| Epistemology of the Closet |  | Author: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
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Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 159,524
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2
Pages: 280
Number Of Items: 1
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Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.6
ISBN: 0520254066
Dewey Decimal Number: 401
EAN: 9780520254060
ASIN: 0520254066
Publication Date: January 17, 2008
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Amazon.com Review
Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual life of the U.S. This has been, to no small degree, due to the popularity of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critically acclaimed Epistemology of the Closet. Working from classic texts of European and American writers--including Herman Melville, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde--Sedgwick delineates a historical moment in which sexual identity became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries. Sedgwick's literary analysis, while provocative and often startling (you will never read Billy Budd or The Picture of Dorian Gray the same way again), is simply the basis for a larger project of examining and analyzing how the categories of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" continue to shape almost all aspects of contemporary thought. Epistemology of the Closet is a sometimes-dense work, but one filled with wit and empathy. Sedgwick writes with great intelligence and an eye for irony, but always makes clear that her theories and critical acumen are in the service of a politic that seeks to make the world a better and more humane place for everyone. An extraordinary book that reshapes how we think about literature, sexuality, and everyday life. --Michael Bronski
Product Description
Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual and political life of the United States. This has been due, in no small degree, to the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critically acclaimed Epistemology of the Closet. Working from classic texts of European and American writers--including Melville, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Wilde--Sedgwick analyzes a turn-of-the-century historical moment in which sexual orientation became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In her preface to this updated edition Sedgwick places the book both personally and historically, looking specifically at the horror of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic and its influence on the text.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 12
 Indispensible part of my library April 19, 2010
Nicol Hammond (New York, NY, USA)
I had taken this book out of the library so many times, I finally decided that it was time to buy it, and I'm so glad I did! I am referring to it constantly throughout my dissertation. Sedgwick was so far ahead in her theorization of the non-reality of the gender binary. For a scholar of performance, and gendered power, this book is the best way of thinking forward that I have yet encountered.
 Looking at Classic Gay Texts December 16, 2008
Amos Lassen (Little Rock, Arkansas)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Sedgwick, Eva Kosofsky. "Epistemology of the Closet", University of California Press, 2008. (2nd edition).
Looking at Classic Gay Texts
Amos Lassen
Eva Kosofsky Sedgwick is one of the pioneering voices in the field of gay studies and queer theory. Her book, "Epistemology of the Closet" has been regarded as a classic since it first appeared in and now it has been re-released by the University of California Press. The book is a literary analysis of classic texts of American and European writers among whom are Herman Melville, Marcel Proust, Henry James and Oscar Wilde. Sedgwick's basic thesis is that there was a historical moment when sexual identification became an important sign of self as did gender.
What she does with this thesis is analyze and examine literature by seeing how sexual preference shapes almost all aspects of modern contemporary thought. Sedgwick is provocative and her book is more than a literary analysis; it is also a study of culture and a political analysis. The book deals with the modern AIDS epidemic as well and shows how it influenced texts.
Kosofsky writes beautifully and as the "mother" of queer theory she has a great deal to say. She maintains that gay men and lesbian women are represented in society and in literature as if homosexuality is deviant and perverse when compared to the larger society. Homosexuals have tended to remain closeted and it exists as a secret that wants to come out but dare not. This is a sensible argument and Sedgwick uses literature to bear this out. In doing so she looks at how it is that we came to our ideas about sexuality and why is it that we classify everyone as having either heterosexual or homosexual and ignoring any middle ground. She is an important thinker who cannot be ignored and whether we agree or not, we cannot deny that Sedgwick has something to say and it is important. She does show that the closet is impossibility because there is always someone who knows. It is easy to see how this book gained the status it has and it is good to have it back in print.
The Closet Isn't Where It Ued To Be- May 4, 2008
Daniel Edward Loftin (Spokane, WA USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Most surveys of sexual variations seen in the historical context fail to take into account that sexuality has been defined and categorized differently in almost every era and culture. In western cultures, the current sexual categories became defined somewhere between the Civil War and world War I. In other words, there were no homosexuals (in the modern sense) before the Civil War. There were men who loved, and sometimes slept with, other men, but they didn't form a separate category. Social opprobrium was reserved for the practice of sodomy, whether it was practiced between men or men and women. Having sex with other men was simply something that wasn't discussed in public, although it happened all the time.
Ms. Sedgwick has taken on the task of seeking to discover just how it is that we came by our current ideas of sexuality, why, for instance, that we seem to think that everyone is either heterosexual or homosexual, ignoring the reality that according to Kinsey, the vast majority are bisexually attracted, to at least some degree.
She also examines the ways in which the public discussion of sexuality has changed and developed in the critical years between the two wars, using literature of the period for her sources.
