Epistemology of the Closet notes
Oct. 11th, 2006 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radfrac_archive_fullOh, let's call it something fancy.
Lucky Numbers: Thirteen Preliminary Notes on E. K. Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet
There. Pompous yet disorganized.
As an exercise, I've tried to put all of this in very simple language. If it makes sense, then I've understood the material, or I've at least created a self-consistent delusion about the material. I also want to see whether her ideas still seem important when reduced this way.
Context
In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick is primarily discussing male homoerotic desire in British and American culture and literature around the turn of the last century, and the influence of their ideas about this desire on how sexuality is thought about now.
Terms
Epistemology: the study or theory of the nature and limits of experience, belief, and knowledge.
Closet: the psychological structures of secrecy and confinement that arise from the 'unspeakable' nature of homosexuality in the society.
Taxonomy: A system of classifying a set of related things, as we classify animals by species.*
Analysis
For the purposes of this discussion, let's invent a man of the time and place under discussion, and call him Jack.
1. Sedgwick asserts that no structure of Western culture can be understood without considering how it is altered by the closet.
2. She agrees with Foucault that sexuality has been made central to Jack's understanding of himself, and that sexuality and the metaphor of sexuality have affected or defined most other kinds of interaction.
3. If sexuality is one of Jack's defining metaphors, then the things which define sexuality for him will also define everything that sexuality defines.
4. For example: There is knowledge that is forbidden. The myth of Eden and the eating of the apple is about the discovery of forbidden knowledge.
If sexuality is very important to Jack's society, then he will assume that forbidden knowledge is sexual knowledge.
If the forbidden kind of sexuality is homosexuality, then he will think that secret sexual knowledge is probably homosexual.*
Because of this, any time there is a secret, Jack will tend to assume (consciously or not) that it is a sexual secret and that the sexual secret is a homosexual one. Whenever Jack thinks of homosexuality, he will also think of other things that are secret and forbidden. Whenever he thinks of secret and forbidden things, he will also think of homosexuality. The one will always remind him of the other.
How To Define Sexuality
5. In the nineteenth century, people became very concerned with defining and describing the world in a systematic, scientific way: with creating taxonomies. They made catalogues of sexual deviance. There were many categories of sexual deviance to begin with. (The Masturbator. The Flagellant. The Sadomasochist.)
There are all kinds of ways Jack can think about himself as a sexual being. He can think about what he likes to do (What bit lines up with what other bit?), how he likes to do it (in what position, in what location, at what time of day), where he likes the power to be (dominant or submissive or both or neither), and who he likes to do it with (appearance, age, number of people).
Around the turn of the last century, the gender of Jack's sexual partner became the defining characteristic of his sexual identity, and this is still true for the heirs and victims of his tradition. The first automatic question about someone's sexuality is: Gay or straight? Other aspects, as above, are seen as variations of the two (or sometimes three, if you allow bisexuality in your list). They are not as important as the main category.
Jack thinks of heterosexuality vs. homosexuality as a natural and obvious distinction, but it is neither: it is a historical artefact. Not every culture chooses this way to define and categorize sexuality.
6. So in Western society, the fundamental pair (or as Sedgwick says, dyad) in sexuality is homosexual/heterosexual.
Specifics
7. Sedgwick says that there are two contradictions in the way homosexuality is defined. (It does not have to be defined by these factors, but for Jack, these debates are central and unresolvable.)
She doesn't want us to decide between the two choices, or to figure out a compromise between them. She wants to show us that these conflicts have defined how homosexuality is thought about.
She calls the two conflicts the "minoritizing/universalizing" conflict and the "transitive/separatist" conflict. This is clearly insane. We're going to call them Conflict One and Conflict Two.
8. If Conflict One and Conflict Two define homosexuality in Jack's mind, then they also set boundaries on sexuality as a whole, since the fundamental dyad is homosexual/heterosexual. They also define any other interaction that Jack interprets through sexuality or as having a sexual element, which (See Points 2 and 3) is pretty much everything.
This means that Conflict One and Conflict Two create conflicts for Jack in lots of other social situations where no specific question of sexuality is obvious.
Isn't that cool?
