Epistemology of the Closet

Sedgwick segues to the notion of the “closet,” its relationship to what is known and unknown, and its relationship to the private and public lives of gay people. For Sedgwick, the language of “coming out” and “the closet” has constituted a double bind in homosexual life. Commenting on the case of an earth science teacher, Acanfora, who in 1973 was transferred to a nonteaching position by the Board of Education in Montgomery County, Maryland when they learned he was gay. Sedgwick notes that the board asked the case to be dismissed before trial “on the grounds that he had failed to note on his original employment application that he had been, in college, an officer of a student homophile organization—a notation that would, as school officials admitted in court, have prevented his ever being hired” (69). Thus, the secrecy and disclosure of one’s homosexual orientation constituted a situation whereby remaining in the closet allowed for Acanfora’s employment and ability to earn a living while his coming out gave the Board of Education the legal means of barring his access to continue teaching in the classroom—for no other reason than the fact of his homosexuality was now a piece of public knowledge.

For Sedgwick, casual uses of a language that has its origins in homosexual identity is no accident, and in order to understand why this is the case, she provides an historical overview of the way in which knowledge and ignorance became inseparable from questions related to sex and one’s sexual identity. Relying on the genealogical account Foucault provided in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Sedgwick argues that what began in Europe prior to the Renaissance and was then accelerated during the late eighteenth century was a process of secularization of Judeo-Christian language. The main effect of this, was the understanding that “sexuality is fruit...to be plucked from the tree of knowledge” (73). In other words, the theological vocabulary of sin, virtue, salvation, and the fall of man was translated into a secular discourse on personal identity and moral character, and this discourse located the vice of human existence within the not so obvious, private lives of human desire. Enlightenment Europe now viewed human existence as threatened by its own desire, particularly its own sexual desire. In this process of secularization, the separation of heterosexual from homosexual desire played a central role such that “knowledge and ignorance [...] became not contingently but integrally infused with one particular object of cognition: no longer sexuality as a whole but even more specifically, now, the homosexual topic” (74). However, says Sedgwick, ever since the early period of the LGBTQI movement within the United States, the language and vocabulary of “coming out of the closet” has found popular usage with respect to other oppressed social groups (whether based on race, gender, ethnicity, ability, etc.).

And it is due to this fact that Sedgwick takes the time to delineate the ways in which oppression based on one’s sexuality differs from other forms of oppression. First, sex, unlike race, ability, ethnicity, and so on, is not immediately obvious or perceptible to others. This means that sexual identity itself involves a certain questioning and interrogation in order for the “truth” of one’s sexuality to be known—whether by the individual or by society as a whole. Second, sexual identity, unlike other kinds of identity, lacks a certain stability or certainty inherent in other identities, such as race or ethnicity. As Sedgwick writes:

In the process of gay self-disclosure […] questions of authority and evidence can be the first to arise. “How do you know you’re really gay? Why be in such a hurry to jump to conclusions? After all, what you’re saying is only based on a few feelings, not real actions…” (79).

In this way, homosexual individuals are robbed of the agency to define for themselves what their sexuality is, which “reveal[s] how problematical at present is the very concept of gay identity, as well as how intensely it is resisted” (79). It is one of the few aspects of identity that one must seek to find, rather than just “being.”

It is these incoherencies in the notion of sexual identity—equally applicable to heterosexual identity—that Sedgwick identifies in the tension between minoritizing (e.g., gay identity, “essentialist”) and universalizing (e.g. bisexual potential, “social constructionist”) views on sexual identity. It is the tension at the heart of sexual identity that defines any sexual identity whatsoever. 

In this chapter Sedgwick applies the framework developed in the previous chapter to Melville’s novella Billy Budd—a text with an explicitly homosexual character (John Claggart) written at the very moment when the crystallization of homosexual identity was reaching its apex in Europe. This makes the text a perfect case study for the ambiguities and irresolvable tensions that have come to define the heterosexual/homosexual binary throughout Western society. As Sedgwick notes, even Melville’s description of John Claggart reinforces the irresolvable tension and indeterminate nature of sexual identity, while relying upon an implicitly moralizing vocabulary. Melville’s description of Claggart as “mysterious” or “secretive” parallel with “equally abstract chain[s] of damning ethical designations: ‘the direct reverse of a saint, ‘depravity,’” (95). For Sedgwick, Billy Budd is a seminal case where a homosexual character appears in literature precisely because of the manner in which Claggart is experienced by the other characters.

Billy Budd is a story about the dynamics between Billy, Claggart, and Captain Vere at sea. Claggart’s is an on-board policeman. There is a suspicion that a member of the crew is acting as an agent provocateur aiming to foment a mutiny on the ship. This informs how the ambiguity and undecidability of Claggart’s identity becomes crystalized into the homosexual. And what transpires on the ship between Billy and Claggart—Billy’s accusation of Claggart’s intent to mutiny and Billy’s ultimate murder of Claggart—paints the portrait of the anxiety that shapes heterosexual identity in relation to homosexuality. For Sedgwick, Billy’s murder of Claggart is an early example of what came to be known as the “panic defense”—a justification for murder used by an individual charged with murdering a homosexual person, which claims that the murder, in this instance, was excusable precisely because of the “panic” experienced on the part of the murderer. It is this fact of anxiety and panic on the part of heterosexual identity that is played out in Melville’s novella.

In this chapter Sedgwick takes up the figures of Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche and examines the ways in which homoerotic relations and the male body were coded and recoded at the final decade of the 19th century in Europe. Perhaps one of the central reasons for pairing Wilde and Nietzsche is that each represent a particular reception of the Classical (i.e. Ancient Greek) male body with respect to Victorian (for Wilde) and Christian (for Nietzsche) virtues. As Sedgwick puts it, “[t]he Victorian cult of Greece gently, unpointedly, and unexclusively positioned male flesh and muscle as the indicative instances of ‘the’ body, of a body of unphobic enjoyment. The Christian tradition, by contrast, had tended both to condense ‘the flesh’ [...] as the female body and to surround its attractiveness with an aura of maximum anxiety and prohibition” (136). Though Victorians and Christians came to the demystification of the male body for distinct reasons, the outcome of this reception, says Sedgwick, is the lifting of the cultural prohibition on the enjoyment and fascination with the figure of the male body (whether in art or in religion).

In both the work of Wilde and Nietzsche, one discovers time and again an explicit or implicit celebration of the male figure and of male-male desire. With respect to Wilde, these homoerotic relations are recast in terms of a self-reflexivity that would come to define his antirepresentationalism and modernist antisentimentalism; Wilde recasts male-male desire as a proto-narcissistic relation to oneself and self-image. For Nietzsche, by contrast, the celebration of homosocial bonding among men is more explicit, especially given that his reception of Ancient Greek depictions of the male figure is treated in a more overt manner than Wilde. For Sedgwick, however, the chief characteristic that brings Nietzsche and Wilde into conversation about the representation of male-male desire is that both writers demonstrate how male-male desire drives the social lives of others and constitutes a relation that must be continuously policed such that homosexuality can be separated and excluded from the body politic of nineteenth century Europe.