The Queer Faces of Eve

Trauma and autobiographical critics document the necessity of writing—or “witnessing”—one’s life in order to work through it. In her memoir, A Dialogue on Love (1990), the late Eve Sedgwick also underscores the significance of traumatic and autobiographical witnessing, but what precisely does A Dialogue testify to? As Eve’s therapist, Shannon Van Wey, probes: “What’s it all about?” (61). Given that A Dialogue records Sedgwick’s history of breast cancer, her ensuing therapy, mastectomy, and chemotherapy, readers may classify the work alongside Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals or Lucy Grealey’s Autobiography of a Face as a typical illness narrative. Sedgwick’s account differs from these, however, in that, while she acknowledges that her medical diagnosis is her memoir’s “triggering event” (Sedgwick 1999, 3), her disease seems less A Dialogue‘s subject than its pretext. Instead, Sedgwick uses her dialogue to work through her heretofore academic interventions into the field of queer theory. That is, A Dialogue witnesses not only personal illness but queer performativity, particularly in its treatment of intersubjective relationality, hybrid sexuality, and the Japanese mode of haibun.

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ISSN: 2202-2546

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