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Quote :Epistemology of the Closet
“Closeted-ness” itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence—not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it.
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.
So much talk about not talking. Here, Sedgwick claims that pretty much all aspects of society are affected by the categorical homo/hetero divide. What we are made to hide about our sexuality, and how we are told to hide it, tells a lot about our positionality in the world. Clearly, rich, straight, white men ain’t got much they need to keep in the closet.
The rest of us are engaged in a delicate dance of telling without telling too much. Think of it like this: a famous, unmarried musician is asked if he’s gay. He remains silent and his publicist issues a statement that reads, “A man’s private life is his business. Please respect his privacy.”
As a result, everyone goes crazy, saying, He’s, like, so obviously gay. If you don’t deny something, people assume you are that something.
And as the questions continue, the “fits and starts,” the different ways to stay silent, build up and the world makes up its own story about what is being hidden. The way the musician stays silent tells you what he hides.
You see: there is a language of silence. This occurs when one speaks in codes, or tries to suggest something in what one wears, or in how one reacts to questions of identity. And the longer closet doors are shut, the more vivid and outlandish the stories become of what’s inside.
So the person in the closet uses silence as a performance. People read the performance and make their own interpretations, to which the closeted person fashions another response—yet another silence, with a smile or dark glasses and a security fence.
The breakthrough here is that in the space between the known and the unknown creates all kinds of new ways of “knowing” things. Before Sedgwick, people weren’t as hip to how people can talk without talking, which is necessary in a culture of oppression. We guess gaydar really is a sixth sense.