Customer Reviews

Epistemology of the Closet: Updated with a New Preface

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick'swork is her written style. Jonathan Goldberg, one of her disciples,has paid homage to her "gorgeous" sentences, while Lee Siegel, one of her critics, has described her prose as "weirdly mechanistic." I mention Sedgwick's style at the outset because it is a conspicuous presence throughout her Epistemology of the Closet (1990), a book which has become by now a keystone of queer thinking, authored by the mother of queer theory. It is difficult to grasp Sedgwick's ideas without first coming to terms with the often outrageous way in which these ideas are presented. Her idiom may be said to consist of a psychedelic lexicon ("phosphorescent romantic relations," "a choreography of breathless farce," "astrologically lush plurality of its overlapping taxonomies of physical zones") combined with a syntax that is often tortuous and perplexing. At best such language achieves a strangely kaleidoscopic accuracy of expression; at worst it remains inscrutable or scandalous, or both at once.

On any given page of Epistemology the reader is apt to find at least one fortuitous instance of her prose style and at least several unfavorable instances. Of the latter the following passage may be given as an example. Sedgwick is writing here about Pat Robertson's pronouncement that "AIDS is God's way of weeding his garden":

The saccharine lustre this dictum gives to its vision of devastation, and the ruthless prurience with which it misattributes its own agency, cover a more fundamental contradiction: that, to rationalize complacent glee at a spectacle of what is imagined as genocide, a proto-Darwinian process of natural selection is being invoked - in the context of a Christian fundamentalism that is not only antievolutionist but recklessly oriented toward universal apocalypse.

Not only is this an instance of Sedgwick's prose poetry at its worst; but the poetry here is unnecessary. Robertson's statement is self-evidently egregious; it does not deserve the extravagant analysis that Sedgwick accords it. She might have written more simply: "Robertson's dictum paradoxically invokes the process of natural selection in the context of an antievolutionist Christian fundamentalism. The invocation serves to rationalize the statement's implicit fantasy of gay genocide." Instead, Sedgwick favors a verbosity that causes the reader to expend so much effort in disentangling her prose that little energy is left for assessing the worth of her interpretation.

Unlike her written style, Sedgwick's main thesis is simple enough: "the book will argue that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition." The differentiation between homosexual and heterosexual, in other words, pervades all aspects of twentieth-century Western culture through and through. Needless to say, this is an extreme claim. Most of her evidence resides in turn-of-the-century texts such as Melville's Billy Budd and James's "Beast in the Jungle" - texts saturated, Sedgwick observes, with words like "secret," "exceptional," "obscure," "mysterious," and "queer." She ingeniously describes such words as "representationally vacant, epistemologically arousing": to the extent that they are meaningful, she argues, the meaning is homosexual. Yet too often the marshalling of her evidence consists of merely listing instances of words like "secret" without adequately demonstrating their significance. One of Sedgwick's worst vices more generally as an expositor of ideas is the frequent substitution of catalogue for patient interpretation and analysis (at times her catalogues run the length of miniature paragraphs).

Moreover, her central thesis is questionable. At one point in the book she claims that the phrase "coming out of the closet," even when used in reference to Black people or fat women, maintains its gay specificity. Struggles not involving gay rights, that is to say, are nevertheless "indelibly marked with the historical specificity of homosocial/homosexual definition." I would ask readers to submit Sedgwick's argument to the test of personal experience: is your "coming out of the closet" as, say, a shy person or a person with mental illness "indelibly marked" with the specificity of gay definition?

Ironically, Sedgwick is at her best when digressing from her main topic. At one point she gives a marvelous account of the experience of reading:

The inexplicit compact by which novel-readers voluntarily plunge into worlds that strip them, however temporarily, of the painfully acquired cognitive maps of their ordinary lives (awfulness of going to a party without knowing anyone) on condition of an invisibility that promises cognitive exemption and eventual privilege, creates, especially at the beginning of books, a space of high anxiety and dependence.

