Critical Response 5

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick analyzes various texts in order to point to the dichotomous ways in which Western society has arranged sex, gender, and sexuality. While I’ve been exposed to arguments that suggest that narratives of the closet have and continue to limit the ways in which queer identities can be conceptualized, I appreciated Sedgwick’s use of literature as a way to point to language as a regulating factor. In other words, how do our imaginaries of the realness of homo/hetero binaries affect the ways in which we might be able to conceptualize any type of narrative? I share Sedgwick’s fear “that there currently exists no framework in which to ask about the origins or development of individual gay identity that is not already structured by an implicit, trans-individual Western project or fantasy of eradicating that identity” (1990, 41), and find myself constantly thinking about whether or not I too in my own writing and work perpetuate these very binaries that I am looking to eradicate since I am also imbedded within a culture where power continues to constantly move.   

I think in putting Sedgwick’s work in conversation with the GLQ Journal and the Black Queer Studies Anthology I am also reminded that these types of systems did not always exist and don’t have to continue to do so. And in some ways I think that Sedgwick does this when she rereads the work of Melville’s Billy Budd as a novel primarily focused on the “sexual definition” of its main character’s infatuation with Billy Budd (1990, 92). In this way, Sedgwick is not so much concerned with the intended audience or purpose for Melville’s novel and instead points to the queering of particular texts that otherwise could be assumed to be heteronormative. In this way, she highlights the unreality of the binary which positions homo and hetero as oppositional in the first place. Nevertheless, I also think that Sedgwick complicates her discussion about binaries by suggesting that it’s not just the binaries that are a problem but also the ways in which Western society is imbedded and dependent on binary thinking whereby nothing outside these binaries is able to exist (1990, 91). 

While I agree that Western society is very much driven by binary thinking, I also think that there have been and continue to be other ways of knowing that can in some ways inform how Sedgwick talks about knowledge production. Sedgwick’s Foucauldian analysis of binaries leads her to only think of binaries, just as Foucalt did, in terms of Western knowledge as a legitimized and always assumed way of thinking and knowing, thus in a way also positioning this type of knowledge as more legitimized than others even while trying to deconstruct it. In thinking about how Sedgwick’s work can help me with my own writing and theorizing I am reminded again of how easily it is to fall back into binary thinking even when we try to step away from it.