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raxMore Sedgwick notes! Yay Sedgwick! <3
CHAPTER ONE: Epistemology of the Closet
Page 68 has one of the other things I find to be a core idea in this book: "The deadly elasticity of heterosexist presumption means that, like Wendy in Peter Pan, people find new walls springing up around them even as they drowse: every enounter with a new classful of students, to say nothing of [many other categories], erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure. Even an out gay person deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn't know hwether they know or not." This is still true, I feel, and also true not only of homosexuality but of most (all?) invisible minoritizations. [0]
Page 70 discusses "contradictory constraints on discourse" coming out of various court cases --- coming out is sometimes protected and is at other times not protected and it is very hard to know in advance. (To what extent is this still true? What's the law now?) Sedgwick "want[s] to argue that a lot of the attention and demarcation that has swirled around issues of homosexuality... has been impelled by the distinctively indicative relation of homosexuality to wider mappings of secrecy and discolsure, and of the private and the public, that were and are critically problematical for the gender, sexual, and economic structures of the heterosexist culture at large, mappings whose enabling but dangerous incoherence has become oppressively, durably condensed in certain figures of homosexuality."
Page 72: Is the closet generalized and coming free of gay identity? She argues that no, use of the closet in other discursive frameworks echoes back to and is entangled with homosexuality, particularly surrounding male homosexuality as defined around 1900. I'm not sure if I agree here --- although twenty-odd years later, conversations may have changed. Well, maybe I agree. Hm. Something to chew on and respond to in the review one way or another.
More intersectionality on page 75, still no trans. (How did I not notice this gap when I first read this book? It was for a trans theory course for god's sake. I think I might just have been too swoony.) I mean, her book is about gay and not trans, and not everything is about trans, and yes I look for it more than someone else would, but when you're talking about visible and invisible minorities and the effects of closets... This was published in 1988, there's not really an excuse.
...wasn't there actually a closeted gay clerk in the Bowers v Hardwick case? Isn't that like a thing? Yes, it is. Hot damn, Sedgwick called it. She says she "more than flirts with sentimentality" but I don't think that's necessarily true; or, at least, if it is, it's not hte only important thing that's going on. More generally she is doing something important, which is showcasing a specific case where a specific coming-out might have made a significant change in national policy. Esther's story may or may not be apocryphal, but this one --- though she didn't know it at the time of writing --- was not.
BUT. In contrast to my argument, she points out a number of reasons why the hypothetical-real Hardwick clerk and Esther had different realities and different risks. It's an excellently made argument. Some, but not all, would be true for the real-real Hardwick clerk as well; I'm not sure that changes the potential but there is certainly great personal risk there. I don't mean to say what that clerk did or didn't do was necessarily wrong. I've certainly avoided coming out in cases where it could have made my life awkward. However in none of those cases did I have the opportunity to affect a Supreme Court decision. :) Would I have come out in that clerk's case? I like to think so, but honestly, I don't know. Anyway, that's not the point of my review.
Sedgwick chooses her literature because the time period was "prodigally productive of attempts to name, explain, and define this new kind of creature, the homosexual person," which brought about the heterosexual person as well. Pages 87-89 talk about "genderfuck" and "inversion" and "gender bending" but not even a passing mention of trans as a potential phenomenon here? Come _on_...
CHAPTER TWO: Some Binarisms
Billy Budd has a homosexual character (John Claggart) but it has no desire in it that isn't same-sex --- this collapses definitional categories.
"Is men's desire for other men the great preservative of the masculinist hierarchies of Western culture, or is it among the most potent of the threats against them?" BB doesn't answer this question but it does foreground it.
"Natural depravity: A depravity according to nature," perturbing natural/unnatural binary
Is he depraved for being queer or phobic? "Paranoia."
This is all great from an English perspective but that's not really where I want to go with the review. Actually it's worth noting that --- the reader who is not interested in lierature may find this chapter largely uninteresting. It's a very close reading (and I find a very helpful one) of Billy Budd in the light of the ideas presented earlier, but it doesn't present many new ideas. In that sense it's like a mathematical proof, kinda? I dunno if I want to bother with that analogy, I said "constructive interference" in class (context: Derrida's haunting can operate as a constructive interference) and everyone went crazy with "OH GOD MATH GET IT OFF ME."
