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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.)
He’s self-conscious that he’s acting badly, but he argues that he should be allowed to “reduce human beings to caricatures.” After all, Sedgwick examined how Proust’s fiction was concerned with hidden gay and Jewish identities, so she believed in the importance of “human types.” Sedgwick furthermore wanted “wild expansion” of gender and sexuality labels. Smith, while acknowledging that we suffer from the “rigidity” of these many subcategories, admits that they enable us to “find our people.”
His position is that people should boldly label each other and expect less right to label themselves. “Self-categorization,” he says, “has become both a wearying imperative and a perverse parody of self-knowledge.” He adds: “Freud and Marx, too, warn us that people hardly do anything but misunderstand themselves.” OK, labels can be a parody of self-knowledge; fair enough; I’ll grant him that observation; labels are socially necessary yet aren’t keys to esoteric secrets. So…