The Homosexual
9. This is not unique to Sedgwick, but it is important. Sedgwick reminds us that "The Homosexual" did not exist as a role in Jack's world before the 19th century. It came into being with all those other categories that were later discarded, like "The Masturbator". Before that, there were certain acts, called sodomy, that were forbidden, but anyone was considered to be at risk for them, and committing sodomy did not mean you were transformed into a new kind of person, from a heterosexual to a homosexual.
10. By the same logic, "The Heterosexual" did not exist before "The Homosexual", and in fact, inventing homosexuality created heterosexuality. Without homosexuality to define itself against, heterosexuality is a meaningless idea.
Again: cool. There was no such thing as a heterosexual before someone thought up the idea of a homosexual. There was no such thing as a normal sexual identity before they made up an abnormal one. (There were sexual behaviours that were thought of as abnormal, but not a class of people who embodied sexual abnormality.)
11. Power struggles happen for control over how reality is defined. If Jack’s reality is defined by the way homosexuality is defined, then the definition of homosexuality is something to fight over. Depending on whether Jack is defined as heterosexual or homosexual, he will also be defined as one or the other of a whole long list of pairs – powerful/powerless, masculine/feminine, normal/abnormal, upright/criminal, and so on.
12. Jack never has complete control over whether he will be defined as homosexual or not, so he is always vulnerable to losing his power and status, his sense of self, or his life to this conflict, no matter how he thinks about himself. It is possible for other people to "know" something about him that he doesn't know about himself.
13. This is because his definition as hetero- or homosexual in society is not created by what he has or hasn’t done. It is defined by how he is perceived; by what side of the dyads he appears to fall on. If he falls afoul of one dyad, he can end up on the "wrong side" of all of them. That is the source of what we call "homosexual panic".
Footnotes
I have located these outside of the cut for those with a footnote fetish.
*I realize I probably don't have to define "taxonomy", but I like the word and wanted an extra chance to caress it with description.
*No, I can't explain why Jack doesn't think the Eden story is Gay. Sedgwick takes certain things as axiomatic.
{rf}
Lucky Numbers: Thirteen Preliminary Notes on E. K. Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet
There. Pompous yet disorganized.
As an exercise, I've tried to put all of this in very simple language. If it makes sense, then I've understood the material, or I've at least created a self-consistent delusion about the material. I also want to see whether her ideas still seem important when reduced this way.
Context
In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick is primarily discussing male homoerotic desire in British and American culture and literature around the turn of the last century, and the influence of their ideas about this desire on how sexuality is thought about now.
Terms
Epistemology: the study or theory of the nature and limits of experience, belief, and knowledge.
Closet: the psychological structures of secrecy and confinement that arise from the 'unspeakable' nature of homosexuality in the society.
Taxonomy: A system of classifying a set of related things, as we classify animals by species.*
Analysis
For the purposes of this discussion, let's invent a man of the time and place under discussion, and call him Jack.
1. Sedgwick asserts that no structure of Western culture can be understood without considering how it is altered by the closet.
2. She agrees with Foucault that sexuality has been made central to Jack's understanding of himself, and that sexuality and the metaphor of sexuality have affected or defined most other kinds of interaction.
3. If sexuality is one of Jack's defining metaphors, then the things which define sexuality for him will also define everything that sexuality defines.
4. For example: There is knowledge that is forbidden. The myth of Eden and the eating of the apple is about the discovery of forbidden knowledge.
If sexuality is very important to Jack's society, then he will assume that forbidden knowledge is sexual knowledge.
If the forbidden kind of sexuality is homosexuality, then he will think that secret sexual knowledge is probably homosexual.*
Because of this, any time there is a secret, Jack will tend to assume (consciously or not) that it is a sexual secret and that the sexual secret is a homosexual one. Whenever Jack thinks of homosexuality, he will also think of other things that are secret and forbidden. Whenever he thinks of secret and forbidden things, he will also think of homosexuality. The one will always remind him of the other.
How To Define Sexuality
5. In the nineteenth century, people became very concerned with defining and describing the world in a systematic, scientific way: with creating taxonomies. They made catalogues of sexual deviance. There were many categories of sexual deviance to begin with. (The Masturbator. The Flagellant. The Sadomasochist.)