Claggart's desire as private and Vere's as public --- what does this get us? p 109 It gets us feminism and deconstruction! Here is a new idea, about the impossibility of constructing a delineated space that is public or private. "incoherent register." pg114 Vere uses the trial scene as a way to enact mastery over spaces
"We know Vere suffers in private because Vere suffers in private in public." Here she is critiquing Douglas's reading of the text, which again, great if you care about Douglas.
Vere fails to master the medical discourse, even though he acts diagnostically in other ways.
Page 124 has a fascinating comparison of Vere and Nixon that is a useful way to help out the reader who is not familiar with BB or not a scholar of literature.
Page 127 starts a troubling and exciting section about the fantasy of "life after the homosexual." "Bloodletting on a scale more massive by orders of magnitude than any gay minority presence in the culture is the 'cure,' if cure there be, to the mortal illness of decadence." This is another new idea, so there are _some_ new things in this chapter, it's just a whole lot of English work too, which was more exciting to me the first time I read it. Now it's "yup yup explication of Billy Budd take me to the theory!"
CHAPTER 3: Some Binarisms (II)
Interesting stuff on Nietzsche and presenting same-sex desire without minoritizing it, that is, keeping it as nebulous "desire" --- Sedgwick relates this to Deleuze and Guattari, which I would not have thought to do.
Greek as a virilized male body defined as "the" body (see Laqueur)
p139 homosexual panic as a form of knowledge
p141-142 role of Christ in creating an object for the homoerotic/homophobic male gaze --- this is fascinating stuff
Ooh, it gets more into the sentimental here 143-145, talking about how it's put down but is clearly effective, as a code for feminine, and thus also "an important gay male project" to rehabilitate in the form of camp.
"the sacred tears of the heterosexual man"
"Nietzsche, then, is the philosopher who put the scent back in sentimentality." (149) How can you not love this book.
p153-154 talk about the Esther example I want to use earlier: "It's not me risking the coming out, but it's all too visibly me having the salvational fantasies."
p156 kitsch-attribution versus camp-recognition --- this stuff on camp is really useful to me in understanding what is going _on_ with camp. She cites The Celluloid Closet a lot in footnotes which is interesting because she talks about film almost never. It must be an interesting book.
I have to wonder if all this talk about "double binding binarisms" is influenced by D&G at all. Since she mentioned them.
p158-9 more on inversion versus homosexuality --- and a really interesting paragraph about whether queer relationships have the same amount of identification and desire linkage as straight ones. She thinks yes. This is (a) awesome and (b) begging, begging, begging, begging to be used in/extended on in a reading of trans-queer desires. "How does a man's love of other men become a love of the same?" (160)
p165 Hitchcock's Rope as "the secret" --- I don't think I want to use this though
Reminding us that Wilde's Dorian Grey can have either modernist empty or homosexual full meaning.
Page 168 on Nietzsche-Wagner-homosexual is fascinating. I had no idea Wagner had a homosexual fanbase. How odd.
pg171 Nietzsche on skin reminds me of Barthes and maybe even a little of BwO.
Voluntarity and addiction --- discourses around opium mirroring discourses around sexuality. This also brings you to natural(food) vs. artificial(drugs) which can be paralleled with the problematic use of "natural" for sexual categories, which brings me to Myra Hird although I don't think I want to bring this into this review. I'm sure there are other sources on that... maybe I should see if she cites anything contemporary to Sedgwick that I can pull into the review?
...god I am working so slowly these last couple of days. :/ At least I am still getting work done.
[0] I probably want to use this in my final paper too: "furries don't [necessarily] want to pass, but they can't help it."
