Universalizing and broadened queerness

Sedgwick’s idea of the universalizing view of sexuality reminds me of Cohen’s claim that we need “a broadened understand of queerness…based on an intersectional analysis that recognizes how numerous systems of oppression interact to regulate and police the lives of most people” (Cohen, 2007, p.26). It makes sense that for many the idea that sexuality is unpredictable, unstable, or fluid would be scary, of course if this were not the case we would not live in a heteropatriarchy. Yet, if we are to get past this fear the idea of the universalizing sexuality could be very helpful for social justice movements. Especially if we were to take some of the points Sedgwick explores in the Epistemology of the Closet and combined them with Cohen’s application of queerness to intersectionality and systems of oppression and privilege.

            I’m definitely on board with the limitations of a binary view of sexuality. Sexuality is simply to complex to be set within a binary, not to mention the effects a binary system has on those that fall within the “subordinated” term homosexual (p.10). In fact, I think it may be good to do a close reading on Sedgwicks’s description of one of the main arguments of her book. She states that “heterosexual/homosexual…actually subsist in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but subordinated to term A.” So in this instance homosexual [term B] as part of the binary of sexuality is not balanced or an interchangeable term for heterosexuality, because homosexuality is seen as less than or secondary to heterosexuality, and this is because the relationship between the two terms while not expressed explicitly are actively changing. She then goes on to state: “second, the ontologically valorized term A actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous submission and exclusion of term B” (p.10). Here heterosexuality is specifically named as a term of value, and status, as a commodity that was brought to existence through the coinage of the term homosexual. Without the term homosexual, heterosexual would mean nothing, yet at the same time the term heterosexual depends not only on the term homosexual from being seen as inferior or lesser than but it also depends on homosexual as a term becoming external, separate, and apart from the essence of heterosexual. Lastly, Segwick states that “third, the question of priority between the supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is irresolvably unstable, an instability caused by the fact that term B is constituted as at once internal and external to term A.” Here we see the debate between which word has the right to precede or come before the other word in terms of rank or privilege is impossible to resolve because the words themselves are not fixed to be broken down into steady parts that can be knowable. They are unsteady precisely because homosexual is apart of heterosexual but at the same time it is outside, external and excluded to heterosexual.

Visually, when I think about this concept I picture the word heterosexual sitting large and proud on the page with a large backslash between itself and the smaller homosexual, so that it doesn’t have to see and can exclude homosexual from it’s presence. Yet unbeknownst to heterosexual its own shadow gives it away as being connected to but removed from homosexual. Homosexual is there but also not there, and this connection that it can’t quite ever shake off is what will cause heterosexual to crumble one day. 

This is a perfect example of Segwick and Foucault’s claims that silence is just as important as non-silence (p.3). Here we see that the word homosexual is silenced largely from entering into discourse related to heterosexuality, yet it is there we just need to search through the silence to find it and illuminate it’s significance. This also connects well with Morales call for an illumination of silences. It seems to me that through analyzing, deconstructing, and bring forth silences we are restructuring power dynamics so that where silence originally held little power, it now holds much power and potential for liberation.  Sedgwick’s illumination of the complexities and silences around the hetero/homo binary in the end actually shows that homosexuality as a term in actuality has great power.  Once this has been established we see that looking at queerness through a broadened lens and in conjunction with intersectionality (also axiom 1 that people are different from each other and that axiom 2 that gender, sex, and sexuality are related but not the same), as Cohen calls for, holds a lot of potential for social change.