Analysis Of Sedgwick's Epistemology Of The Closet

Coming to the idea of Sedgwick

Sedgwick was considered as one of the most influential and groundbreaking queer theorists. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her book Epistemology of the closet is one the key text in queer theory. Generally, the epistemology of the closet is the idea that thought itself is structured by homosexual/heterosexual definition, which damages our ability to think. The homo/hetero binary is a top for knowledge itself. Sedgwick says that study of sex and gender are not parallel, sex is chromosomal and gender is constructed. Gender is definitionally built into homosexuality, but sexuality represents beyond gender and reproduction. Gender always reveals the preference to heterosexual because the social institution makes gender

The sexual and cultural practice of gay and lesbian were associated with secret knowledge and codes. Discussed in Eve Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the closet( ) The gradually reifying effect of this refusal meant that by the end of the nineteenth century, when it had become fully current – as obvious to Queen Victoria as to Freud – that knowledge meant sexual knowledge, and secrets sexual, there had in fact developed one particular sexuality that was distinctively constituted as secrecy: the perfect object for the by now insatiably exacerbated epistemological/sexual anxiety of the turn-of-the-century subject (Sedgwick 1990: 73).

Sedgwick also argues that there were a lot of argument and discussion were done on Homosexuality since the end of the 19th century in Europe. Homosexual was pictured as secret and isolated from public and private. Homosexual identities are a stick in textual construction which shape in discourse, without the discourse which constructs the identity seems to be no agency. In some of the works, sexual identities are the textual construction which shapes in

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 support of their immediate communities, in whose lives the closet is not still a shaping presence (Sedgwick 1990: 68).

Homosociality

With the publication of Between Men (1985), Sedgwick analyses the relations between different types of desire, social bond, power relation and intimate relation between men.

To draw the “homosocial” back into the orbit of “desire,” of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokeness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual – a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted. (Sedgwick, 1985, pp.