u"Kosofsky - Georgetown University

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merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not .... t itm 'l : People are dit'fe
7 =u"Kosofsky Sedgwick Axiomatic

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION In this subtle piece of methodological ground-clearing (or mine-sweeping), t)art of the introduction to her book Epistemologty of the C/oset Eve Sedgwick rtlaborates some deceptively simple axioms from which queer studies might l)roceed. Of oarticular interest is her discussion of the Foucauldian claim thal homosexuality' begins around '1870. What this means, of course, is that ndividuals who preferred sex with people of thsir own sex were then for the hrst time detined or identified as (fundamentally pathological) 'homosexuals'. llut, as Sedgwick argues, even as we try to dismanlle the category 'homosex' llirl'we are playing a game in which one large model is being replaced with ,urother large model. In this situation it is important to take the banality 'We are .rll ditferent people' (Axiom 1) very seriously. This banal proposition contains a pun: we're all diflerent from each other, .||rd we're not always the same ourselves. lt is because the tirst is true that

,rllo-identitication' (identification with the other) should take place, however r,rrely it does; and it is because the second is true that the first can take place:

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cannol simply 'auto-identify' once and lor all. Thus sams-sex sex, like illlerent-sex sex, involves a mixture ot both kinds ol identification. At a more ,lrrneral level, lor Sedgwick, auto-identification requires narratives which try to .Lcount for howwe came to be whal we are and, more than that, to establish we are - though, of course, this can never be finally determined. Such 'v//;it More 'r,rrratives can also trigger further identitications by and with others. r,,rrlrcularly, Sedgwick implies, lesbian and gay studies need a particular max ,r iruto- and allo-identification if thev are to remain differenl from, but not ,,r(lroaliy other to, each other.

t trther reading. Butler 1990; Foucault 1980; Halperin 1989; Heath 1982; Itrrlrrn 1975, 1984; Sedgwick 1987, 1990: Weeks

1985.

S.D.

E\,E KOSOFSKY

SEDGWICK

Epistemology of the Closet proposes that many of the rnajor nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured - indeed, fractured - by a chronic, now endernic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating ftom the end of the nineteenth century. The book will argue that an understanding of 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; and it will assume that the appropriate place for

that critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentred perspective of modern gay and antihornophobic theory. The passage of time, the bestowal of thought and necessary politi-

cal struggle since the turn of the century have only spread and deepened the long crisis of modern sexual definition, dramatizing, often violently, the internal incoherence and mutual contradiction of each of the forms of discursive and institutional 'common sense' on this subject inherited from the architects of our present culture. The contradictions I will be discusslng are not in the first place those between prohomosexual and antihomosexual people or ideologies, although the book's strongest motivation is indeed the gay-affirmative one. Rather, the contradictions that seem most active are the ones internal to all the important twentieth-century understandings of homo/heterosexual definition, both heterosetst and antihomophobic. Their outlines and something of their history are sketched in Chapter 1. Briefly, they are two. The first is the contradiction between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority (what I refer to as a minoritizing view), and seeing it on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what I refer to as a universalizing view). The second is the contradiction between seeinS same-sex object choice on the one hand as a matter of liminality or transitivity between genders, and seeinS it on the other hand as reflecting an impulse of separatism - though by no means necessarily political separatism - within each gender. The purpose of this book is not to adjudicate between the two poles of either of these contradictions, for, if its argument is right, no epistemological grounding now exists from which to do so. Instead, I am trying to make the strongest p()ssiblc introductory case for a hypothesis about the centrality of this nominallt' marginal, conceptually intractablc sct of tlt'finitional issut's lo tlrr'

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