Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an academic specializing in the fields of gender studies and queer theory. Her best known works include Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire and Epistemology of the Closet. She died in 2009.
 

"It seems to me that an often quiet, but often palpable presiding image here... is the interpretive absorption of the child or adolescent whose sense of personal queerness may or may not (yet?) have resolved... Such a child — if she reads at all — is reading for important news about herself, without knowing what form that news will take; with only the patchiest familiarity with its codes; without, even, more than hungrily hypothesizing to what questions this news may proffer an answer."

– Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction