Sedgewick - Between Men - Epistemology of the Closet

Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick

1.     Between Men

a.     Patterns of male relationships, including friendship and heterosexuality and homosexuality, are linked to class and require relational women and gender systems to be understood.

b.     Male homosocial desire is used to describe social bonds between members of the same sex.

                                               i.     It is a new word with clear analogy to homosexuality.

                                             ii.     The word describes male bonding, which may be formed on homophobia.

                                            iii.     To consider homosocial in context with desire and the potentially erotic is to suggest a continuum between homosocial and homosexuality.

                                            iv.     The continuum is not recognized or visible to men.

                                             v.     Homsociality refers to the social structures of relationships between men.

c.     The term desire will be used to reference the erotic as desire refers to the libido and it is the best descriptor to reflect the force that forms important relationships.

d.     The male is selected for the topic as the essay explores:

                                               i.     What shapes sexuality.

                                             ii.     What counts as sexuality, and

                                            iii.     And both require the affect of historical power relationships.

1.     Distinctions in power structures between men and women facilitate differences in gender and prohibit the nature of this essay.

                                            iv.     Does “men-loving-men” and “men-promoting-the-interests-of-men” have the same meaning as it does for women?

1.     No.

2.     There are suggestions that “obligatory heterosexuality” and homophobia are built into and necessary for patriarchal institutions.

3.     The oppression of homosexuality is part of the same system that oppresses women.

                                             v.     Homophobia and persecution are not arbitrary, but interwoven with family, gender, age, class, and race relations.

1.     Society could not function in the same fashion without homophobia.

                                            vi.     Suggests corollaries between the Greeks homosexuality and the mentorship of young boys.

1.     Also mentions labor was conducted by slaves and women that may have impacted traditional classifications of frowning on the laborer.

2.     The example suggests heterosexuality is necessary for the patriarchy, but not necessarily homophobia. 

3.     The continuum of homesociality and homosexuality was seamless, visible and accepted.

                                          vii.     Studies have reflected that homosocial continuums are culturally constructed and not based on gender.

                                         viii.     Historical and literary importance arises as notions on homosocial continuums are needed for the practical politics of the gay movement.

2.     Epistemology of the Closet

a.     Axiom 2: The study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of gender; correspondingly, anti-homophobic inquiry is not coextensive with feminist inquiry.  But we can’t know in advance how they will be different.

b.     Understanding of sex and gender has been a most influential and successful undertaking of the feminist movement.

                                               i.     Sex is the difference in chromosomes between people:  XX and XY.

                                             ii.     Gender is the social constructs of reproduction, identities and behavior based from the “raw material” of sex.

                                            iii.     Gender is the cultural binary view of male and female.

                                            iv.     Sex is based in biological and fixed, and gender is based in social constructs are mutable and variable.

c.     The term sex is socially used to extend to gender, expectations, narratives, pleasures, identity formations and knowledge.

d.     Freud and Foucault suggested sexuality is not based on “sex.”

e.     The issue with discourse on sex/gender systems is that the term sex encompasses gender from the social to the sexual.

f.      Reference to Gayle Rubin that sex and gender are related, but they are not the same thing.

g.     The hypothesis of the essay is that sex and gender are distinct in the same manner as class and race, or sex and race.

h.     Gender differences are important as gender distinctions are relational in degrees: the male and the female and variances in between.

i.      Not all oppressions are the same.  As such, it might not be appropriate to ask feminist studies to speak to the newly created field of gay studies.

j.      Dichotomized ideology that people are all male or all female limits the understanding of gender studies.

k.     That sexual preference is perceived as a choice lends difficulties to a discourse of gender studies.

l.      A condensation of “sexual theory” into “gay/lesbian theory” in line with the language of “sexual orientation” and “gender object choice” clearly demonstrates that any discourse is skewed history.

  

            Works Cited

Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.  Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al.  2^nd ed. New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 2010.  2466-2470. Print.

---. Epistemology of the Closet. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.  Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al.  2^nd ed. New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 2010.  2470-2477. Print.