36 pages • 1 hour read
Eve Kosofsky SedgwickEpistemology of the Closet
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Homosexual Panic
“Homosexual panic,” or Kempf’s Disease, was a term coined in the 1920s and described hysteria attributable to “perverse sexual cravings” in oneself or another. It was an official diagnosis in the revision of the DSM I. Sedgwick provides a clear and wrenching description of the legal phenomenon resulting from this fallacious diagnosis known as the “panic defense” in Chapter 1. “The widespread acceptance of this defense [shows] that hatred of homosexuals is even more public, more typical, hence harder to find any leverage against than hatred of other disadvantaged groups,” Sedgwick writes (18).
For Sedgwick, there are two key points to keep in mind related to the panic defense. First, the federal US court system and many US states continue to accept it as a legitimate defense in cases where an individual harms or murders another on the basis of their sexuality because one of the central homophobic ideas that structures the legal system in the United States is that the unknowability of another person’s sexuality overrides the right to life of persons who are perceived as non-heterosexual. The second point, related to the first, is the fact that sexuality, unlike race, gender, or other identity markers, is a mode of personal identity that is not immediately legible to others in public. Thus, homophobia constitutes a systemic form of oppression because violence against persons perceived to be homosexual is deemed by the state to be a legitimate and excusable response. Even today, violence is a socially accepted punishment for sexual “deviance.”
Historical Construction of Sex and Gender Binaries
Throughout the text, there are instances where Sedgwick puts forward the argument for the historical construction of masculinity and the heterosexual/homosexual binary. The clearest example of this is seen in her treatment of the reception of Ancient Greek culture in German and England during the nineteenth century:
In both German and English culture, the Romantic rediscovery of ancient Greece cleared out [...] for the nineteenth century a prestigious, historically underfurnished imaginative space in which relations to and among human bodies might be newly a subject of utopian speculation. Synecdochally represented as it tended to be by statues of nude young men, the 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. Thus two significant differences from Christianity were conflated or conflatable in thought and rhetoric about “the Greeks”: an imagined dissolving of the bar of prohibition against the enjoyed body, and its new gendering as indicatively male (136).
Fundamental to the argument for the historical making and remaking of what have come to know as the gender (masculine/feminine) and sex (male/female) binaries is that in each historical moment, these ways of categorizing human existence have been redefined in such a way as to preserve the dominance of one term of the binary (male/masculine) at the expense of the other term (female/feminine). Moreover, it is through this style of argumentation where the reader encounters Sedgwick’s method of analysis: deconstruction. It is a hallmark of deconstructivism to analyze a given social binary or dichotomy and underscore the asymmetrical power dynamics that shape and reshape the definition of each of its terms.
Camp and Kitsch
In her treatment of the ideas and aesthetic styles of camp and kitsch, Sedgwick is able to draw out important ethical and epistemological implications from each of these respective aesthetic registers. For Sedgwick, kitsch aesthetic inherently involves an unequal balance of power between the artist and the observer, such that those who delight in the kitsch aesthetic are subject to be attributed as being kitsch themselves (tacky and dated). However, the artist evades any attribution of responsibility for the object itself. By contrast, the camp aesthetic, writes Sedgwick,
[S]eems to involve a gayer and more spacious angle of view [...] Unlike kitsch-attribution, then, camp-recognition doesn’t ask, “what kind of debased creature could possibly be the right audience for this spectacle?” Instead, it says what if: What if the right audience for this were exactly me? […] Unlike kitsch-attribution, the sensibility of camp-recognition always sees that it is dealing in reader relations and in projective fantasy [...] about the spaces and practices of cultural production. Generous because it acknowledges (unlike kitsch) that its perceptions are necessarily also creations, it’s little wonder that camp can encompass effects of great delicacy and power in our highly sentimental-attributive culture (156).
Thus, unlike kitsch, camp replaces the threat of attribution with the possibility of recognition. Moreover, the relationship between artist and spectator is defined by a mutual parity instead of a cynical and critical distance, as in kitsch. For Sedgwick, camp is ultimately closer to homosexual life precisely because it is an aesthetic that provides the occasion for individuals to recognize another non-heterosexual individual, whether they are out of the closet or not.
