Queer Theory Terms Flashcards
heterosexist / (anti)homophobic
Sedgwick “The Epistemology of the Closet” 1, 85
minoritizing / universalizing views
One of the outlines and something of history sketched 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 (… 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 (… a universalizing view).” (1)
"”minoritizing” versus “universalizing” rather than to essentialist versus constructivist understandings of homosexuality. I prefer the former terminology because it seems to record and respond to the question, ‘In whose lives is homo/heterosexual definition an issue of continuing centrality and difficulty?” (40)
Sedgwick “The Epistemology of the Closet” 1,40
heterosexual / homosexual
“this books is deconstructive … The analytic move it makes is to demonstrate that categories presented in a culture as symeetrical binary oppositions - heterosexual/homosexual - actually subsists in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit relation …” (2)
“homo/heterosexual definition has been a presiding master term of the past century”
“I will suggest instead that contests for discursive power can be specified as competitions for the material or rhetorical leverage required to set the terms of, and to profit in some way from, the operations of such an incoherence of definition” (11)
“Each of these complicating possibilities stems at least partly from the plurality and the cumulative incoherence of modern ways of conceptualizing same-sex desire and, hence, gay identity; an incoherence that answers … to the incoherence with which heterosexual desire and identity are conceptualized. … To question the natural self-evidence of this opposition between gay and striaght … is not … to dismantle it. … substantial groups of women and men under this representational regime have found that the nominative category “homosexual” … does have a real power to organize and describe their experience of their identity, enough at any rate to make their self-application of it … worth the enormous accompanying costs. If only for this reason, the categorization commands respect.” (82-3)
Sedgwick “The Epistemology of the Closet” 2, 10-11, 82-3
performative
“one characteristic of the readings in this book is to attend to performative aspects of texts … in the vicinity of the closet, even what counts as a speech act is problematized on a perfectly routin basis. As Foucault says: ‘there is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say … There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.’ ‘Closetedness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a slience - not a particular silence, but a slience that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitute it.” Sedgwick “The Epistemology of the Closet” 3
the closet / coming out
“An assumption underlying the book is that the relations of the closet—the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit around homo/heterosexual definition—have the potential to be peculiarly revealing, in fact, about speech acts more generally. “
“‘The closet’ and ‘coming out’ now verging on all- purpose phrases for the potent crossing and recrossing of almost any politically charged lines of representation, have been the gravest and most magnetic of those figures”
“The closet is the defining structure for gay oppression in this century. The legal couching, by civil liberties lawyers, … as though political empowerment were a matter of getting the cops back on the street where they belong and sexuality back into the impermeable space where it belongs, are among other things extensions of, and testimony to the power of, the image of the closet.”
“The image of coming out regularly interfaces the image of the closet, and its seemingly unambivalent public siting can be counterposed as a salvational epistemologic certainty against the very equivocal privacy afforded by the closet.”
(71) Sedgwick “The Epistemology of the Closet” 3, 67-71
homosexual / gay; gay / lesbian
“I have not followed a convention … of differentiating between “gay” and “homosexual” on the basis of whether a given text or person was perceived as embodying (respectively) gay affirmation or internalized homophobia.”
“‘Homosexual’ was a relatively gender-neutral term … though it has always seem to have at least some male bias. … ‘Gay’ is more complicated since it makes a claim to refer to both genders but is routinely yoked with ‘lesbian’ in actual usage, as if it did not … itself refer to women. … this terminological complication is closely responsive to real ambiguities and struggles of gay/lesbian politics and identities.” (17)
Sedgwick “The Epistemology of the Closet” 16-18
sex
“Sex, gender, sexuality: three terms whose usage relations and analytical relations are almost irremediably slippery.” (27)
“‘Sex’ is, however, a term that extends indefinitely beyond chromosomal sex. That its history of usage often overlaps with … gender is only one problem. … the association of ‘sex,’ precisely through the physical body, with reproduction and genital activity and sensation keeps offering new challenges to the conceptual clarity or even possibility of sex/gender differentiation.” (28)
My paraphrase: in terms of reproduction, pleasure, expectional, knowledges, sex and sexuality seem to have affinity to each other. But regarding that human sexuality is often different from that of animals, including all the ideological imaginations and fantasies, sexuality can also be regarded as the opposite to chromosomal-based sex. So how to navigate this complex map of sex and sexuality is rather a strategical matter than an issue of finding truth.
“sex/sexuality does tend to represent the full spectrum of positions between the most intimate and the most social, the most predetermined and the most aleatory, the most physically rooted and the most symbolically infused, the most innate and the most learned, the most autonomous and the most relational traits of being.” (29)
Sedgwick “The Epistemology of the Closet” 27-30
