And here's Eve Sedgwick at a conference on Writing a Feminist Life, when asked about her own writing:

"People you think, you imagine yourself writing for aren't necessarily at all the people who will find something useful in what you do." (1/n) https://twitter.com/pfessenbecker/status/1308828598950940672

"And it's not as though there's academia and then there's the real world. I mean A, academia is real. And B, the people in the real world are quite varied in their interests and their reading habits, and their willingness to deal with what some people find difficult writing."(2)

"It never occurred to me, when I started writing as a critic, to imagine readers who weren't academics, which accounts for some bad writing. But partly it was just a failure of imagination, a very serious one. Partly, it was modesty. And partly it was realism." (3/n)

"Because who does read books on 18th-century gothic novels? But then, what happened to me was that I discovered that, after I started writing about queer stuff, that people who weren't academics were reading it. Which quite surprised me." (4/n)

"Or people who really weren't that educated would tell me that they had struggled through books that I had assumed would presume a good deal of education." (5/n)

"And then when I looked back at the books, often I'm shocked at my habit of using an esoteric word when a more accessible word would do just fine." (6/n)

"Or, at the insider-ness of some of the jokes. So, I think my writing has gotten, those quite arbitrary barriers that I'm much, much less apt to put those up." (7/n)

"On the other hand, for me it seems that there is a texture of productive thinking in writing that doesn't go down that easy. And I don't think of that as really a difference, necessarily a difference between an academic and a non-academic audience." (8/n)

"But more it's a difference between people who like to or want to engage with that in an active way, and others who don't." (9/n)