Queer “I”

“…(I)t was a queer but long-married young woman whose erotic and intellectual life were fiercely transitive, shaped by a thirst for knowledges and identifications that might cross the barriers of what seemed my identity” (Sedgwick 1993, 256). Sedgwick describes herself in this way in the ’80s. This sentence is a good example of her style in general and I would like to reflect on this for a moment. It is very characteristic of Sedgwick to write in the first person, to talk about herself. Her texts often have a specific, intimate atmosphere. As she admits, she does not engage in building a “strong theory” but instead cultivates “weak theory”.³⁵ Most of her writing might be considered a personal balancing between academic and literary genres in which “queer” appears. “Queer” describes an “I” but, as one can see from the sentence quoted, this “I” is a peculiar one. It is the “I” of the author, Eve, but not the “I” of the narrator. In short, there is a split. By Sedgwick describing herself as “queer”, she avoids the first person form and chooses to say it in the third person form. As a consequence, “queer” is used to tell the story of an “I” which is split or cannot be identified as itself. Perhaps this “I” is in an ambiguous relation to itself and it is clearly not self-identical, because it appears in the gap between the narrator, the author and the subject of writing: Eve from the past, who was a temporal Eve, in contrast to the person who writes the text, Sedgwick, who is differentiated from the Eve of the past. This sentence contains three instances of “I”: the fictional Eve from the past, the narrator, who is a function of the text, and the author, who allows us to read it as Sedgwick’s essay. All these functions are interconnected but split, which is especially evident in the “queer”

identification. Only the fictional Eve from the ’80s is described as “queer”. It is also interesting that in this case, while describing the Eve from the past, Kosofsky uses the indefinite article

35Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Barber, Stephen M., Clark, David L. “This Piercing Bouquet: An Interview with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick”, in Regarding Sedgwick 243-262.

“a”, which might seem to be a mistake, especially in that the Eve from the past had already appeared earlier in the text. It seems that in this context, Sedgwick in general questions the traditional oppositions of literary studies: the fiction - reality, inside - outside of the text. It is therefore not possible to ask what it would mean that “a queer but long-married young woman”

is fictional. The narration situates her as an object, but at the same time, this object is a precondition of the narration because it is the past of the author. Perhaps queer Eve is the narrator’s fantasy that has a transformative potential for the author.

In the context of “queer” the young Eve is a figure of herself. This figuration questions the relation between identity and time. Here the traditional metonymic relationship is displaced.

The most interesting aspect is that this figuration of the author reveals the split in the identity itself. This opens identity up to multiple positionalities. Here “queer” strips away the fiction of unity and coherence from the “I” and reveals it as being vulnerable and capable of suffering and pain, but also open to new meanings. The relation of the author to the figure of a young author is marked by melancholia and a particular kind of idealization. This idealization is a sign of openness and indeterminacy. There is no longing for “queer” by the actual author, but the young Eve is a transformative figure in itself. Interestingly, Sedgwick does not draw from the term “queer” any ideas to come and she does not pre-define “queer” in order to represent her political or theoretical aims.

In Tendencies “queer” is found in an interesting temporal relation. For Sedgwick temporality is crucial to her use of “queer”. For instance, she talks about “queer time” or “queer moments” (this temporal dimension of “queer” is clear in the first chapter of Tendencies). This temporality cannot be mistaken for passive linear history. Barber and Clark write: “If “queer” is temporality, a “moment,” it is also then a force; or rather, it is a crossing temporality with force” (Barber and Clark 2002, 8). What is even more striking is that “queer” is often related to the past. In the sentence that I am analysing this is also the case. Sedgwick does not describe herself at the current moment as “queer”, but she talks about the young woman from the past, as if “queer” would mark some impossible limit for the presence. It is important to note that

“queer” does not appear in any relation to the future in Sedgwick’s writing. It marks the past: a time of crisis and hope, as radically open for interpretation. It is not the future or the current time which is open, but the past. And the past is open to what she refers to as a paranoid and reparative reading.

Finally what is also significant in that sentence is the very literal meaning that it carries.

For Sedgwick, “queer” is placed in a non-exclusionary opposition to marriage. Young queer Eve is transitive in her erotic and intellectual life. She seems to be on the border or between

different identities and knowledges (Sedgwick uses the grammatically incorrect plural form

“knowledges”). This means that “queer” is not in opposition to an identity; on the contrary, it is connected to a multiplicity of identities and their unfixed character. “Queer” neither represents alternative identity, nor the idea that identities do not matter. Instead, “queer” stands for some multiplicity of forms and shapes that life can assume. “Queer” as an adjective shows young Eve as being open to change, not fully formed, possibly in the midst of a crisis, but on the other hand it is a time of hope. Certainly, “queer” is associated with a unique time, a time that has passed and which could exist only fleetingly, only related to the fictional Eve, which is the precondition of the real author, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. As a trope, therefore, “queer”

fictionalizes stories of the past and offers them as ready for reinterpretation.

A particularity of “queer” is that Sedgwick situates it somewhere between fiction, fantasy and reality. In her writing the term functions as a challenge to this opposition between fiction and reality, between literature and politics. In short, fiction is a transformative site of reality. Sedgwick shows us that “I” is made in fiction and as a fiction, therefore it can also be rewritten, transgressed through fiction. She does not link “queer” directly to politics but fiction nevertheless has an immense political potential as it often expresses individual experiences better than theories.

In the sentence quoted Sedgwick does not use “queer” in relation subjectivity in a utopian way. The aim is not to completely deconstruct identity and present it as totally open for any new meaning. “Queer” is attached to the subject that is limited by its painful history but is in the process of redefining its meaning and deconstructing its position and relations. I see the influence of Sedgwick’s conceptualization of “queer” in the work of Elizabeth Freeman, in particular her book Time Binds (2010). Specifically, it is the political aspect of Sedgwick’s usage of “queer” that inspired scholars such as Freeman to theorize the traumas and histories of marginalized people. In relation to “queer”, Freeman turns to the past rather than to utopia. In this context, “queer” helps to rewrite the past. Freeman in the preface to her book mentions Sedgwick a number of times. In the spirit of Sedgwick she claims that queer time is about twisting chronology but, more importantly, it is also about discovering new possibilities in the painful past. Freeman calls it: “the temporal politics of deconstruction” and understands by this

“putting the past into meaningful and transformative relation with the present” (Freeman 2010, xvi). “Queer” functions politically by transforming the way narrations are formed. I suggest that Sedgwick’s connection between “queer” and temporality offers not merely an insight into the formation of narrations, it also reveals the particular character of any narration and its open structure.

Sedgwick does not use “queer” as a term that can describe a social group or movement:

“(T)here are important senses in which “queer” can signify only when attached to the first person” (Sedgwick 1993, 8, italics original). In this way “queer” can destabilize the meaning of established identity concepts, as in their place it offers a fantasmatic self-affiliation. Therefore, according to Sedgwick, “queer” might signify something different each time. The meaning of the term thus changes each time it is attached to a different object. This is the crucial aspect of Sedgwick’s “queer performativity”; when “queer” is used in every speech act, it proves the possibility of not being itself. As Linda Anderson states:

“It [Sedgwick’s strategy to use “queer” in the first person] is first of all a way of dislodging queer from its possible definitional role and putting it to work as a word – an adjective – which actively changes meanings. As performed meaning, Sedgwick argues, queer is always different from itself. (Anderson 2000, 69)