“Living with Advanced Cancer”: Life and Death in the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Papers
Contributed by Sam Rutherford, Lecturer in LGBTQ+ History, University of Glasgow; Recipient of an Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Research Travel Grant, 2026–27, supported by the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Foundation.
Box 16, Folder 382 of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s papers contains a printout of an email Sedgwick sent on December 22, 2000 to 35 of her close friends and family. She was writing to share her latest article for MAMM, a magazine for people with breast cancer for which she wrote a regular column for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Titled “Living with Advanced Cancer: Eve’s ABCs,” the column runs through the alphabet: “chemobrain,” “incurable,” “MRI,” “prognosis.” Y stands for “Yes.” Sedgwick writes:
\ The year my cancer metastasis was diagnosed [1996], I’d been spending most of my time with a younger friend with AIDS. He had gotten HIV several years before, and his T-cells were hovering around zero. We had discussed his plans for suicide in case, as he feared, he was starting to suffer from dementia. My diagnosis came at the end of summer. The summer had started with an international AIDS conference in Vancouver where some new treatments were announced as showing a lot of promise. But all of us who had been involved with AIDS, or with communities much affected by it, had been through so many roller-coaster cycles of hope and disappointment that it seemed cruel to even suggest that the course of the disease might be altered—especially in what little remained of my friend’s lifetime.
As that year came to an end, I was struggling to adjust my feelings and ambitions to a radically shortened temporality. Instead of three or four decades ahead of me, I thought I might have three or four years, if I was lucky. The things I’d already learned about cancer treatment—what Dr. Susan Love referred to as the crude techniques of “slash, burn, and poison”—made me feel that whatever other hopes I might have, hoping to survive for more than a handful of years would be blind folly.
As that same year ended, my friend was in a very different place. He, too, was struggling. But his challenge was to begin again, in early adulthood, to imagine a life that might possibly unfold in decades; projects that might mature at their own pace and suggest new projects; relationships that could deepen with experience. I didn’t, at that point, see my own future in what he was going through, but I identified with it because I was so happy for him, and also fascinated by the difficulty and excitement of his task.
As I write this my friend is finishing his first book, the virus at an undetectable level in his blood. And I feel at least that I know what such a revolution of hope might feel like. Even that it may soon happen for us, or be happening around us.
As elsewhere in her published writing, here Sedgwick analogizes her experience of living with cancer to that of those of her loved ones who were gay men living with HIV. While previously Sedgwick had been moved to action around HIV/AIDS by the deaths of her friends Michael Lynch and Gary Fisher, by 2000 identification with an unnamed HIV-positive friend’s experience allowed her to imagine new advances in medical research that might turn metastatic breast cancer, like HIV, into a chronic but manageable condition. It is tragic to read the optimistic conclusion to her column knowing that such advances didn’t, in the end, come for her.
I did not come to Sedgwick’s archive expecting to be so struck by the extent to which cancer patient advocacy featured in both her and Hal Sedgwick’s working lives in the last decade of her life. As a historian and as someone assigned female at birth who, like Sedgwick, understands myself to have an “identity as a gay man” (Tendencies 256), I came to her archive asking what a “transfag” reading of Sedgwick’s life, work, and sense of gendered embodiment would add to our understanding of trans masculinity, male homosexuality, and the history of queer thought. To be sure, I found plenty of smoking guns (shoutout to the teenage Lawrence of Arabia fanfic). But I also became convinced that this kind of symptomatic—we might say paranoid—reading of the archive was insufficient to capture the rich and varied texture of Sedgwick’s life and work. My attention was drawn, instead, to what the archive has to say both about the grinding routine of long-term illness, and about the new genres into which Sedgwick’s cancer advocacy work led her. Since her death, scholars have appreciated her textile arts and her engagement with Buddhism. Less has been said about how, in her writing for MAMM, she adopted the warm, humorous, but gently bracing tone of the advice column; or how she and Hal sought to master the science of breast cancer so that they could participate as patient advocates in the evaluation of research grant applications. Sedgwick listed “cancer advocacy” as a section on a 2007 academic CV (Box 16, Folder 266), indicating how she understood this work in relation to her larger career.
In Sedgwick’s own lifetime, her identification with gay men at times attracted criticism (see e.g. Between Men viii). The analogy she draws between cancer and AIDS might to some ears strike a note of false equivalency, or a perverse desire to get in on the action of gay men’s suffering. But as I learned more about Sedgwick’s patient advocacy work, I found that breast cancer advocacy took shape as a movement in the 1990s directly and materially in conversation with HIV/AIDS advocacy. Breast cancer advocates learned from HIV/AIDS advocates how to read medical papers, to talk to doctors, medical researchers, and policymakers, and to organize themselves into groups that could support each other in doing this work. MAMM, the magazine to which Sedgwick contributed, began life as an offshoot of a magazine for HIV-positive people. These struggles were not opposed, but rather interlinked.
The archival record of Sedgwick’s long illness, and of its impact upon her and those who loved her, is devastating to encounter. At the same time, attending to her cancer advocacy work offers an opportunity for taking seriously her gay male identification, while also integrating it within a complex web of affinities, solidarities, and temporal horizons—the “open mesh of possibilities” (Tendencies 8) that her unique perspective made so central to how we all today theorize gender and sexuality.
\ References
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Duke University Press, 1994).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Columbia University Press, 1985; new preface, 1992)