This is all unequivocally true and wonderfully put. I only wish Sedgwick could have expanded this brief digression into an essay or even a book of its own.

This scholarly text is the second academic publication by Sedgwick, who has made a name for herself by becoming one of the prominent researchers of 'queer theory'. Sedgwick is a professor of English at Duke University. In this book, she elaborates her focus on the study of male homosexuality in Western texts, and so reads between the lines, as it were, of mainly canonical works by authors such as Melville, Wilde, James and Proust for signs of obscure queer themes and subtexts.

Sedgwick's main argument is as follows: she believes that homosexuality - male and lesbian - tends to be represented in both society and in literature as though it were an unstable, even deviant or perverse alternative to the fixed norm of heterosexuality. Homosexuality is all too often a thing of 'the closet'; it is a secret waiting to come out; it is the 'love that dare not speak its name'. In Sedgwick's preface to this book, she introduces a note of urgent contemporaneity to her writing that continually resurfaces later on. Clearly, Sedgwick perceives an urgent topicality in her subject matter.

This argument is sound. The execution is mostly fine. Occasionally Sedgwick seems to truncate her examination of works as soon as she has provided us with the bare outlines of their queer subtexts. For instance, she tells us that Claggart in Melville's 'Billy Budd' is gay, and that his testimony against the short story's title character contains an array of important, yet pervasively subtle, sexual connotations. Sometimes this approach borders dangerously on dispensing cheap thrills as Sedgwick proceeds to list terms that constitute sexual innuendo. Having done this, she does not try to link other themes in 'Billy Budd' - issues of legality, of social hierarchies and of mutiny - with the theme of homosexuality. Thus she doesn't always carry her analysis far enough. Why is Claggart gay, but not Billy Budd himself, or any of the other sailors aboard the Bellipotent for that matter? Why does Sedgwick make this seemingly petty distinction when the text itself is, as she rightly argues, deliberately secretive to the extent that it is refuses to make such details explicit? Still, this is an admirable and well-intentioned effort to create a foundation for further studies of queer theory. At the same time Sedgwick tries to emphasize the broader social relevance of her concerns. But here's the final catch: her style of writing is so densely compacted, so obfuscatory, so Jamesian in its complex morass of never-ending clauses that it's bound to marginalize a potentially much larger audience than the one it has now. And so this text, which is relevant in one sense, is esoteric in another. Moreover, Sedgwick likes to combine eloquence with banal profanities as freely as she mixes readings of Proust with Willie Nelson. For those who are phased by such language games, this set of reviews is where your intimacy with Sedgwick ends. For those remaining, Sedgwick's writing is a rare treat.

Most surveys of sexual variations seen in the historical context fail to take into account that sexuality has been defined and categorized differently in almost every era and culture. In western cultures, the current sexual categories became defined somewhere between the Civil War and world War I. In other words, there were no homosexuals (in the modern sense) before the Civil War. There were men who loved, and sometimes slept with, other men, but they didn't form a separate category. Social opprobrium was reserved for the practice of sodomy, whether it was practiced between men or men and women. Having sex with other men was simply something that wasn't discussed in public, although it happened all the time.
Ms. Sedgwick has taken on the task of seeking to discover just how it is that we came by our current ideas of sexuality, why, for instance, that we seem to think that everyone is either heterosexual or homosexual, ignoring the reality that according to Kinsey, the vast majority are bisexually attracted, to at least some degree.
She also examines the ways in which the public discussion of sexuality has changed and developed in the critical years between the two wars, using literature of the period for her sources.
She contends, in my opinion successfully, that the gay/straight debate is the key issue for western culture, in terms of defining person-hood. Western culture has become obsessed with sex.
It follows then, that issues of the conflict between the private and public spheres is central to her discussion.
On the minus side, her prose is uneven, sometimes beautiful, sometimes turgid to the point of constipation. Her analyses are uneven, as well. I would have preferred a more thorough analysis of fewer examples, Billy Budd in particular.
Taken on the whole, it's an important work by an important thinker who has added substantially to the discussion of sexuality and gender studies, well worth the effort required to read it with comprehension.

