Text taken from the Honoring Eve website.
A day of rich intellectual exchange in honor of the memory of Professor Sedgwick, the “soft-spoken queen of gay studies,” the “‘primum mobile’ of queer theory,” and one of the most gifted writers of our time. Eve taught at Boston University in the early 1980s and there are still many there who remember her from those years. BU hosted many of her old friends and newer fans for a day of remembrance and celebration.
The ID 450 Collective, whose name and genesis was inspired by Eve, began as a study group on published feminist thinking, but when we started writing ourselves-also instigated by Eve-we broadened the subject considerably with our own disparate imaginations and experiences, a project that was simultaneously happening within the feminist movement in the 1980s. But while feminist activists were fighting about differences among us, we were having a lot of fun exploring those differences. When Eve was with us from 1982-84 (plus a bit in 1986-87, 1991, and once in 2008), we staged an all-night meeting discussing our first sexual experience with a human at a Howard Johnson’s motel room in the Fenway; we ordered ID 450 T-shirts and then jackets with “feminist” names such as “Tang” and “Dreamwhip”; we published some of our writings in a lesbian sex magazine called Bad Attitude, which no one mentioned on her vita; we discussed ways to escape binary thinking on Eve’s lawn in Amherst (at Eve’s instigation, of course); we cooked and ate sumptuous meals together. After Eve left the group, we wrote autobiographical fragments about our lives for 6 or 7 years, a rich herstorical record of our shared yet different lived experiences as women. When Eve left this world in April, we wrote memorials to her together and formally sent prayers to her in the Bardo, wishing her no pain, and a safe journey to wherever she is resting and playing now.
Videos from the symposium are available here Proceedings from the symposium will be published in a forthcoming issue of Criticism: Quarterly for the Literary Arts.