Caring sideways

Sedgwick's queer siblings and feminism's generational time

Bibliographic Data

ID4367496
AuthorsKimberly K Lamm (0000-0002-5189-8290, Duke University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume26
Issue3
Pages724-747
Publication date2025-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/14647001251330779
OpenAlexW4410805994
LanguageEN
References cited22

This article aims to show how the dominant figures for imagining feminist generations-sisterhood, and its 'parent,' the mother-daughter relationship-limit feminism to the white heterosexual family and the exclusionary violence wielded in its name. While the horizontality of sisterhood has the potential to interrupt the vertical structure of the mother-daughter relationship, it nevertheless keeps feminism beholden to the idea that it is only for women who align with the image propagated by the dominant image of the family and therefore impedes it from becoming a space of identification for people who do not easily identify as women, or those with dissident sexualities that test heterosexual norms. In the hope of imagining alternatives, I turn to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's writing about her queer friendships in which people care for each other across identities, genders, and sexualities, and then link that care to her work's attention to siblings. Drawing on Juliet Mitchell's study Siblings: Sex and Violence , I demonstrate that by engaging with siblings rather than the gender-specificity of sisters, Sedgwick's writing realizes the inherent queerness of siblings and offers a model for undoing the concept metaphors brought to feminism's generational time

Feminism · Human sexuality · Lesbian · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Queer theory · Sociology · Undoing · Gender Roles and Identity Studies · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Psychology