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"Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and the 'Age of Frankenstein,'" Andrew Parker, Rutgers University

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called “The Age of Frankenstein” the historical period—roughly a century—running from the closing of the English molly houses to the arrest and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. This is, for Sedgwick, the period in which an intense homophobia could exist even without defined homosexual identities. Sedgwick made Frankenstein—the novel, the character—a metonym for the entire era, and used the phrase repeatedly in Epistemology of the Closet and other later works. And yet Sedgwick never wrote more than a few lines about Frankenstein, not even in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, the Yale dissertation that became her first book. Queer theory, in some sense, owes its existence to this tension between the name of an epoch and the absence of a reading. My paper will suggest how and why this may be so while reflecting on some of the factors that, for Sedgwick, made periodization queer.