Difference between revisions of "Homosexual Closet"

Revision as of 18:15, 19 April 2010

...the subjectivity of this experience is work in progress... ~ <3 Nooney

Sedgwick Notes

“a hypothesis about the centrality of this nominally marginal, conceptually intractable set of definitional issues to the important knowledges and understandings of twentieth-century Western culture” (Sedgwick 2)

“An assumption underlying the book is that the relations of the closet—the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit around homo/heterosexual definition—have the potential fir being peculiarly revealing, in fact, about speech acts more generally” (3).

“In the vicinity of the closet, even what counts as a speech act is problematized on a perfectly routine basis” (3). She cites Foucault “there is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say […] There is not one but many silences.”

“'Closetedness' itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence—not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relations to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it. The speech acts that coming out, in turn, can comprise are as strangely specific” (Sedgwick 3).

“the pretense of ignorance (one meaning, the Capital one, of the word 'stonewall') can sometimes be enough to enforce discursive power” (Sedgwick 6).

“there is a satisfaction in dwelling on the degree to which the power of our enemies over us is implicated, not in their command of knowledge, but precisely in their ignorance” (Sedgwick 7).

“Perhaps there exists a plethora of ignorances, and we may begin to ask questions about labor, erotics, and economics of their human production and distribution” (8).

“It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of 'sexual orientation'” (8). If the homosexual is now a species, not longer practicing silence, no longer bound to the speech act of “coming out” but rather bound to the speech act of “I do”, does the death of the closet signal the re-investment in one species, homohetero (ack, is there something about sinthomosexuality here? Edelman...)?

“The reign of telling the secret was scarcely overturned at Stonewall. Quite the opposite, in some ways. To the fine antennae of public attention the freshness of every drama of (especially involuntary) gay uncovering seems if anything heightened in surprise and delectability, rather than staled, by the increasingly intense atmosphere of public articulations of and about the love that is famous for daring not speak its name” (Sedgwick 67). The oppositions of private/public, inside/outside do not destabilize when one “comes out”; rather, it attests to their “fantasmatic recovery” (Miller, qtd. in Sedgwick 67).

Gay life, for Sedgwick is a constant navigation of silences, ignorances, and suggestions, as one engages in the risky gamble of who knows what. “The gay closet is not a feature only of the live of gay people. But for many gay people it is still the fundamental feature of social life; and there can be few gay people, however courageous and forthright by habit, however fortunate in the supports of their immediate communities, in whose lives the closet is not still a shaping presence” (68).

“[...] a lot of the energy of attention and demarcation that has swirled around issues of homosexuality since the end of the nineteenth century, in Europe and the United States, has been impelled by the distinctively indicative relation of homosexuality to wider mappings of secrecy and disclosure, and of the private and the public” (71).

“The closet is the defining structure for gay oppression in this century […] the image of coming out regularly interfaces the image of the closet, and its seeming unambivalent public siting can be counterposed as a salvational epistemologic certainty against the very equivocal privacy afforded by the closet” (71).

re-read 73-74