Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Axiom 1: People are different from each other
It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact. A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions. They, with the associated demonstrations of the mechanisms by which they are constructed and reproduced, are indispensable, and they may indeed override all or some other forms of difference and similarity. But the sister or brother, the best friend, the classmate, the parent, the child, the lover, the ex-: our families, lovers, and enmities alike, not to mention the strange relations of our work, play, and activism, prove that even people who share all or most of our own positionings along these crude axes may still be different enough from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species.

There's an old joke about academia, that the fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so small. Which is, of course, totally true. But Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who passed away this weekend, was the rare critic who made the stakes much larger. I honestly can think of few other academics I have admired more. In my head I have an approximately 20,000 word-long blog post about how much her work and career means to me, but I think I'll stop here, leaving you with the first axiom from her epochal 1990 book Epistemology of the Closet. Roxie's World has a good roundup of memorials.