I had taken this book out of the library so many times, I finally decided that it was time to buy it, and I'm so glad I did! I am referring to it constantly throughout my dissertation. Sedgwick was so far ahead in her theorization of the non-reality of the gender binary. For a scholar of performance, and gendered power, this book is the best way of thinking forward that I have yet encountered.

The August 11, 1999 "a reader" comments about Sedgwick's prose is especially valuable. The tendency to "abuse" language, in J. L. Austin's famous phrase, seems pronounced in Francophile and postmodernist writings, as if obscuritanism is a measure of profundity rather than a measure of obscuritanism. Several critics have justly claimed that unintelligibile writing and ideation only expose unintelligibility.

What could have been a provocative inquiry into the uniqueness of each human being (a novel, but now confirmed, fact, originating in Darwinian theory), once again reverts to a series of ideological templates to overlay the diversity of being and experience to "fit" a new paradigm. The dominant template here is the binary homosexual/heterosexual dichotomy, which Sedgwick insists is the prism by which we come to have knowledge of our world (I hope my effort at intelligibility does not misrepresent her views.)

Of course, the use of ideological templates laid over an inquiry is nothing new. Critical theory, Marxist theory, Freudian theory, and now Queer theory are variants of the same methodology. If one accepts the ideological template, then the subsequent examination under that template achieves a knowledge (i.e., epistemology) within the limits of that template, but generates a new conceptual scheme. Ironically, the ostensible purpose of the ideological template is to liberate thought from the status quo by forcing thought through an alternative sieve. The "insight" derived from this process becomes subversive of the status quo, but only to impose an different status quo that is putatively superior to the existent one.

According to psychology and anthropology, humans "by nature" impose categorical thinking on experience in order to "frame the reference" and "give order" to chaotic particularism of individual experience. This notion is no longer controversial, indeed, it is "obvious," with aetiology as far back to Hebraism and Hellenism, differing only in the templates used. So, instead of breaking the mold, the new theorists create new ones. Akin to Kuhn's paradigm shift applied outside science, we are prodded to look anew at the old phenomena.

But one of Darwin's keenest insights is the uniqueness of all living things, despite similarities. Instead of the essentialist thinking we inherited from Greek metaphysics and epistemology, we're told by Darwinians that we must use "population thinking," where "grouping" of things is by common descent, not our morphological, behavioral, or ideological similarities. I suggest this same motif applies to sexual populations, sexual expressions, and sexual orientation. Kinsey and others who have insisted on a continuum of orientation differences along a line between the polarities of opposites is truer to the truth than a "homosexual essence" or "heterosexual essence." The appellation of "gay" and "straight" are nominalist, not essentialist, groupings, where each appellation picks out a wide variety of differences by our conceptual schemes of categorization and understanding of populations, not by any essence. If true, and I believe it is, why revert to binary templates of essences to lay over the variety of differences as if one aspect, however shared, must then define many others as well?

Same-sex and opposite-sex relations are not as "neat and tidy" as theorists want us to believe, nor do they exist only in polarity, but rather along a continuum with yet another point between any other two points. Within different populations one finds vast varieties of sexual orientation and expression, not to mention vast differences in other facets of the human being, that homo- and hetero-sexual appellations conflate. To then use these conflated nominalisms as departure points (i.e., templates) for further inquiry only boxes in the subject further, thus undermining difference itself. Instead of nominalist pluralism one becomes both a reductionist and an essentialist to further categorize what is already tenuous at best. This paradigm shift in turn becomes its own raison d'etre further undermining uniqueness so that a new consensus of a new conceptual scheme can be forged.

Consequently, these projects have their own slippery slopes I'd prefer not to slide into. They all strike me as yet another "ideology" in the service of liberation, subverting one status quo for another, categorizing more categories, until we fit the new paradigm. I think we have had enough experience with this methodology to stop it before it starts.

Indeed, the courage to be authentic suggests the enterprise is not only subversive of the status quo, but subversive of our authenticity as well. Being unique, and therefore different, is both a starting and ending point, not a place to begin new essentialist programs to "fit" yet another putatively "new" conceptual scheme.

Once again Sedgwick provides a brilliant theoretical framework for thinking about contemporary queer identity issues, then trilalizes it by providing reductive and just-plain-unconvincing readings of a series of Western novels and novellas. Her reading of James's "The Beast in the Jungle" is a classic case in point--the idea of preterition as a point of slippage is brilliant, but her reading of the James novella is embarrassing.

And she is one of the worst stylists in academia today.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, is one of the most important persons in queer theory. "Epistemology" is maybe her most well-known book. The books contains several queer readings of literature, but it is the Introduction and the title essay which are most famous. In the "Epistemology of the Closet" article, Sedgwick deconstruct the being in/being out of the closet binarism. She shows how one can never be in the closet - as you can never be sure of who knows, and one can never be out of the closet - as once again, you never know who already knows. Sedgwick shows how so much of the discourse of secrecy in modern Western societies is centered around homosexuality and the closet. She uses the bibical story of Esther and shows how her story is a coming-out story. For those of you celebearing Purim: the Megillah reading will never look the same, once you realize that Esther confessing to Ahesurus she is Jewish, is an act of coming out. This book is indispensable to anyone interested in gay studies/queer theory.

According to the writer Avital Ronell, in his youth Kant wanted to be a poet. Fortunately for us, perhaps, he turned to philosophy instead. Through this turn Kant ended up setting the standard towards which most academics currently strive: a zero-degree style (which Lyotard both attempts to mime and identifies as naive in the preface to The Differend). What this does, essentially, is provide the rather stupid (and perpetually misrecognized) effect that an author is objective, sound, and important. Most of the time, authors are none of these.

People may disagree with me, but I find Sedgwick's style gorgeous and memorable. This may make the book difficult to read, but it also can make it quite a pleasure, and what else could one want from a well-informed, well-argued, politically necessary academic intervention?

For people deterred by Sedgwick's prose, I suggest you go pick up something more simple-minded. Whoever thought that reading a book shouldn't be a challenge? Who actually believes that one shouldn't struggle with difficult and new ideas?

The Epistemology of the Closet is a necessary book. Sedgwick's thoughts on ignorance and power (in response to Foucault's coupling of knowledge/power) are incredible. Her readings of Bowers v. Hardwick, the homosexual panic defense, and figurations of homosexuality are more than insightful: they are powerful critiques and exposes of the way that homophobia operates and is legitimated in contemporary American culture. Please please read this book. Read it twice or three times. Try it again and again. Each time you return, I promise you, you'll be startled by the ideas that come out, and hopefully, they'll mobilize you to do something more with them.

Take it to the next level and keep reading.

Ugh, a tough, tough book to read. I found myself really bogged down by this book and looked more forward just to getting through it than actually getting anything out of it. Sedgewick's style is definately not for me, but if you can get past the thick writing style you may be able to glean some interesting points from it.

Long long ago, when I was a young faglet wandering the halls of my college pursuing truth, beauty, and a lang & lit degree, I ended up in a class with Professor Peters, my favourite teacher in history and a fabulous gay guy. It came time for us to write an essay - I forget whether it was the one about Blanche duBois as a drag portrayal of the author in "A Streetcar Named Desire" or the one about Hyde being the queer half of Jekyll, but at any rate I asked Prof. Peters for help and he directed me to this book. Trusting his judgment, I sat down to read.

Well. I'm sure this book contains many fascinating and provocative things to say, but unfortunately they are buried under prose so thick that one has the sensation of wading through molasses. Note to Dr. Sedgwick: ideas do nobody any good if they are expressed so poorly that nobody can understand them.

"Any book not written for the majority - in number and intelligence - is a stupid book." - Charles Baudelaire