Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950—2009) American literary critic and auteur theory. In a trilogy of books published over a decade beginning in the mid-1980s, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), and Tendencies (1993), Sedgwick mapped out the coordinates for what would subsequently become the field of queer theory. Between Men popularized the term ‘homosocial’, a term that was scarcely used in public discourse at that time, as a way of talking about close male relationships in the work of canonical English male authors such as Dickens and Shakespeare that are homosexual in everything but name. Epistemology of the Closet extended this line of thought by arguing that western literature cannot be understood unless that which it seeks to exclude from view and discussion is recognized to be an ineradicable feature of the landscape. Sedgwick opens the book with a bold set of seven axioms that have become cornerstones for queer theory today: (1) people are different from each other; (2) the study of sex is not co-extensive with the study of gender and anti-homophobic inquiry is not coextensive with feminist inquiry; (3) we can determine in an a priori way the degree to which it makes sense (or does not) to think about gay and lesbian identities together or separately; (4) nature versus nurture debates take place against a highly unstable background of fantasies about what nature and nurture mean; (5) the search for an historical ‘paradigm shift’ in the treatment of homosexuality may obscure our understanding of the present reality; (6) the relation between gay studies and literary studies is tortuous; (7) the paths of both allo-identification and auto-identification are likely to be strange and different. Tendencies focuses on the structural incoherence in commonsense understandings of homosexuality. Sedgwick was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1991. She wrote about the disease and the way it affected how she thought and felt about life in A Dialogue of Love (1999).