She contends, in my opinion successfully, that the gay/straight debate is the key issue for western culture, in terms of defining person-hood. Western culture has become obsessed with sex.
It follows then, that issues of the conflict between the private and public spheres is central to her discussion.
On the minus side, her prose is uneven, sometimes beautiful, sometimes turgid to the point of constipation. Her analyses are uneven, as well. I would have preferred a more thorough analysis of fewer examples, Billy Budd in particular.
Taken on the whole, it's an important work by an important thinker who has added substantially to the discussion of sexuality and gender studies, well worth the effort required to read it with comprehension.
The "Problem" with Conceptual Schemes, New and Old July 20, 2006
D. S. Heersink (San Francisco)
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
The August 11, 1999 "a reader" comments about Sedgwick's prose is especially valuable. The tendency to "abuse" language, in J. L. Austin's famous phrase, seems pronounced in Francophile and postmodernist writings, as if obscuritanism is a measure of profundity rather than a measure of obscuritanism. Several critics have justly claimed that unintelligibile writing and ideation only expose unintelligibility.
What could have been a provocative inquiry into the uniqueness of each human being (a novel, but now confirmed, fact, originating in Darwinian theory), once again reverts to a series of ideological templates to overlay the diversity of being and experience to "fit" a new paradigm. The dominant template here is the binary homosexual/heterosexual dichotomy, which Sedgwick insists is the prism by which we come to have knowledge of our world (I hope my effort at intelligibility does not misrepresent her views.)
Of course, the use of ideological templates laid over an inquiry is nothing new. Critical theory, Marxist theory, Freudian theory, and now Queer theory are variants of the same methodology. If one accepts the ideological template, then the subsequent examination under that template achieves a knowledge (i.e., epistemology) within the limits of that template, but generates a new conceptual scheme. Ironically, the ostensible purpose of the ideological template is to liberate thought from the status quo by forcing thought through an alternative sieve. The "insight" derived from this process becomes subversive of the status quo, but only to impose an different status quo that is putatively superior to the existent one.
According to psychology and anthropology, humans "by nature" impose categorical thinking on experience in order to "frame the reference" and "give order" to chaotic particularism of individual experience. This notion is no longer controversial, indeed, it is "obvious," with aetiology as far back to Hebraism and Hellenism, differing only in the templates used. So, instead of breaking the mold, the new theorists create new ones. Akin to Kuhn's paradigm shift applied outside science, we are prodded to look anew at the old phenomena.
But one of Darwin's keenest insights is the uniqueness of all living things, despite similarities. Instead of the essentialist thinking we inherited from Greek metaphysics and epistemology, we're told by Darwinians that we must use "population thinking," where "grouping" of things is by common descent, not our morphological, behavioral, or ideological similarities. I suggest this same motif applies to sexual populations, sexual expressions, and sexual orientation. Kinsey and others who have insisted on a continuum of orientation differences along a line between the polarities of opposites is truer to the truth than a "homosexual essence" or "heterosexual essence." The appellation of "gay" and "straight" are nominalist, not essentialist, groupings, where each appellation picks out a wide variety of differences by our conceptual schemes of categorization and understanding of populations, not by any essence. If true, and I believe it is, why revert to binary templates of essences to lay over the variety of differences as if one aspect, however shared, must then define many others as well?
Same-sex and opposite-sex relations are not as "neat and tidy" as theorists want us to believe, nor do they exist only in polarity, but rather along a continuum with yet another point between any other two points. Within different populations one finds vast varieties of sexual orientation and expression, not to mention vast differences in other facets of the human being, that homo- and hetero-sexual appellations conflate. To then use these conflated nominalisms as departure points (i.e., templates) for further inquiry only boxes in the subject further, thus undermining difference itself. Instead of nominalist pluralism one becomes both a reductionist and an essentialist to further categorize what is already tenuous at best. This paradigm shift in turn becomes its own raison d'etre further undermining uniqueness so that a new consensus of a new conceptual scheme can be forged.
Consequently, these projects have their own slippery slopes I'd prefer not to slide into. They all strike me as yet another "ideology" in the service of liberation, subverting one status quo for another, categorizing more categories, until we fit the new paradigm. I think we have had enough experience with this methodology to stop it before it starts.
Indeed, the courage to be authentic suggests the enterprise is not only subversive of the status quo, but subversive of our authenticity as well. Being unique, and therefore different, is both a starting and ending point, not a place to begin new essentialist programs to "fit" yet another putatively "new" conceptual scheme.
 Deep wading May 9, 2006
eclectic reader (Milwaukee WI USA)
3 out of 11 found this review helpful
Ugh, a tough, tough book to read. I found myself really bogged down by this book and looked more forward just to getting through it than actually getting anything out of it. Sedgewick's style is definately not for me, but if you can get past the thick writing style you may be able to glean some interesting points from it.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 12
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