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Epistemology of the Closet (Centennial Books)
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Epistemology of the Closet (Centennial Books) description
Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual life of the U.S. This has been, to no small degree, due to the popularity of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critically acclaimed Epistemology of the Closet. Working from classic texts of European and American writers--including Herman Melville, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde--Sedgwick delineates a historical moment in which sexual identity became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries. Sedgwick's literary analysis, while provocative and often startling (you will never read Billy Budd or The Picture of Dorian Gray the same way again), is simply the basis for a larger project of examining and analyzing how the categories of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" continue to shape almost all aspects of contemporary thought. Epistemology of the Closet is a sometimes-dense work, but one filled with wit and empathy. Sedgwick writes with great intelligence and an eye for irony, but always makes clear that her theories and critical acumen are in the service of a politic that seeks to make the world a better and more humane place for everyone. An extraordinary book that reshapes how we think about literature, sexuality, and everyday life. --Michael Bronski |
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Epistemology of the Closet (Centennial Books) Customer Reviews
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The "Problem" with Conceptual Schemes, New and Old
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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. |
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