Sedgwick in her Epistemology of the Closet, claims that “many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structures—indeed, fractured—by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” (Sedgwick 2008, 1). Sedgwick argues that it is a crisis “indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century” (1).The author says that “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” (1). Sedgwick is aligning with some of the arguments that Butler also addresses in her work, she is tackling the constraints of binaries and the rigidity they imply. Sedgwick abounds in that statement saying that “the appropriate place for the critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modern gay and antihomophobic theory” (1). The epistemology of the closet is the:

[i]dea that thought itself is structured by homosexual/heterosexual definitions, which damages our ability to think. The homo/hetero binary is a trope for knowledge itself. […] 20th century thought and knowledge is structured–indeed, fractured–by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition which has roots in the end of the 19th century[…] Any analysis or understanding of any aspect of Western culture is incomplete and degraded if it does not