CHAPTER ONE: Epistemology of the Closet
Page 68 has one of the other things I find to be a core idea in this book: "The deadly elasticity of heterosexist presumption means that, like Wendy in Peter Pan, people find new walls springing up around them even as they drowse: every enounter with a new classful of students, to say nothing of [many other categories], erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure. Even an out gay person deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn't know hwether they know or not." This is still true, I feel, and also true not only of homosexuality but of most (all?) invisible minoritizations. [0]
Page 70 discusses "contradictory constraints on discourse" coming out of various court cases --- coming out is sometimes protected and is at other times not protected and it is very hard to know in advance. (To what extent is this still true? What's the law now?) Sedgwick "want[s] to argue that a lot of the attention and demarcation that has swirled around issues of homosexuality... has been impelled by the distinctively indicative relation of homosexuality to wider mappings of secrecy and discolsure, and of the private and the public, that were and are critically problematical for the gender, sexual, and economic structures of the heterosexist culture at large, mappings whose enabling but dangerous incoherence has become oppressively, durably condensed in certain figures of homosexuality."
Page 72: Is the closet generalized and coming free of gay identity? She argues that no, use of the closet in other discursive frameworks echoes back to and is entangled with homosexuality, particularly surrounding male homosexuality as defined around 1900. I'm not sure if I agree here --- although twenty-odd years later, conversations may have changed. Well, maybe I agree. Hm. Something to chew on and respond to in the review one way or another.
More intersectionality on page 75, still no trans. (How did I not notice this gap when I first read this book? It was for a trans theory course for god's sake. I think I might just have been too swoony.) I mean, her book is about gay and not trans, and not everything is about trans, and yes I look for it more than someone else would, but when you're talking about visible and invisible minorities and the effects of closets... This was published in 1988, there's not really an excuse.
...wasn't there actually a closeted gay clerk in the Bowers v Hardwick case? Isn't that like a thing? Yes, it is. Hot damn, Sedgwick called it. She says she "more than flirts with sentimentality" but I don't think that's necessarily true; or, at least, if it is, it's not hte only important thing that's going on. More generally she is doing something important, which is showcasing a specific case where a specific coming-out might have made a significant change in national policy. Esther's story may or may not be apocryphal, but this one --- though she didn't know it at the time of writing --- was not.
BUT. In contrast to my argument, she points out a number of reasons why the hypothetical-real Hardwick clerk and Esther had different realities and different risks. It's an excellently made argument. Some, but not all, would be true for the real-real Hardwick clerk as well; I'm not sure that changes the potential but there is certainly great personal risk there. I don't mean to say what that clerk did or didn't do was necessarily wrong. I've certainly avoided coming out in cases where it could have made my life awkward. However in none of those cases did I have the opportunity to affect a Supreme Court decision. :) Would I have come out in that clerk's case? I like to think so, but honestly, I don't know. Anyway, that's not the point of my review.
Sedgwick chooses her literature because the time period was "prodigally productive of attempts to name, explain, and define this new kind of creature, the homosexual person," which brought about the heterosexual person as well. Pages 87-89 talk about "genderfuck" and "inversion" and "gender bending" but not even a passing mention of trans as a potential phenomenon here? Come _on_...
CHAPTER TWO: Some Binarisms
Billy Budd has a homosexual character (John Claggart) but it has no desire in it that isn't same-sex --- this collapses definitional categories.
"Is men's desire for other men the great preservative of the masculinist hierarchies of Western culture, or is it among the most potent of the threats against them?" BB doesn't answer this question but it does foreground it.
"Natural depravity: A depravity according to nature," perturbing natural/unnatural binary
Is he depraved for being queer or phobic? "Paranoia."
This is all great from an English perspective but that's not really where I want to go with the review. Actually it's worth noting that --- the reader who is not interested in lierature may find this chapter largely uninteresting. It's a very close reading (and I find a very helpful one) of Billy Budd in the light of the ideas presented earlier, but it doesn't present many new ideas. In that sense it's like a mathematical proof, kinda? I dunno if I want to bother with that analogy, I said "constructive interference" in class (context: Derrida's haunting can operate as a constructive interference) and everyone went crazy with "OH GOD MATH GET IT OFF ME."