There are all kinds of ways Jack can think about himself as a sexual being. He can think about what he likes to do (What bit lines up with what other bit?), how he likes to do it (in what position, in what location, at what time of day), where he likes the power to be (dominant or submissive or both or neither), and who he likes to do it with (appearance, age, number of people).
Around the turn of the last century, the gender of Jack's sexual partner became the defining characteristic of his sexual identity, and this is still true for the heirs and victims of his tradition. The first automatic question about someone's sexuality is: Gay or straight? Other aspects, as above, are seen as variations of the two (or sometimes three, if you allow bisexuality in your list). They are not as important as the main category.
Jack thinks of heterosexuality vs. homosexuality as a natural and obvious distinction, but it is neither: it is a historical artefact. Not every culture chooses this way to define and categorize sexuality.
6. So in Western society, the fundamental pair (or as Sedgwick says, dyad) in sexuality is homosexual/heterosexual.
Specifics
7. Sedgwick says that there are two contradictions in the way homosexuality is defined. (It does not have to be defined by these factors, but for Jack, these debates are central and unresolvable.)
1. Either homosexual definition is the concern of a small minority of people who can be defined as "homosexuals", or it is a constant element of everyone’s self-awareness.
2. Either homosexuality is gender-transitive (it leads people to behave in a cross-gendered way) or it is gender-separatist (it leads people to intensify and collect around gendered behaviours)
She doesn't want us to decide between the two choices, or to figure out a compromise between them. She wants to show us that these conflicts have defined how homosexuality is thought about.
She calls the two conflicts the "minoritizing/universalizing" conflict and the "transitive/separatist" conflict. This is clearly insane. We're going to call them Conflict One and Conflict Two.
8. If Conflict One and Conflict Two define homosexuality in Jack's mind, then they also set boundaries on sexuality as a whole, since the fundamental dyad is homosexual/heterosexual. They also define any other interaction that Jack interprets through sexuality or as having a sexual element, which (See Points 2 and 3) is pretty much everything.
This means that Conflict One and Conflict Two create conflicts for Jack in lots of other social situations where no specific question of sexuality is obvious.
Isn't that cool?
The Homosexual
9. This is not unique to Sedgwick, but it is important. Sedgwick reminds us that "The Homosexual" did not exist as a role in Jack's world before the 19th century. It came into being with all those other categories that were later discarded, like "The Masturbator". Before that, there were certain acts, called sodomy, that were forbidden, but anyone was considered to be at risk for them, and committing sodomy did not mean you were transformed into a new kind of person, from a heterosexual to a homosexual.
10. By the same logic, "The Heterosexual" did not exist before "The Homosexual", and in fact, inventing homosexuality created heterosexuality. Without homosexuality to define itself against, heterosexuality is a meaningless idea.
Again: cool. There was no such thing as a heterosexual before someone thought up the idea of a homosexual. There was no such thing as a normal sexual identity before they made up an abnormal one. (There were sexual behaviours that were thought of as abnormal, but not a class of people who embodied sexual abnormality.)
11. Power struggles happen for control over how reality is defined. If Jack’s reality is defined by the way homosexuality is defined, then the definition of homosexuality is something to fight over. Depending on whether Jack is defined as heterosexual or homosexual, he will also be defined as one or the other of a whole long list of pairs – powerful/powerless, masculine/feminine, normal/abnormal, upright/criminal, and so on.
12. Jack never has complete control over whether he will be defined as homosexual or not, so he is always vulnerable to losing his power and status, his sense of self, or his life to this conflict, no matter how he thinks about himself. It is possible for other people to "know" something about him that he doesn't know about himself.
13. This is because his definition as hetero- or homosexual in society is not created by what he has or hasn’t done. It is defined by how he is perceived; by what side of the dyads he appears to fall on. If he falls afoul of one dyad, he can end up on the "wrong side" of all of them. That is the source of what we call "homosexual panic".
Footnotes
I have located these outside of the cut for those with a footnote fetish.
*I realize I probably don't have to define "taxonomy", but I like the word and wanted an extra chance to caress it with description.
*No, I can't explain why Jack doesn't think the Eden story is Gay. Sedgwick takes certain things as axiomatic.
{rf}
