Since the late 1980s queer studies & theory have become vital to the intellectual & political life of the United States This has been due in no small degree to the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critically acclaimed " Epistemology of the Closet" Working from classic texts of European & American writers
- including Melville James Nietzsche Proust & Wilde -Sedgwick analyzes a turn-of-the-century historical moment in which sexual orientation became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries In her preface to this updated edition Sedgwick places the book both personally & historically looking specifically at the horror of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic & its influence on the text