Claggart's desire as private and Vere's as public --- what does this get us? p 109 It gets us feminism and deconstruction! Here is a new idea, about the impossibility of constructing a delineated space that is public or private. "incoherent register." pg114 Vere uses the trial scene as a way to enact mastery over spaces
"We know Vere suffers in private because Vere suffers in private in public." Here she is critiquing Douglas's reading of the text, which again, great if you care about Douglas.
Vere fails to master the medical discourse, even though he acts diagnostically in other ways.
Page 124 has a fascinating comparison of Vere and Nixon that is a useful way to help out the reader who is not familiar with BB or not a scholar of literature.
Page 127 starts a troubling and exciting section about the fantasy of "life after the homosexual." "Bloodletting on a scale more massive by orders of magnitude than any gay minority presence in the culture is the 'cure,' if cure there be, to the mortal illness of decadence." This is another new idea, so there are _some_ new things in this chapter, it's just a whole lot of English work too, which was more exciting to me the first time I read it. Now it's "yup yup explication of Billy Budd take me to the theory!"
CHAPTER 3: Some Binarisms (II)
Interesting stuff on Nietzsche and presenting same-sex desire without minoritizing it, that is, keeping it as nebulous "desire" --- Sedgwick relates this to Deleuze and Guattari, which I would not have thought to do.
Greek as a virilized male body defined as "the" body (see Laqueur)
p139 homosexual panic as a form of knowledge
p141-142 role of Christ in creating an object for the homoerotic/homophobic male gaze --- this is fascinating stuff
Ooh, it gets more into the sentimental here 143-145, talking about how it's put down but is clearly effective, as a code for feminine, and thus also "an important gay male project" to rehabilitate in the form of camp.
"the sacred tears of the heterosexual man"
"Nietzsche, then, is the philosopher who put the scent back in sentimentality." (149) How can you not love this book.
p153-154 talk about the Esther example I want to use earlier: "It's not me risking the coming out, but it's all too visibly me having the salvational fantasies."
p156 kitsch-attribution versus camp-recognition --- this stuff on camp is really useful to me in understanding what is going _on_ with camp. She cites The Celluloid Closet a lot in footnotes which is interesting because she talks about film almost never. It must be an interesting book.
I have to wonder if all this talk about "double binding binarisms" is influenced by D&G at all. Since she mentioned them.
p158-9 more on inversion versus homosexuality --- and a really interesting paragraph about whether queer relationships have the same amount of identification and desire linkage as straight ones. She thinks yes. This is (a) awesome and (b) begging, begging, begging, begging to be used in/extended on in a reading of trans-queer desires. "How does a man's love of other men become a love of the same?" (160)
p165 Hitchcock's Rope as "the secret" --- I don't think I want to use this though
Reminding us that Wilde's Dorian Grey can have either modernist empty or homosexual full meaning.
Page 168 on Nietzsche-Wagner-homosexual is fascinating. I had no idea Wagner had a homosexual fanbase. How odd.
pg171 Nietzsche on skin reminds me of Barthes and maybe even a little of BwO.
Voluntarity and addiction --- discourses around opium mirroring discourses around sexuality. This also brings you to natural(food) vs. artificial(drugs) which can be paralleled with the problematic use of "natural" for sexual categories, which brings me to Myra Hird although I don't think I want to bring this into this review. I'm sure there are other sources on that... maybe I should see if she cites anything contemporary to Sedgwick that I can pull into the review?
...god I am working so slowly these last couple of days. :/ At least I am still getting work done.
[0] I probably want to use this in my final paper too: "furries don't [necessarily] want to pass, but they can't help it."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-10-16 06:41 pm (UTC)i am so very hoping that you elaborate on this one...
(no subject)
Date: 2010-10-16 10:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-10-17 10:03 pm (UTC)I was reminded of the bit from part two of Foucault's history of sexuality where he explains that attraction of men to men was, in classical Greece, just an example of the attraction toward beauty, rather than being different in kind from that toward women.