Saying ‘Cleareyed’ When You Mean ‘Exclusionary’
The latest transphobic article in ‘Tablet’
Of all the things I thought I might read about Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009), a queer theory pioneer whose writings I discussed years ago in a Jewish study group, this wasn’t one of them: a 2023 description of her as having exemplified a type of “stereotypically nerdy, mousy, and frumpy sweater-wearing” woman who’s inclined to “read and often write about gay men and gay sex, in an intellectualized fantasy through which they escape their own sexuality.”
Blake Smith said this in a new article in the Jewish culture magazine Tablet. His long essay is headlined “Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Big Fat Nonbinary Mistake” (January 12, 2023).
Toward Sedgwick, he says he feels “gratitude” but also “revulsion against what I can’t help but recognize as her cringe-inducing type” because she is “a fat straight woman” who wrote about “the miserable paucity of her sexual relations” while also writing about gay male sexuality. He suggests he wouldn’t have allowed her to sit with him in his high school cafeteria had he known her then. (If I were awarding points for honesty about how he would have behaved in high school, perhaps I’d give him one, but I am not awarding any such points right now. I am just staring at his bad behavior.)
