I took a detour away from memoirs to read the first book on my History of Sexuality list, Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Sedgwick. Of course I’ve read many, many things that cite the book, but I had never actually read it myself until now.
When I first saw how long the introduction was, I was overwhelmed and anticipating a difficult slog through dense, pointless theorizing. Just get to the analysis! But I was wrong, and I ended up deeply appreciating the care Sedgwick took to lay out exactly what her argument is and is not, exactly what her project aims to do and does not aim to do, and the assumptions she is operating with/the implications they have for her work. I understand more about the contradictions of constructions of (homo)sexuality in modern Western culture, and I appreciate the value of her intervention with Foucault— that “sodomy” never really went away, that “sexuality” was just layered on top of it, and the “sexual acts/universalizing” construction still permeates and shapes our culture.
I’m also not sure if I’ve ever read a straightforward deconstructive analysis besides some Derrida I didn’t understand. Now I get what the method means. I don’t think I’m interested in using it myself, but I get it. But on that note, other than the fact that she was in an English department, I don’t understand why Sedgwick chose to do the majority of her analysis/case studies on works of literature, rather than popular discourse (legal writing, news, opinion pieces, etc.) from the time. Because literature is art, and fiction, there’s extra layers of interpretation and symbolic structures that go into it. Any representations of sexuality in a novel might be deployed deliberately for literary/artistic purposes, rather than subconsciously/as signifiers of their cultural context. The parts of the case studies I enjoyed the most were when Sedgwick relates the novels to moments in history, either current events at the time of writing or from the past. I feel like a book deconstructing the epistemology(ies) of the closet that deals with direct examples of discourse from life, rather than from art forms representing life, would have been more direct and more useful.
I suppose this is a tension I always have with literary studies. I do enjoy literature and literary criticism, often both reading it and doing it myself. But I often struggle with seeing “the point” in the greater world outside of, some people are like me and enjoy thinking complexly about novels. I don’t think that people shouldn’t do queer deconstructive analyses of novels, but I do think we should start with theorizing the world and then applying those theories to our artistic artifacts, rather than building the theory out from the art. Because then it’s a theory of art, not of culture, and viewing literature as a cultural artifact is often different— and requires different considerations— than viewing literature as art. I think Sedgwick does some of both, but the focus is on art, and the bigger point that she makes is about art— because if her goal was to make a bigger point about society, why choose a handful of novels? Or maybe that’s just my rhetorician/social scientist brain talking.