Further Regarding Sedgwick

Sorry for the light posting, kids. We are in rest and catch up mode, following the hugely successful Homopalooza held over at Queer the Turtle U this past weekend. The papers were top-notch, the discussions lively, the weather glorious, and the artichoke dip sublime. Both moms felt it was poignant and powerful to be gathered with a group of queer studies scholars just a few days after the death of one of the field's founding figures, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. For some in attendance, Sedgwick's passing was a devastating and deeply personal loss. For others, it was less personal but nonetheless profound. In some ways, the conference felt like the first tentative steps, on a local level, toward the fulfillment of a wish Sedgwick herself expressed in 1993, apropos of her use of the first-person singular:

"I have an intense wish to be assured that the people and communities I'm leaving behind can take care of themselves -- that they don't need 'me,' my thought, my labor of regenerating a first person to keep them going."

(Photo Credit: Carrie Boretz, New York Times)

Meanwhile, the tributes and stock-takings continue to roll in.

• The best thing we've seen so far is this marvelous piece by NYU's Ann Pellegrini, just published in The Chronicle of Higher Ed (subscription-access only, sorry). Pellegrini does a beautiful job of capturing what she describes as Sedgwick's "luminous, path-clearing, and sometimes wickedly playful role in the imagination and formation of lesbian and gay studies."
• Our buddy Katherine Franke was in Marrakech when Sedgwick died and muses eloquently, on Columbia's Gender and Sexuality Law blog, on how Sedgwick's relentless problematizations of the homo-hetero binary help to explain the lavish public displays of homosociality she observed in North Africa.
• Here's an interesting bit by David Shankbone, the photographer who took the Wikipedia photo of Sedgwick that we and a lot of other folks have used in writings since her death. Of the shot of a relaxed, grinning Sedgwick, with a photo of the Dalai Lama over her shoulder, Shankbone remarks: "I took perhaps 30 portrait shots of Sedgwick, but the one [that has been so widely circulated] I felt best captured her essence. She was concerned that photographs of her tended to be in the extremes: a deathly serious face, or she was uproariously laughing. She wanted something to capture several aspects of her spirit, and the smirk you see [in that photo] I think did it." We agree, except that we'd call it a grin rather than a smirk. George Bush smirked. Eve Sedgwick emphatically did not.
• Oh, and NYT did better in its second attempt at explaining the Cosmic Cultural Significance of Sedgwick than it did in its obituary. Read this, and see if you agree.
• Tenured Radical has a thing or two to say about Sedgwick's importance to historians in a piece that linked back to Roxie's World. Many thanks, TR -- A few more shout-outs, and we may forgive your inexplicable devotion to a breed other than the Wire Fox Terrier.

That's all for now, kids. My typist has to get ready to teach tomorrow. (Insert eye-rolling icon here.) Peace out.