Caring sideways: Sedgwick's queer siblings and feminism's generational time

Abstract

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.