Eve Sedgwick’s Queer Children

This essay looks at Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s contribution to the first issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. I argue that Sedgwick’s piece indexes generational anxieties that have come to characterize queer studies. These anxieties come from an attempt to protect a precarious field and secure it a future, and they can manifest as suspicion or concern over how later generations enter the field. I look elsewhere in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s oeuvre to see how she provides ways to both understand and disrupt this generational logic, and thus open up possibilities for the field and its practitioners.