Alan Sinfield (1941-2017)

The celebrated queer theorist and literary scholar, Alan Sinfield, died on 2 December 2017, aged seventy-five. From his early adulthood it was clear that Alan’s dynamic intellectual presence would leave its mark both within and well outside academia. His rebellious curiosity and innovative imagination were honed from childhood by his distinct educational ascent as a beneficiary of rapidly expanding postwar welfarism. Alan was born in Southgate, north London, on 17 December 1941, to Lucy (née Seabright), a cafe assistant, and Ernie Sinfield, an insurance salesman who was killed in military action flying over Norway less than three years later. Widowed in her early thirties and already pregnant with Alan’s younger brother Mark, Lucy faced the further blow of early-onset Parkinson’s disease, diagnosed soon after Ernie’s death. British welfare support proved hugely enabling for Alan, but the widow’s pension she received was never sufficient to lift his mother out of hardship. Her husband died serving his country, yet the double jeopardy of widowhood and disease ‘moved Lucy, decisively, to the bottom of the pile’, which meant, as Alan later recalled, ‘that her social life shrank almost to nothing’. The 1950s was not a good time to be a single mother, nor indeed, as Alan would quickly learn for himself, to depart from conformity in any way at all, however inadvertently: ‘My sense of anger at the injustice in the world is undoubtedly linked with the distresses of Lucy’s life’. Indeed, the indignities and impoverishment of Lucy’s life, as Alan wrote in middle age, helped to shape his life-long commitment to all who are similarly disadvantaged: ‘the elderly, infirm, unemployed, black, queer, lone parents, and more’.1

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• Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain

  Alan Sinfield•Literature, Politics and Culture…•2007

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• On Sexuality and Power

  Alan Sinfield•On Sexuality and Power (Between…•2004

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