academic symposium. There was no posturing and no posing, and the discussions were satisfying both on an intellectual and an emotional level. Some said that it felt like a cross between a wake and a conference. Although many participants knew each other already, most were strangers to one another, and most had known Sedgwick only through her writing. But, perhaps because it was Eve who brought us all together, there was a sense of intimacy and connection in the room that, we like to think, would have made her very happy.

The texts around which the symposium was organized come from different moments in Sedgwick’s thinking, yet they all display her characteristic commitment to recognizing, honoring, and creating deep engagements and connections, both to texts and to people, engagements and connections that do not fit into our most told narratives or that partly fit but end up depleted by being squeezed into those narratives. Given this commitment, it seems apt that organizing this event...